As soon as the judge was washed off de Cuéllar’s raft, it began to heel over again. At the same moment, a piece of timber smashed down on his legs, dealing him a severe injury, which was to cripple him for months. A sequence of four waves (the detail is precise) washed him onto the shore on Streedagh Strand north of Sligo Bay. This beach, along with others nearby, is a surfer’s paradise today, with huge storm-waves rolling in, exactly as de Cuéllar described. He could not swim, but swimming in such conditions was hardly relevant. Bodies were being hurled ashore, dead or alive. The danger on reaching the beach was that a following wave would sweep him back to sea again. Weltering in blood, severely injured, he was an appalling spectacle. The plunderers stripping other survivors somehow left him alone. He made a distinction between ‘enemies and savages’ on the beach: the enemy English and the native Irish. He missed the point that the soldiers killing his own countrymen were largely Irish too.
Sentenced to Death
In his account of the shipwreck, de Cuéllar was careful to underline that he was among the last to abandon the Lavia, even though he was not in command. ‘Most of the men and all the captains and officers had already drowned and were dead when I resolved to find a way of saving my own life ….’
De Cuéllar had a personal case to make and he made it urgently in his letter. Weeks earlier, in the English Channel, he had been stripped of his command of a galleon called the San Pedro and sentenced to a brutal death for lack of attention to duty. Twenty captains in all were sentenced. De Cuéllar’s ship, by his own account, had done no worse than to move out of formation in the hands of a bad pilot, while he himself slept from exhaustion. The Judge Advocate, Martín de Aranda, had appealed the cruel conviction to the commander-in-chief, and de Cuéllar’s life was spared. Otherwise he would have been hanged from the yardarm. He had remained on board the judge’s ship for the journey home. One captain was actually hanged. Returning home in disgrace, his professional honour in shreds, de Cuéllar faced a battle for the recovery of his good name in Spain. The judge who had reprieved him would have been a crucial witness.
Records recently discovered show that his conviction on the Armada was not his first brush with authority. He had already been the subject of an enquiry concerning an incident in Brazil, in 1583, when the Spanish had lost a vessel in a skirmish with the English because de Cuéllar had kept his own ship out of the firing line. It should be remembered that few of the Armada captains were experienced commanders and that very heavy-handed discipline prevailed.
Not only were the clothes of the castaways of value to the plunderers, dressed themselves in woollen homespun, but they knew that the Spaniards carried their valuables either on their bodies, or stitched into their clothing, as de Cuéllar was soon to reveal. He seems to have crawled away from the beach, without drawing attention to himself, until at nightfall he lay down ‘on some rushes, in open country and in great pain.’ He had seen other Spaniards in extreme misery on the way.
The salbajes did not necessarily kill their victims as the soldiers did, but they beat them into a condition in which they could be stripped, robbed and cast aside. Added to hypothermia and the horror of shipwreck, this brutality left many stark naked, ‘with not a single garment on them’, and must have induced a condition of extreme shock. The symptoms, so familiar today in casualties, are obvious in de Cuéllar’s encounter with a young Spaniard who was naked and so shocked that he could not speak. De Cuéllar himself was still dressed in a blood-drenched shirt and some kind of jacket. Lying on open ground, the Spaniards were discovered by two menacing Irishmen who arrived after dark. One had a gun and the other carried an axe. In one of the many ironies in de Cuéllar’s account, the strangers took pity on the Spanish pair. Cutting a mass of rushes, they covered them well. ‘Then they went to the strand to ransack and break open chests and whatever they found there.’ During the night, de Cuéllar heard further pillagers arriving on horseback. By then, his young companion had perished from exposure. His death greatly upset de Cuéllar, as did the fate of all the other bodies ‘that the sea had cast up, to be devoured by ravens and wolves, with no one to give any of them burial ….’
