Read The Spanish Armada Online
Authors: Robert Hutchinson
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Great Britain, #Military, #Naval, #General
The Spanish Armada (35 page)
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:
A huge gale hit us broadside on, with the waves reaching the sky . . . the [anchor] cables could not hold and the sails were no use, so that we found ourselves hurtling
ashore with all three ships on to a beach of very fine sand, hemmed in at either side by tremendous rocks.
A colonel, Don Diego Enríquez, ‘the hunchback’, had loaded his ship’s boat with 16,000 ducats in jewels and gold coins. It had a deck, and four men sheltered below,
ordering the hatch to be closed and caulked above them. Suddenly, more than seventy men who were left on the wreck jumped down into the boat and ‘an enormous wave’ submerged her,
sweeping away the crew and washing it ashore, leaving it upside down on the beach.
In this sorry plight, the gentlemen who had gone below died.
When the boat had been a day and a half on the shore, some savages reached her and turned her over . . . Breaking open the deck, they pulled out the dead and Don Diego Enríquez who
finally expired in their hands.
Then they stripped them and took their jewellery and money, dumping the bodies around without burying them.
Cuéllar was on the
Lavia
’s poop deck, watching with horror as many drowned inside the ships, whilst others jumped into the water ‘never to come
up again’;
others were shrieking inside the ships, calling on God for help. The captains were throwing their gold chains and gold coins into the sea. I could see . . . the beach full
of enemies, dancing and skipping about with glee at our misfortune. When any of our men reached the shore, two hundred savages and other enemies went up to him and took everything he was
wearing until he was left stark naked . . . Survivors were pitilessly beaten up and wounded.
Cuéllar, who could not swim, looked around for some debris he could cling to as he struggled for the shore. Suddenly, Martin de Aranda, the judge advocate general who had
reprieved him, was alongside him on the
Lavia
’s poop deck. He was ‘extremely tearful and dejected’ and could hardly stand as he was weighed down with gold ducats he had
sewn into his doublet. Cuéllar, clutching a wooden hatch cover for buoyancy, jumped into the water. Aranda scrambled on top of the flotsam but was swept away by an enormous wave, piteously
appealing to God as he drifted out of reach to drown. Covered in blood from injuries to both legs, Cuéllar managed to reach the beach, and hid that night. The next morning he found a
deserted monastery that had been torched by the English. Inside the church there were twelve Spaniards hanging from the iron bars of the window gratings. On the beach were six hundred corpses,
being eaten by scavenging dogs and ravens.
50
Much later Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam visited Streedagh Strand:
I went to see the bay where some of those ships wrecked and where, as I heard, lay not long before, 1,200 or 1,300 of the dead bodies.
I rode along that strand near two miles and then turned off from that shore, leaving before me [more than a] mile’s riding in which places . . . there lay a great store of the timber
of the wrecked ships . . . being in mine opinion more than would have built five of the great ships that ever I saw, besides mighty great boats, cables and other cordage . . . and some masts
for bigness and length as in mine own judgement I never saw any two could make the like.
51
Fitzwilliam had sent David Gwyn (who had escaped from one of
the Armada galleys wrecked earlier off Bayonne) to take charge of salvaging the treasure and
guns from the ships at Streedagh Strand and to question Spanish prisoners in Drogheda. Unfortunately, Gwyn fled to La Rochelle in France with £160 in coins, gold chains and jewels, stolen
from the survivors. Back in Dublin, he was the subject of scurrilous allegations that, while serving on the galleys, he had boasted that Walsingham ‘was for the Spaniards and would deliver
her majesty’s person into their hands’. Incensed, the lord deputy swore he would defend Walsingham’s loyalty with the loss of his own blood.
