tried to swim to safety. Known as the Portadown massacre, it was one of the bloodiest such events to take place in Ireland during the 1640s. In nearby Kilmore, English and Scottish men, women and children were burned to death in the cottage in which they were imprisoned, while in Armagh as a whole some 1,250 died in the early months of the rebellion, roughly a quarter of the local settler population. In County Tyrone, modern research has identified three blackspots for the killing of settlers, the worst being near Kinard, "where most of the British families planted... were ultimately murdered". Elsewhere at Shrule in County Mayo, Protestant prisoners were killed by their Catholic escorts, despite attempts by their officers to intervene. Killings of Catholics also took place, including the murder of two dozen at Islandmagee by members of the Carrickfergus garrison in November 1641. The arrival of a Covenanter army in Ulster in April 1642 led to further such atrocities, William Lecky, a 19th-century historian of the rebellion, concluding "it is far from clear on which side the balance of cruelty rests". The Scots executed Irish prisoners taken in a skirmish near Kilwarlin woods outside Dromore, while James Turner records that after retaking Newry, local Catholics were lined up on the banks of the Newry River and killed "without any legal process". On Rathlin Island, Scottish soldiers from Clan Campbell were encouraged by their commanding officer Sir Duncan Campbell to kill the local Catholic MacDonnells, who were related to the Campbells' enemies in Scotland, Clan MacDonald. They threw scores of MacDonnell women over cliffs to their deaths. The killings were brought under some degree of control by Owen Roe O'Neill, who in July 1642 was given command of Irish forces in Ulster and hanged several rebels for attacking civilians. Though still brutal, the war thereafter was fought according to the code of conduct both O'Neill and the Scottish commander Robert Monro had learned as professional soldiers in mainland Europe. Contemporary pamphlets published in London contained lurid details of the massacres and suggested over 200,000 Protestants had lost their lives. These figures were recognised even then as wildly exaggerated and in November 1641 Parliament jailed a publisher who admitted paying for fictitious atrocity tales. Recent research suggests around 4,000 were killed in the attacks, with thousands more expelled from their homes, many of whom died of exposure or disease, leading