How 18th century Irish traders set up business in the Canary Islands
This research is funded by a Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
This piece originally appeared on RTÉ Brainstorm
Irish merchants were drawn to Tenerife by the growing economic opportunities offered by the island's sweet wines, writes Dr Richard Fitzpatrick, Research Fellow in the Arts and Humanities Institute who is researching The Irish in Tenerife project.Readers may be surprised to learn that the Irish presence on Tenerife did not begin with budget flights in the early 2000s. In fact, Irish merchants first settled on the island during the 1670s.
Among the earliest arrivals were two prominent Waterford families, the Walshs (Valois) and Fitzgeralds (Geraldino), whose descendants still reside on the island today. Much like modern tourists, early Irish traders were drawn to Tenerife for its wines, especially Malvasia or Malmsey, a sweet wine that made the Canary Islands famous.
Tenerife is the largest of seven islands in the Canary Islands chain, located about 100 km off the western coast of Morocco. These islands first gained prominence because of their strategic position along the trade winds that facilitated Atlantic crossings between Europe and the Americas. Added to this, the islands' volcanic soil and subtropical climate soon proved ideal for vine cultivation.
In northern Tenerife, the fertile Orotava Valley emerged as a central wine-producing area. Just to the northeast, the bustling urban centres of La Laguna and Santa Cruz developed, attracting Spanish settlers and, later, Irish merchants drawn by the island’s growing economic opportunities.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, many Catholic merchants left Ireland due to civil, religious and political restrictions, and sought out economic opportunities in Europe's expanding domestic and colonial markets. Numerous families from Ireland's southeast, such as the Aylwards, Butlers, Fitzgeralds and Walshs, built successful networks across European ports, drawing on shared religious identity, family connections and business acumen to integrate and thrive.
A leading example of this success was George Fitzgerald (d.1744), who arrived in Tenerife around 1698. He later moved to London and became one of the top merchants and financiers of his time. The foundations of this success lay in his business partnership with Bernard Walsh (1663-1727), which was cemented through the latter’s marriage to Fitzgerald’s niece, Xaviera. Their eldest son, Nicholas or ’Nickey’ Walsh (1706-1741), inherited a lucrative business in Tenerife. One contemporary even went as far as to describe the Walsh trading house as 'ye. oldest House of Commerce, most universally known abroad, & the best in this Island.’
Nicholas Walsh was heavily engaged in trade with Latin America. Each year, he dispatched ships across the Atlantic to ports such as Caracas, Campeche, Veracruz and Havana, carrying cargoes of wine and occasionally contraband. These ships returned loaded with valuable commodities like cocoa, hardwoods, tobacco, sugar and large consignments of silver dollars to fuel the European economy.
Back in Europe, Walsh distributed these goods—along with additional wine—across key trade hubs, including Dunkirk, St. Malo, London, Ostend, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Dublin. To obtain wine from the island's vineyards, his ships brought back European cloth, Irish provisions like beef and butter, and fish, especially pilchards (a larger species of sardine similar to herring). This cyclical trade network exemplified the complex interdependence of the Atlantic and European economies.
Nicholas was fluent in several languages and well-trained in business. He studied merchandising in London under his granduncle, George Fitzgerald, who admitted, 'I know no merchant that can write a better letter or reason better than he, which is a proof of his good sense.' Over time, however, it became clear that Nicholas lacked the dedication of his father and granduncle. By the time of his premature death in 1741, this neglect had brought his trading house to the brink of ruin.
Fortunately for the family, Walsh’s sister married John Colgan, a Dubliner, in 1742. Committed to restoring the business, Colgan acknowledged Fitzgerald’s vital role in taking ‘this house under your protection’ and gradually rebuilt the family’s reputation and commercial ties across Europe and the Americas. This dedication ensured the family business would endure for generations to come.
For researchers studying the Irish diaspora, the survival of an account book or even a small collection of letters is invaluable, especially given the significant loss of early modern records due to destruction and neglect. Migration is a central aspect of the Irish experience which makes foreign archives particularly rich sources of information, and Tenerife is no exception. The largely intact Colgan-Walsh business records, one of Europe’s best-preserved commercial archives from this period, enables historians to explore not only the island’s trade but also broader economic and social processes across Europe and the Atlantic world.
The aims of The Irish in Tenerife Project: An early modern merchant community navigating the cusp of legality and change within the Atlantic world, c.1739-c.1742 are twofold. First, using the Tenerife archive covering the period 1730 to 1750, it will examine trade relations under several headings, including Irish involvement in transatlantic trade with Latin America, alongside clandestine commerce during a period of conflict between Britain and Spain. Supporting this analysis will be reference to captured mail from the British High Court of Admiralty held in London’s National Archives.
The second main goal of this project is to make a selection of correspondence, both from Tenerife and other European archives, accessible to the public and researchers through an interactive database. This database will allow users not only to read transcribed correspondence but also to filter information by specific interests. For example, users can explore details about ships and captains—often underappreciated factors that made trade possible across Europe and the Americas. The completion of this database will in turn serve as a proof of concept to potentially expand the project to include other Irish commercial correspondence covering the early modern period.
The digital aspect of this research project brings new and developing technologies to the forefront. Notably, the Irish in Tenerife project will use Transkribus, an AI-powered transcription software that employs machine learning to recognise and transcribe historical handwriting. This means the project can significantly reduce the time needed for transcription, allowing for quicker and more accurate digitisation of these invaluable documents. This integration of AI underscores how technology is expanding access to historical records, enhancing the value of humanities research.
How 18th century Irish traders set up business in the Canary Islands | Maynooth University