52
Cuéllar later met two armed men, an Englishman and a Frenchman and ‘a most extremely beautiful girl’ of about twenty who prevented her companions from killing him but not from
stripping him of his clothes and a gold chain and the forty-five ducats sewn up in his doublet – two months’ pay received before he left Corunna. His doublet was returned, but not his
shirt, which ‘the savage damsel hung round her neck, saying, by signs, that she meant to keep it and that she was a Christian, being as much like one as Mohammed was’, the Spaniard
recounted. Eventually Cuéllar escaped to Scotland and sailed on to Dunkirk where this unlucky man was shipwrecked again, and saw two hundred and seventy of his companions put to the sword by
the Dutch at the harbour’s mouth. It was not until 4 October 1589 that he reached the safety of the Spanish-held city of Antwerp in the Low Countries.
53
Back in Ireland, the hulk
Falcon Blanco Mediano
, 300 tons, ran ashore near Inishbofin island, Galway, on 25 September. The eighty-strong crew were fed and hidden by the
O’Flahertys of Connemara, until the governor issued a proclamation ordering that anyone who harboured Spaniards for more than four hours would be hanged as traitors, at which point the
O’Flahertys surrendered their guests to Sir Richard Bingham.
54
Even Bingham, who had boasted of killing eleven hundred survivors from the
wrecks off Connaught, was perhaps tiring of the slaughter for he spared them – or was he thinking more of the ransom? However, they were later executed on Fitzwilliam’s own orders.
Another ship, the 418-ton Biscayan
Concepción de Juan de Cano
came ashore further south at Ard Bay, near Carna, more than 18 miles (30 km) west of Galway city, after being lured to
shore by the bonfires of a party of wreckers.
55
There were two more identified Armada wrecks – this time in Scotland.
After parting company with the ill-fated
La Trinidad Valencera
on 4 September, the 650-ton flagship hulk
El Gran Grifón
had been blown backwards and forwards by errant
winds off Scotland’s west coast. On 27 September, she sighted Fair Isle, between Orkney and Shetland, and was beached at dawn in a narrow inlet beneath the towering cliff of
Stromshellier.
56
Seven died as the crew scrambled ashore and the three hundred survivors (some of whom came from the
Barca de Amberg
) were
well treated by the handful of crofter families on the island.
They must have wondered at the strange world that fate had brought them to. The inhabitants were all bald, ‘not a hair between them and heaven’ – an affliction they ascribed to
‘excessive toiling in rowing through impetuous tides’.
57
A senior Spanish officer, retaining some pride amongst all this privation,
asked a local chieftain, Malcolm Sinclair of Owendale, if he had ever seen ‘such a man as he’. There was a pause and then the islander replied: ‘Fair in the face . . . [but] I
have seen many [a] prettier man hanging in the Burrow Moor.’
58
After months of neglect, some fifty Spanish died from wounds or disease and
were buried at the south end of Fair Isle on a spot still marked as ‘Spainnarts’ graves’.
59
The others were so weak that two of
them were easily pushed off the cliff by the islanders. The survivors were taken to Anstruther, on the Scottish mainland, in hired ships, landing on 6 December, and two hundred and fifty were
repatriated to Spain in March 1589.
The 800-ton Ragusan warship
San Juan de Sicilia
, with a crew of more than three hundred, became the second Armada casualty in Scotland, but not through the effects of bad weather. Don
Diego Tellez Enríquez had dropped anchor on 25 September in Tobermory Bay, at the north-east tip of the island of Mull, off the west coast. For more than four weeks, she remained there,
repairing her damage and taking on fresh supplies, ready for the voyage home. In return for allowing her safe anchorage, the local landowner, Lachlan MacLean of Duart, employed around one hundred
Spanish soldiers as mercenaries to sort out some of his local clan feuds. The Spanish plundered the nearby islands of Rum and Eigg, belonging to the MacDonalds of Clanranald, and
also Canna and Muck, owned by the Macleans of Ardamurchan.
On 5 November, the ship unexpectedly blew up, leaving just fifteen survivors from those aboard.
60
MacLean kept on a force of fifty remaining
Spaniards for another year before they were returned home.