THE ABBEY OF STAAD
At daybreak, he began to search for a nearby church. This was the Abbey of Staad (Stad – a stopping place), a few hundred metres from the southern end of Streedagh, although not visible from the beach itself. The gable of the tiny abbey still stands, just above the shoreline, looking out to the monastic island of Inishmurray, which it served as a departure point and a mainland sanctuary. The once-sturdy gable is now a tissue of loose masonry, showing clearly the use of seashells for lime in the mortar between the fine blocks of local stone.
When de Cuéllar reached it, the church was abandoned, its contents burned and destroyed. ‘… all the friars had fled to the hills for fear of the enemies who would sacrifice them too if they caught them.’ A grisly scene confronted him within. Twelve of his countrymen had been executed and their naked bodies were left hanging from iron bars. De Cuéllar must have suspected that his own nagging appointment with the hangman might not be postponed indefinitely. He had escaped the noose on the Armada, only to find it waiting for him ashore.
Escaping through a nearby wood, he met an old woman who was hiding five or six cows from soldiers billeted in her village. They were there, presumably, to deal with the Spanish castaways, and were more than likely Irish themselves. Throughout the country, most of the soldiers in the English army were actually Irishmen. These were probably from Sir Richard Bingham’s garrison in Sligo town.
With tears and sign language, the old woman warned de Cuéllar not to approach the village as the enemy had already chopped the heads off many Spanish there. Injured and starving, he made his way back towards the beach where parties were still scavenging among the wreckage and carrying away the loot. There must have been an untold wealth of ropes and rigging, timber and exotic effects, coming ashore. The local people would have been competing for the salvage with the garrisons and with Elizabethan officials.
The Spanish Ships
A map of Sligo, drawn in early 1589, shows a colossal mainmast, rigged and flagged, lying along miles of coastline. A caption says: ‘The wrack of trý Spanesh Shepps’. The crude drawing echoes the opinion of an English observer who reported a mast as big as any two he had ever seen before. These were enormous ships. Divers on the wreck of the Juliana in 1985 discovered the rudder, intact, with its iron swivels still in position. The rudder is twelve metres long.
Terrified of capture, de Cuéllar remained in hiding nearby, where he was joined by two Spanish soldiers. They were naked, one with a head wound sustained while being robbed. According to them, the English had already executed more than a hundred Spaniards. Since things could get no worse and he was dying of starvation anyway, de Cuéllar headed for the wreckage in the hope of salvaging some ship’s biscuit from the tide. On the way, he recognised, among hundreds of corpses on the shore, the bodies of comrades and superiors.
With the aid of the two soldiers, he dug a pit in the sand to bury some of the most distinguished victims, including a captain who had been a close friend of his. They were mobbed at once by savages: two hundred and fifty of them, in de Cuéllar’s estimation. He explained in sign language that they were burying their friends to protect their bodies from the ravens. The Spaniards were spared, perhaps as a result of these corporal works of mercy, but not for long. De Cuéllar was still clothed and he was soon attacked by four men determined to rob him. He was unexpectedly defended by a chief of some kind, who ordered the assailants away. ‘He must have been a chief because they respected him,’ de Cuéllar observed. This mentor spent some time with the Spaniards, before pointing them to a track leading to his own village.
THE VILLAGE OF GRANGE
Barefoot on stony ground, tormented by his injury, de Cuéllar became separated from his companions. He excused them wholeheartedly on the grounds that they were naked and freezing and thoroughly justified in
going ahead without him. The fine sand of Streedagh must have irritated his open wound. His leg would later become infected. Behind the dunes, a muddy lagoon led to wooded ground. Dragging himself inland, de Cuéllar could not have guessed that he was beginning a journey of seven months, during which he would wander throughout northern Ireland under constant threat of discovery and death. His first tottering steps took him upriver towards a settlement of thatched huts where the village of Grange now stands.
It seems likely that Grange was not a secular village at the time, but an out-farm belonging to the Cistercian Abbey thirty-five miles away in Boyle, Co. Roscommon. This outfarm, with its buildings and over five hundred acres of land, would have been occupied by monks and farm-workers, although they may well have gone into hiding during the military disturbance.
