The Spanish Armada (34 page)

Unfortunately, fate had dealt them an ill-starred card.

Denny had been given Colonel Sebastiano di San Giuseppe, the Italian commander of the Dún an Óir (‘Fort of Gold’) at nearby Smerwick, for ransom after the 1579–80
papal incursion into Ireland, but he had inconveniently escaped,
²²
leaving Denny not only humiliated but out of pocket too. That day, eight years
before, he had sworn that, henceforth, he would kill any Spaniard he could lay his hands on, and here was his unexpected chance to fulfil that bloody vow. The crew were detained and, during less
than gentle interrogation, admitted that the Armada now numbered only seventy ships. They also disclosed there was an Englishman called ‘Don William’, described as ‘of a
reasonable stature [and] bald’, on board Medina Sidonia’s ship.
²³
Denny promptly strung up seventeen of the Spanish sailors at Dingle,
but three ‘offered ransoms for their lives, promising that they should find friends in Waterford to redeem them’. They could not name these guarantors, so they were summarily executed
as well.
²⁴

Seen through sixteenth-century eyes, these judicial killings and massacres would seem entirely reasonable, if not normal. There was no Geneva Convention then to protect captured combatants.
Prisoners of war enjoyed no special rights, particularly those with no hope of bringing their captors bountiful ransoms. Moreover, the English in Ireland could manage only precarious governance
over the restive Irish chieftains and the unruly Catholic population. Memories were still fresh of the Desmond rebellion and the papacy’s ill-advised military adventure on the Dingle
peninsula. No wonder then that reports of Spanish ships landing troops galvanised the English government in Dublin, who suspected this was yet another foreign invasion of Ireland.

Sir Richard Bingham, the ruthless governor of Connacht, told of ‘further news of strange ships. Whether they are of the dispersed fleet which are fled from the supposed overthrow in the
Narrow Seas, or new forces come from Spain directly, no man is able to [tell] otherwise by guess.’ Bingham believed that as many ships were on the west coast, they must have sailed from
Spain. ‘I look this night for my horses to be here and on receipt of further intelligence, I will make towards the sea coast, either upwards to Thomond or downwards to
Sligo.’
²⁵

Sir William Fitzwilliam, lord deputy of Ireland, warned of ‘so ticklish and dangerous a time’ for ‘this poor realm’
²⁶
and emphasised to Elizabeth’s Privy Council that he had less than seven hundred and fifty trained soldiers with which to defend Ireland. The Irish government looked
‘rather to be overrun by the Spaniards than otherwise’, he warned. With so few soldiers on hand to defeat a Spanish incursion, he ordered his officers on the west coast ‘to
apprehend and execute all Spaniards found of whatever quality. Torture may be used in prosecuting this policy.’
²⁷
George Fenton, secretary to
the Irish Council, was more sanguine about the chances of any Irish rebellion supported by the surviving Spaniards: ‘The Irish [are] more greedy of spoil than apt to hearken after other
things.’
²⁸

Francisco de Cuéllar, whom we met earlier, narrowly escaping execution in the Armada, was shipwrecked in Co. Mayo. He has left us a vivid description of the inhabitants he
encountered:

History has judged these Irish severely, criticising their enthusiasm for plunder and their apparently callous indifference to the hundreds of Spanish who drowned on their
coast. It is true there were few recorded attempts to rescue the wretched crews as their ships went down one after the other, but hardly any Irish could swim in the sixteenth century. Their culture
also apparently maintained that it was downright unlucky to save a man from the sea. If they did, they, or one of their kin, would one day be drowned instead.
³⁰
The sea, they believed, would always claim its victims.