In Ireland, Fitzwilliam believed that a Frenchman who had been condemned for ‘embezzling treasure and jewels’ had lit some gunpowder and blown up the ship.
61
But it was Sir Francis Walsingham’s secret service that destroyed the enemy ship. His agent, John Smollett of Dumbarton, was one of the Scottish merchants who were
selling foodstuffs to the Spanish. He took advantage of a heaven-sent opportunity when, unwisely, the crew were drying gunpowder on the foredeck. After dropping a piece of smouldering cloth nearby,
he swiftly left the ship and headed for shore. Moments later, the huge explosion followed.
62
The scattered remains of the
San Juan de Sicilia
lie in eleven fathoms (20.12 metres) of water, around five hundred and fifty yards (500 metres) from the shore.
63
In 1730 a cannon bearing the arms of Francis I of France was recovered – probably captured by the Spanish at the Battle of St Quentin in 1557. It is now at Inverary
Castle. Despite persistent rumours to the contrary, she was not a treasure ship, although a silver plate eleven inches (27.94 cm) in diameter was brought to the surface in 1906.
In London, Walsingham had heard reports by 8 September that the Spanish ‘had lost a great number of their ships towards the back side of Ireland in the last storm’ and three weeks
later the English government had sufficient information to prepare a ‘printed book’ that provided details of the Armada losses.
64
He
wrote to Sir Edward Stafford, Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris: ‘We do look shortly to hear . . . of other ships to fall into the like distress for the south-west winds have blown so
hard as, in the judgement of our seamen, it has not be possible for them to return to Spain.’
65
Reports of Spanish soldiers roaming the wild wastes of Ireland alarmed Elizabeth, who ordered the lords lieutenant of England’s western counties to put their militia ‘into readiness
to march for Ireland with an hour’s warning’. Fitzwilliam asked for ‘five or six ships from Bristol’ to be stationed off the Irish coast ‘to destroy the forty
sea-beaten vessels returning into Spain’.
66
In the event, no army was needed as the supposed Spanish military threat just melted away. Of the survivors, some soldiers entered the service of Hugh O’Neill, Earl
of Tyrone. Eight years later, there were eight still working for him, including Pedro Blanco, who had escaped from the
Juliana
shipwreck to become the earl’s bodyguard.
About one hundred ‘ransomable’ well-born Spaniards were reprieved by Fitzwilliam, of whom sixty-one were sent to England. Thirty others managed to escape en route between Dublin and
Chester in the last months of 1588. They were put into the
Swallow
, a pinnace owned by Christopher Carleill, constable of Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland (and Walsingham’s stepson
by his first marriage), as she was anchored in Dublin Bay. Afterwards, when he claimed compensation for his stolen vessel, Carleill reported that his eight-man crew and the one gentleman on board
were overcome by the prisoners who ‘forcibly . . . carried both pinnace and men away’. They arrived at Corunna safely and the pinnace was seen there in August or September 1589. Luke
Plunkett reported that
Swallow
and another vessel, which had rescued some Italians from the Armada, were preying on shipping along the Irish coast. Three ‘sailors from Ireland’
– presumably members of her original crew – had been executed by the Spanish by December 1589.
67
Estimates of the number of Spanish who perished off Scotland and the west coast of Ireland or were subsequently slaughtered vary greatly. Beltrán del Salton, in his report to Philip in
April 1589, believed that 3,428 drowned and 1,016 were executed by the English.
68
He listed only thirteen wrecks, however, with one hundred and six
survivors and if the casualties from the ships lost but not known to Beltrán are included, the total number who died rises to 6,751 – fairly close to earlier official Spanish totals of
about 6,161.
69
George Fenton noted sixteen shipwrecks and 5,394 killed.
70
More recent documentary
research suggests that 3,750 drowned or died from hunger and disease after coming ashore; 1,500 were killed by the English or Irish; and there were 750 survivors.
71