As he made his painful way towards the ‘village’, de Cuéllar would have found his view dominated by the unique rampart of Benbulben’s northwest face, about three miles away. The mountain at this point appears as an enormous, green mesa, deeply fluted with symmetrical gullies. De Cuéllar never mentions this extraordinary landmark, and it is possible that the clouds were clamped down low enough to obscure it.
He measured his crippled progress in arquebus-shots, tyros de arcabuz, just as another might use the flight of an arrow. The arquebus was a contemporary firearm, lighter than a musket, with a limited range of perhaps a couple of hundred metres. He had covered two such measures when he was assaulted again. This strange encounter, too odd to be a fabrication, shows the kind of mixture that could be thrown together in a peasant society in a time of upheaval. The group he met consisted of an elderly salbaje, his twenty-year-old daughter, and two armed soldiers – one English, the other French. The young woman was hermossísima por todo estremo, beautiful in the extreme. She was also, in de Cuéllar’s opinion, mistress to the English soldier.
The group was on its way to plunder the Spanish ships, along with the rest of the population. De Cuéllar was attacked by the English soldier who succeeded in slashing him before the others separated them. The old peasant, remembering his obligations as a savage, stepped in and robbed de Cuéllar, stripping him of his clothes. Under the linen shirt, he wore a valuable gold chain, and in his jerkin – a kind of waistcoat – he carried forty-five gold escudos, two months’ worth of a captain’s salary.
The girl, upset by the mistreatment rather than the theft, intervened, and he got his doublet back, though not the linen shirt, and certainly not the money or the chain. He seems at this point to have had some kind of outer jacket (sayo) as well as the waistcoat. The girl coveted the holy relics he wore around his neck in a scapular. She took them for herself, claiming that she was a Christian, which, in de Cuéllar’s sardonic opinion, ‘she was – as much as Mohammed’. He was left on his own then, bleeding badly from the new wound, while the group returned to their hut. But the image of Irish hospitality was restored by a boy sent out with a poultice for the injury and a meal of ‘butter, milk and a piece of oaten bread’. The boy led him along the road, avoiding the soldiers at Grange. He owed this service to the kindness of the French soldier rather than to the old savage or his daughter.
De Cuéllar’s description of his actual route is vague, although events are immediate and striking. The boy pointed out to him mountains in the distance, behind which an important savage chieftain, un gran senor salbaje, lived. This chieftain, Brian O’Rourke of Breifne, was already on the verge of rebellion. He was taking in all the naked Spaniards who reached him, and more than eighty survivors had already arrived in Co. Leitrim. O’Rourke’s lands lay to the east of Benbulben and the limestone plateau known as the Dartry Mountains.
INTO LEITRIM
De Cuéllar’s journey in search of protection could have taken any one of a number of routes, depending on which of O’Rourke’s settlements – Manorhamilton or Dromahair – he was to reach. Earlier commentators favour a plausible route via Glenade to Glencar, but Cruickshank and Gallagher in 1988 suggest a very different route, just north of Lough Gill to Dromahair. Either way, the journey is roughly twenty miles (thirty kilometres). De Cuéllar was regaining strength and beginning to cover greater distances, although still injured and virtually starving. Without diminishing his achievement, it might be noted that he was travelling in the season of wild berries, fruit and corn. Hazel nuts, though not ripe yet, should have been plentiful in a limestone landscape.
His opinion of the Irish improved when he was taken in for the night by some noble natives. One of them spoke Latin – not particularly unusual in sixteenth-century Ireland. He dressed de Cuéllar’s wounds, fed him and gave him a bed. Later that night, the man’s father and brothers came in, laden with material from the wreckage. They too made de Cuéllar welcome. Given their behaviour, it has been suggested that these men might have been monks in hiding, perhaps from the Cistercian grange itself, the father being the abbot and the others monks.
