Zain Paldy's Ile Palavre

Introduction

Origin of the People of Zain Paldy's Ile and Their Language: Thomas Whitty

The story of the unique speech of Zain Paldy's Ile begins with the story of Thomas Whitty, or "Fitty", as the islanders pronounce the name.

Thomas Whitty was born in Wexford, County Wexford, Ireland, a speaker of the unique language there known as Yola or the Forth and Bargy Dialect. Yola is a descendant of the Middle English brought by Whitty's ancestors, the Anglo-Norman and Cambro-Norman families who conquered Ireland in the 12th century. These Hiberno-Normans became mostly Gaelicized over the centuries, and when the conflicts surrounding the English and Scottish Reformations occurred they, like most Gaelic Irish people, remained Catholic; this became a source of conflict between the local people and the English state. Whitty's life was profoundly shaped by these conflicts: he was a child when Irish rebels broke free from English rule throughout most of Ireland and was a teenager when Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland to reconquer the lands controlled by the Confederation of Kilkenny. His father was killed fighting against Cromwell's forces and his mother was killed when Cromwell sacked the town in 1649.

Orphaned and alone, the teenage Whitty became a sailor. Over the years he gained experience and status and eventually became the captain of his own fishing vessel. Each spring he'd sign a crew in Wexford and sail for the summer fishing season to the richest waters then known to European fishermen: Newfoundland. When he'd return at the end of the season he could pass his days with his wife, Maggie. He led his life like this for the better part of 40 years, when war broke out again.

This time James II, the first Catholic ruler of the Three Kingdoms in over a century, had been overthrown by Protestant zealots. James having issued a declaration of religious freedom and appointed an Irish Catholic to the position of Lord Deputy of Ireland, was popular in Ireland and went there to drum up support after having been kicked out of England. Whitty supported the Jacobite cause by fitting his ship with cannons and raiding English shipping, but after three years of fighting the war ended in defeat for the Jacobites.

Whitty was now faced with a dilemma. While other Jacobites had been pardoned provided they agreed to an oath of loyalty to the new monarchs William and Mary, Whitty had spent the war raiding English shipping - he was a pirate, a crime the English crown would be less likely to forgive. Regardless, the idea of an oath of loyalty to another pair of monarchs who had taken control of Ireland seemed loathsome to him. He resolved that his only remaining option was to continue with his newfound life of piracy.

The Adventures of Whitty and the Crew of the Duncannon

Through a stroke of luck, Whitty and his crew captured a much larger and normally faster English merchant vessel off of Southwest England that had been damaged by a storm. They sailed their new ship to Bristol, where they repaired her, restocked their supplies, filled out their crew with some extra hands, and set sail for the high seas.

Whitty and his crew spent the next several years sailing between the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean targeting English ships. The international crew of the Duncannon, as their ship had been rechristened, was still mostly made up of Whitty's neighbors from Wexford, like his first mate, Francis Keating, along with around a dozen people from the West Country they picked up in Bristol, but it also included a few sailors from other places, like Domingo Ochoa, from the Basque Country, and Jean Berthou, who was half Breton and half Mi'kmaq, both of whom Whitty met in Newfoundland.

After docking on an uninhabited but generally hospitable island northeast of the Seychelles and south of Rumbar to repair their ship, they began to use the island as a base to raid English East India Company shipping. This drew them into conflict with the Rumbari people from the islands to the north, who had tasked their navy with hunting the increasing number of pirates in the region.

After a brief battle with a larger force the pirates, realizing that they were outnumbered, agreed to negotiate, and a deal was struck: in exchange for patrolling the waters around their islands the pirates became official privateers and deputies of the Rumbari Republic and were allowed to bring their families to settle on their island with them. This small band of pirates and their families christened their new home Zain Paldy's Ile, after St. Palladius, a saint popular in southeastern Ireland, and their treaty with Rumbar allowed them to form a small but enduring society.

The First Inhabitants of Zain Paldy's Ile

The Duncannon and her crew, escorted by a ship representing the Rumbari Republic, sailed back to Wexford, where Whitty was reunited with his wife Maggie and their son, James. James Whitty had taken up his father's trade as a fisherman to support his mother, but he now used his fishing boat to help transport his family and the families of other crew members back to Zain Paldy's Ile. Upon their return to the island, the population was still just over a hundred people.

Not all the men had wives and children back in Ireland or in Bristol, but some, like Francis Keating and Domingo Ochoa, would end up marrying Betsimisaraka Malagasy women they met while in Madagascar; relations with the Malagasy in and around Ile St. Marie in Madagascar would continue, as would occasional immigration from the area. The wives of the pirates weren't the only women on the island, because, unbeknownst to the men at first, one of the men who joined their crew in Bristol was actually Mary Nance, a runaway from Cornwall eager for adventure who became an enthusiastic pirate. She had a daughter with a Zanzibari navigator who aided the pirates on their first visit to the Indian Ocean and later married Jean Berthou, with whom she had three more children.

From this initial multicultural band of misfits a new society developed. Their language, which came to be known simply as Palavre, evolved from the Yola Language spoken by a majority of the settlers on the island, with major influence from nautical jargon, West Country English, and Malagasy.

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