George Darling at the Battle of Dunbar

A member at Ancestry.com has provided some background on George Darling. It includes how and why he came from Scotland to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. George was a Covenanter.

George Darling was born between the years of 1615 and 1620 most likely in the Midlothian region of Scotland. Some researchers have attempted to attach his parentage to George Darling and Isabell Muckle, however I have not been able to find any evidence of that as of yet.

George was captured at the Battle of Dunbar . . . by Oliver Cromwell’s troops in September of 1650. After the battle, George and tens of thousands of other Scots were taken to Durham Castle and then sent to London, England for trial. Many of the Scots did not survive the conditions at Durham Castle nor the march to London. Even fewer survived the trip to the new colonies. After being pronounced guilty at his ’trial’, George was indentured [as a servant] to John Bex (Beax) and Company and sent . . . to the Lynn Ironworks¹ in Lynn, Massachusetts for an 8 year term of servitude. . . .

Conditions after defeat were horrendous.

The prisoners were then force-marched south towards England in order to prevent any attempt to rescue them. The conditions on the march were so appalling that many of the prisoners died of starvation, illness or exhaustion. By 11 September, when the remnants arrived at Durham Cathedral where they were to be imprisoned, only 3,000 Scottish soldiers were still alive. If Sir Edward Walker’s statement that 6,000 prisoners were taken and 5,000 of them were marched south was correct, then 2,000 captives perished on the way to Durham.

Of the estimated 5,000 Scottish soldiers that began the march southwards from Dunbar, over 3,500 died either on the march or during imprisonment in Durham Cathedral, more than the total number killed on the battlefield. Of the 1,400 survivors, the majority were eventually transported as slave labour to English colonies in the New World and the Caribbean.

George was one of the lucky survivors and, although indentured, landed in a relatively prosperous and free Massachusetts.

On November 11, 1650 George Darling and . . . 150 other Scotsmen sailed across the Atlantic ocean aboard the ship Unity to the new Colonies. They arrived in Boston in December of 1650.

Sixty-two “of these men went to work as woodcutters in the forests near the Iron Works. Others stayed in Boston, some went to Maine and others sent south. One wonders, given his age at the time of between 30 and 35 if George didn’t leave an entire family back in Scotland? Did he have a wife and children in the Midlothians? We’ll probably never know for sure, we do know the families of the captured Scots never knew exactly what happened to them. They were not informed if their sons and husbands had been captured, died at Durham Castle or on the march back to London. Never told their loved ones had been shipped an entire world away.”

According to the author, George took what was called The Freeman Oath. In 1672 George purchased two plots of land known as Coy Pond in Lynn, Salem, Essex County, Massachusetts and became the owner of a tavern and inn on that property.

Before this time, or possibly during, he was also a farmer and a yeoman. George also fished and cut wood.

Around 1657 George married a woman named Katherine. They remained together until his death in 1693.

The exact date of his death is uncertain. We know his estate was inventories on September 13, 1693 and the will probated October 9, 1693. It is believed his ‘Good Wife’ Katherine died some time after 1703.

AJH

1. The Iron Works is now commonly referred to as the Saugus Iron Works, located in Saugus, Massachusetts. Historically, it was also referred to as the Iron Works at Hammersmith.