In the morning, they dispatched a boy and a horse to take de Cuéllar along a section of the route where the mud was belly-deep – perhaps a detour through a bog. The boy spotted a troop of horsemen riding towards them at speed, and he hid de Cuéllar behind some rocks. Over a hundred and fifty horsemen passed, ‘on their way to the strand to rob and kill any Spaniards they found’. De Cuéllar, in this instance, used the Gaelic term, Sasanach, for an Englishman, which he rendered in Spanish as sásanas. He may also have adopted the Irish practice (evident in the annals) of exaggerating the enemy numbers.
Having escaped detection, and still on horseback with his guide, de Cuéllar fell immediately into the hands of ‘more than forty savages on foot’ who wanted to cut him to pieces, ‘because they were all Lutherans’.
The boy persuaded them that the Spaniard was already a captive of his master, and they contented themselves with beating him and stealing every stitch of clothing he wore, so that he was left naked as the day he was born. At this point, de Cuéllar admits, he lost the will to survive and he prayed for death. But he rallied as usual, and continued on his way.
GLENADE LOUGH
Sheltering that night in a deserted hut by a lake (long assumed to have been Glenade Lough), he found three men, ‘naked as the day they were born’, hiding in the hut among sheaves of straw. De Cuéllar was attired by then in ferns and a bit of straw matting, and both parties prayed aloud in frightened Spanish on sight of each other. The three had just lost eight companions to a murderous mob. When they discovered that he was not only human but that he was actually Captain de Cuéllar, they were overjoyed and, as he says proudly, ‘they rushed up to me and nearly finished me off completely, embracing me.’ The group slept there that night, having eaten nothing but blackberries and watercress.
All the following day, until nightfall, they were trapped in the hut by a party of savages working outside, whom the Spaniards judged to be hostile. Eventually, resuming their journey before dawn on the second day, they found themselves in friendlier country, with ‘huts inhabited by better people who, though all savages, were Christians and charitable.’ One man took de Cuéllar into his family hut and patched him up, refusing to let him leave until he had recovered sufficiently to reach O’Rourke’s village – whether Manorhamilton or Dromahair. Oddly enough, these charitable Christians did not give their guest a bit of clothing, such as a cloak which would have disguised him as Irish, because he reached the village still wrapped in a piece of matting.
Unfortunately, el senor de Ruerge was not at home. He was away defending threatened territory, and some seventy refugees, all in desperate straits, awaited his return. They were not effusively welcomed in O’Rourke’s absence, although de Cuéllar’s condition aroused great pity in all who saw him, according to his own account, which openly uses such devices to give the reader a sense of his condition, heightened by bursts of piety and a healthy sense of humour.
LOST IN DONEGAL
While begging for scraps of food next morning, he heard that a big ship had arrived on the coast further north, to p
ick up survivors. With a score of Spaniards, he set off immediately. Again, because of his injuries, he fell behind on the journey to the port, which was either Killybegs or Donegal itself. The Armada ship had put in for repairs after the gales. Setting sail before de Cuéllar reached the port, the overloaded ship was wrecked further along the coast, with all of his recent companions on board. All hands were lost. We do not know which of the Armada ships this was.
Captain de Leyva and the Girona
On 21 September, the day of the Streedagh disaster, the Rata Encoronada, under the extraordinary Captain de Leyva, had run aground at Ballycroy, Co. Mayo. De Leyva, who was provisional commander-in-chief of the Armada, burnt the wreck to deprive the enemy of plunder, took his men safely ashore, and occupied a nearby castle. According to contemporary accounts, he marched to another ship farther along the Mayo coast. He took command and set sail for Scotland with two crews on board. Wrecked again off the coast of Donegal, in Loughros More Bay, he occupied an island-fort in Kiltoorish lake (where one of his heavy guns remained until it was stolen in the 1970s.) From Ardara, he marched his men twenty miles south across the steep peninsula to join the fateful Girona at Killybegs. She was, of course, wrecked off Co. Antrim and only nine of the thirteen hundred men de Leyva had marshalled from various wrecks escaped to Scotland. The movements of this large body of armed men and their potential alliances with rebel chieftains, such as Onelli (O’Neill) and Horruerk (O’Rourke), were reported to both the Spanish and the English authorities.
Endurance Page 5