Thank you very much for all these interesting responses.
I'm wondering, though, whether anyone has any family stories about this?
By the way, just to take the race question out of it for a second, I'm reading a fascinating book, in between other reads, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland by Sean O'Callaghan, about the 17th-century transportations of Irish people to the Caribbean to be enslaved.
I've noticed lately how good humans are at becoming indignant and getting ourselves trapped in a stand that perhaps we don't actually support.