Luzón and four officers landed and were confronted by more than twenty ‘savage people’. Alarmed, they drew their rapiers in self-defence but were surprised to be courteously helped out of their boat. A larger crowd forcibly stripped them of their weapons, gold buttons, clothing and around 7,300 gold ducats in cash.13 Eventually, after some haggling, the local Irish magnate Sir John O’Docherty supplied boats in exchange for 200 ducats, and the ship’s complement began to be ferried ashore. Over the next two days more than four hundred Spaniards, Greeks and Italians were rescued, despite one boat sinking and the Irish being distracted by their enthusiastic plundering of the wreck. The Spanish purchased horsemeat and butter to provide the first fresh meal they had eaten in weeks. The Valencera eventually broke in two, drowning forty-five sick and wounded before they could be taken off.14 More than thirty Irish looters were also lost as the wreck disappeared beneath the waves.
Luzón and his men were now stranded in a hostile country.
They decided to march the 20 miles (32.19 km) south across the boggy Inishowen peninsula to Illagh Castle, home of Connor O’Devenny, Bishop of Down and Connor,15 en route to the west coast where Luzón hoped to find ships to take them to Spain. However, they were surprised by Major John Kelly with a force of Irish mercenaries in English service based at Castle Burt, comprising two hundred cavalry and three companies of ‘footmen, harquebusiers and bowmen’. After some perfunctory skirmishing to satisfy both sides’ honour, Luzón agreed to surrender and be taken to Dublin.
The forty-seven Spanish officers, thought likely to draw sizeable ransoms, were separated from their men and surrounded by a menacing square of soldiers. The ‘other ranks’ were led into a nearby field and, after being stripped naked, were cut down by volleys fired by the harquebusiers. Others were speared by the lances of the cavalry as they tried to flee. Juan Lázaro, the ship’s helmsman, described how they were forced to sit on the ground and two horsemen, with long white beards,16 signalled to the soldiers to open fire.17 About three hundred were killed and a further one hundred injured were left to die on the bloodstained turf.
The walking wounded managed to struggle across a peat bog to Illagh Castle. Some were robbed by Irish peasants, but other locals treated the fugitives well, providing food and accommodation along the way.18 Most survivors escaped to Scotland with the help of the charmingly named Irish chieftain Sorley Boy McDonnell of Dunluce, who ignored threats from Dublin ‘not to ship any more on pain of death and confiscation of all his property’.19 McDonnell pledged that he would ‘rather lose his life and goods and those of his wife and children than barter Christian blood. He had dedicated his sword to the defence of the Catholic faith and despite the governor, the queen and all England he would embark the rest of the Spaniards.’20
The captured officers and gentlemen were taken on a forced march to Drogheda, 30 miles (48.28 km) north of Dublin, but only Luzón and Don Rodrigo Lasso survived the terrible privations of the journey. Both were later taken to London before being repatriated in an exchange of prisoners in March 1591.21
Further south, off Valentia Island, south Kerry, the Castilian galleon La Trinidad, 872 tons, disappeared on 12 September, having kept station with San Juan Bautista since 27 August. The large zabra, or two-masted pinnace, Nuestra Señora de Castro, 75 tons, anchored in Tralee Bay off the little town of Fenit on 15 September, her hull leaking badly, eighteen days after last seeing the flagship San Martin. Three of the twenty-four crew on board swam to shore and surrendered themselves to Lady Margaret Denny, the dour wife of Sir Edward Denny, at Tralee Castle.
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:
These savages live like beasts in the mountains . . . in thatched cabins and are all big men, handsome and well-built and fleet as the roe-deer. They dress . . . [in] short loose coats of very coarse goat’s hair [and] wrap up in blankets and wear their hair down to their eyes.
They are continually at war with the English . . . they don’t let them into their lands which are all flooded and marshy.
What these people are most inclined to is thieving and robbing one another so that not a day passes between them without a call to arms, because as soon as the people in the next village find out . . . that there are cattle or anything else, they come armed at night and all hell breaks loose and they slaughter one another.
In short; in this kingdom there is neither justice or reason, so that everyone does as he pleases.29
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
anchored in an unusual harbour, about one mile (1.6 km) west of Sir Turlough O‘Brien’s house called Liscannor.
The said ship had two cockboats [and] . . . one landed and is not like our English cockboats. It would carry twenty men at least and it is painted red with [a] red anchor with an earthen vessel like an oil crock.
They offered to land the last night in one of the cockboats which they could not by reason of the weather and the harbour.
I watch here with the most part of the inhabitants of the barony.33
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 Island34 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 zabras, 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 Castle44 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
But such optimism was groundless: brave and determined Leyva had died in the single greatest loss of life suffered by an Armada ship. He was described as ‘long-bearded, tall and slender, of a flaxen and smooth hair, of behaviour mild and temperate, of speech good and deliberate, greatly reverenced not only of his own men but generally of the whole company’.47 Philip said later that he mourned his loss more than that of his Armada.
So the slaughter went on. On 22 September, the Biscayan vice flagship El Gran Grin (1,160 tons) was wrecked on a reef off Clare Island at the western edge of Co. Mayo’s Clew Bay, drowning more than two hundred of her crew. Her captain, Pedro de Mendoza, managed to reach the island with one hundred survivors but when they tried to escape by stealing fishing boats the local chieftain, Dawdarra Roe O’Malley, killed sixty-four, including Mendoza.48 Only one Spaniard and an Irishman from Wexford were spared.49
Three days later three Levantine armed merchantmen sank off the two mile (3.22 km) wide sands of Streedagh Strand, in Donegal Bay, north of Sligo: Juliana (860 tons), Santa María de Visón (660 tons) and the squadron vice-flagship Lavia (728 tons). The ships went aground some distance from the shore and broke up within the hour, drowning almost one thousand men. Some three hundred survivors were killed by Sir Richard Bingham’s soldiers. One of those who escaped was Francisco de Cuéllar, who was in the Venetian Lavia after being relieved from command of San Pedro. He described her shipwreck:
The Spanish Armada Page 25