Compared to the scale of the English slaughter, relatively few survivors were killed by the Irish, aside from stories that on one beach Melaghlin M’Cabb, a giant gallowglass, hacked eighty
helpless men to death with his battle axe.
³¹
Indeed, some of the Irish rebel chiefs risked their lives and property to protect Spanish survivors
from English retribution; one of them, called O’Rourke, hid one refugee throughout the following winter and when Fitzwilliam demanded that he be handed over to the government, he steadfastly
refused. O’Rourke’s two sons were hanged in reprisal.
³²

Opportunities for booty for the Irish were growing as Armada ships were now being driven ashore in greater numbers by a fortnight of fierce storms.

Twenty-four hours after the
Nuestra Señora de Castro
surrendered, Boetius Clancy, the sheriff of Clare, informed Bingham that ‘last night two ships were seen about the
islands of Arran and it is thought more sails were seen westwards from the islands’. One ship was currently

Four days afterwards, the ship, Don Felipe de Córdoba’s 736-ton Guipúzcoan warship
San Esteban
, was washed ashore on the white strand near Doonbeg,
north of Kilrush. Two hundred men were drowned and sixty captured as they struggled out of the waves. Six miles (10.14 km) to the north, another Armada ship, probably the
San Marcos
, was
wrecked the same day between Mutton Island
³⁴
and Lurga Point, with only four survivors. Clancy hanged them, with those from the
San
Esteban
, on a low hill thereafter called Cnoc na Crocaire (or Gallows Hill) and they were buried in one pit near Killilagh church.
³⁵

It was an ill day for the Armada. The Levanter
Anunciada
, 703 tons, was set on fire and scuttled in Scattery Roads, off Kilrush on the north bank of the River
Shannon estuary. She had anchored there a week before with five
zabra
s, her leaks threatening to sink her. Twenty-four hours after
Anunciada
’s arrival, the little group of
ships was joined by the tub-bellied hulk
Barca de Danzig
, 450 tons, also badly battered by the weather. Ragusan carpenters managed to repair the transport’s hull, but their own
Anunciada
was beyond help. After her crew, artillery and what remained of her provisions and water were shipped over to the
Barca de Danzig
she was burnt near Scattery
Island.
³⁶

Off Ireland’s south-west coast, in Co. Kerry, some ships survived. Marcos de Aramburu’s galleon
San Juan de Castilla
anchored in Blasket Sound, at the entrance to Dingle
Bay, for repairs. (She managed to reach Santander on 14 October.) The same day Recalde’s
San Juan de Portugal
(1,050 tons), with more than one hundred seriously sick on board, joined
Aramburu in the Sound. Recalde had twenty-five pipes of wine but no drinkable water; what remained had been loaded in Spain and ‘stinketh marvellously’.

Both ships replenished their water from a spring on Great Blasket Island. At noon on 21 September, they were joined by the Guipúzcoan vice-flagship
Santa María de la Rosa
,
945 tons, her sails in shreds. She dropped anchor and then, shortly after two o’clock, suddenly sank having struck the submerged Stromboli pinnacle of rock. All three hundred hands were lost,
save Giovanni de Manona, son of the Genovese pilot, who managed to float ashore on a wooden plank. Captured by the English, he described how one of the ship’s officers had accused his father
of treason in deliberately wrecking the ship and had killed him in a moment of fury. The ship had gone down almost in seconds – so that the officers had no time to launch their boat. He also
claimed that the Prince of Asculi, Philip’s illegitimate son, had been on board and had not survived, but as the prince was in Flanders and subsequently served in Italy, this was patently
untrue. Manona was executed by his English captors.
³⁷

Fernando Horra’s
San Juan Bautista
arrived on 23 September, without her mainmast and clearly damaged beyond any hope of repair. Her crew were transferred to the
San Juan de
Castilla
and
San Juan de Portugal
and she was burnt to the waterline. Recalde
and his ship reached Bilbao on 7 October but he died two days afterwards from
exhaustion in a monastery.

Between 16 and 21 September, three ships were wrecked on the coast of Co. Mayo – the Levanter
San Nicholas Prodaneli
(834 tons) and the two
urcas
,
Santiago
(600
tons) and
Ciervo Volante
(400 tons). Their crews, possibly numbering as many as five hundred men, were drowned or executed, either soon after coming ashore or later while held in Galway
gaol by Sir Richard Bingham.
³⁸
A fourth vessel may have come ashore in Tirawley, probably in Killala Bay.

Don Alonso de Leyva’s
Rata Santa María Encoronada
sailed into Blacksod Bay, an area of sea inlets enclosed by the Mullet Peninsula and Achill Island.
³⁹
On board was Maurice Fitzmaurice, son of the Irish rebel James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald. Despite deploying sea anchors, she ran aground on Fahy Strand, near
Ballycroy, on 21 September, a victim of the vicious local rip-tides. Fitzgerald died on board and was solemnly consigned to the waves in a large cypress chest.

Leyva burnt the ship and moved his men and remaining provisions into Doona Castle, overlooking the bay. The Andalusian hulk
Duquesa Santa Ana
had meanwhile anchored safely in Elly
harbour, 10 miles (16.9 km) across the bay and six miles (9 km) south of Belmullet. Leyva marched his men 25 miles (40.23 km) around the bay to her and took command, intending to sail the
Duquesa
to neutral Scotland, with the seven hundred and fifty men he now had on board. Ill luck dogged him, however, and another storm drove the 900-ton ship ashore in Loughros Mor Bay at
Rossbeg, Co. Donegal, during the night of 25–26 September, when Leyva was injured in the leg by a spinning capstan bar as he quit the ship. Undaunted, he took over an old fort just off the
coast on O’Boyle’s Island in Lough Kiltooris, and positioned a light gun from the wreck in the ruins. The galleass
Girona
was then reported at Killybegs, 19 miles (30.58 km) to
the south and, carried in a rough-and-ready chair, built by the ship’s carpenters, de Leyva led his men down the road from Ardara to join her.

The next two weeks were spent repairing the
Girona
, using materials salvaged from another Spanish ship that had been stranded off Camtullagh Head at the mouth of Killybegs harbour. Some
Irish begged Leyva to stay and lead them against the English heretics, but he argued that his commission prevented him from doing that.
⁴⁰
Having heard that Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam was leading an English force towards them, Leyva ‘put himself aboard her, having for his pilot three Irishmen and a
Scot’.
⁴¹
At last, on 26 October, the galleass departed for Scotland with more than a thousand Spanish on board, three hundred of them galley
slaves.
⁴²
Two hundred had to be left behind – one of them James Machary ‘of the Cross within the county of Tipperary’. The lord
deputy had ‘good will to hang him, [as] he is a subject of her majesty’s’ but spared him to allow the Privy Council in London to question him.
⁴³

Two days later the
Girona
was wrecked at midnight in a storm at the base of towering Lacada Point in Co. Antrim, the ship breaking in two on the rocks. Only nine survivors managed to
climb the cliffs to seek shelter in Dunluce Castle
⁴⁴
and eventually arrived in Scotland. Sorley Boy McDonnell recovered ‘certain wine’
washed up on the shore but at least gave the two hundred and sixty bodies pulled from the sea a decent burial in the local cemetery.
⁴⁵
The loss of
the galleass brought mourning to a number of the great noble houses of Spain and Italy: ‘The gentlemen were so many that a list of their names would fill a quire of paper,’ according to
one Spanish source.

For months, there were high hopes in Madrid that Leyva and his force were miraculously still alive and were fighting the English, in alliance with Irish rebel leaders. One report in January 1589
talks of him capturing the town of Dundalk with ‘three Irish knights’, having joined up with ‘O’Neill and McDonnell who are great gentlemen and enemies of the Lutheran
queen’. Irish merchants the same month passed on rumours that Leyva had fortified a port in Co. Sligo, which was ‘well-entrenched’ and armed with ‘artillery and ammunition
of the vessels that had gone aground’. His Irish allies, O’Rourke and O’Connor, were ‘well content since they had joined with him and were not afraid of the power of the
English’.
⁴⁶