The leaders might have had a private supply of food with them, of course. They certainly had servants and grooms, just as each mounted soldier had one, or perhaps two, horseboys to look after equipment. A supply of food for the leader and senior officers is not unlikely and would explain their consistent energy and drive, and also the survival of the two elderly figures, Dermot of Dursey and O’Conor Kerry. The old men would have spent much of the journey so far on horseback. That would change. Horses were about to become very scarce.
The O’Sullivan boat began upside down as a willow frame, made of poles stuck in the ground, the tips bent in to meet each other and tied with cord. (In Ireland, boat building of this kind was traditionally done with hazel rather than willow.) Crossbeams, planks and seats strengthened the frame. It was covered outside with the skins of eleven horses, and then equipped with oars. The boat was twenty-six feet (almost eight metres) long. In other words, it was the same length as a full-size currach, but a foot and a half broader and a bit deeper too.
The O’Malleys were left with a single skin for their boat, whether by design or by disdain, we don’t know. They made a circular, top-heavy coracle that sounds very like an egg-basket. ‘It was covered with the skin of one horse drawn over the bottom.’ Ten of the O’Malleys got into it and drowned in the middle of the river. The episode reads like a management-training game gone wrong. Philip is probably being spiteful. River boats of this kind were not uncommon, but no one would have attempted ten passengers.
The O’Sullivan boat, after two days’ work in the secrecy of the wood, was carried down to the river at night and began to ferry people across at the rate of ‘thirty armed men at a time…the horses swimming and tied to the poop’. Most of the armed men had been ferried over by daybreak.
Forty soldiers remained behind on the Redwood bank, in ambush, to protect the women and the baggage. Unaware of the armed guard, Donogh MacEgan attacked at this point, killing horseboys and driving ‘the terror-stricken women into the river’. The soldiers sprang out of hiding and killed Donogh, along with fifteen of his men. It would take enormous charity to regret the Sheriff’s fate. Commentators, including the Four Masters, all lament the shame that had fallen on the MacEgans through Donogh’s folly.
Crowds of hostile locals had gathered on both banks by then. As the rearguard was brought over in haste after the Sheriff’s death, the boat was swamped. Fortunately they were close to the bank and able to float it again. It is difficult to imagine heaving that weight out of the water to empty it. Presumably they held off the mob with the threat of musket fire, but it must have taken a miracle to keep powder dry in such conditions. In the panic, some members of the party were left behind. The account does not pursue their fate.
Crossing at the same point in a smaller currach, in January 2003, we found a very strong current, increased by a north-east wind. The river is deeper and faster now than it was in O’Sullivan’s time. A pair of west Cork oarsmen rowed our currach, one an O’Sullivan. They battled fiercely upstream in order to cut across the current and lunge at a sharp tangent for the opposite shore. A powerful effort and sharp judgement were required on each journey in order to land at the right spot, slotting the prow of the currach in between stands of reeds at the bank. Two passengers per trip were carried, and it was difficult to imagine increasing this to four. There appears to have been little rain during O’Sullivan’s journey so far, and the shallow current would have been slow-flowing. A prevailing wind, from the southwest and against the current, would also have helped.
The Boat
That such a boat could have achieved so much is nothing less than miraculous. Thirty armed soldiers is an impossible load for a makeshift craft, unless shoals of them were towed behind it. There is a hint that some of the horseboys swam the river. On reaching the opposite shore, O’Sullivan had two hundred and eighty armed men in his command. In that case, at least a dozen journeys over would have been required, and the same number back. Given the width and flow of the river, it borders on the miraculous. Or the fictional: Philip had the instincts of a novelist rather than a historian. But the timetable of the march left little room for creative tampering, and a contemporary English account confirms the horsehide boats. Certainly the marchers were transported across the river in that period of two days. Philip had a career in the Spanish navy and understood boats in detail. So too would his audience, and he gave measurements that exposed his case to scrutiny.
The O’Maddens of the Connacht bank welcomed the 2003 re-enactment with tea and sandwiches in a riverside pub. Their ancestors had greeted Donal Cam with a volley of lead in 1603. The west Cork men plundered a local village on that occasion, where they feasted on raw beans and grain, swilled down with stolen ale. The pursuit was so heated that O’Sullivan was forced to abandon wounded and exhausted men. Having leapt the widest river to gain the staunchest province, he was entitled now to expect a reprieve. Philip’s mention of beer suggests the point in heroic myth where a climax is marked by feasting. But O’Sullivan’s greatest trials were still to come.
AUGHRIM
Diverting west of the River Suck where it joins the Shannon to shape the symmetry of south Roscommon, he marched through Co. Galway. On 10 January, at the hill of Aughrim, his famished force was blocked by an army of cavalry and infantry. Drawn up to meet him were two troops of horse and five companies of foot. Bands of scavengers skulked on the sidelines. This far superior force, arrayed in battle order, was commanded by Captain Henry Malby. Second-in-command was Thomas Burke, whose brother had been knighted for bravery on the English side at Kinsale a year earlier. O’Sullivan too had distinguished himself in that battle, on the Irish side. Yet another Crown-supporting Burke – Richard – also assisted Malby in command.
The waiting soldiers were armed and armoured, fed and rested. Flaunting banners, trumpets and drums, they were an unnerving sight. The Irish vanguard scattered in appal. O’Sullivan addressed his men in one of the showpiece speeches that resound throughout the annals of Irish rhetoric. Whether he spoke as reported, or Philip added eloquence at leisure; whether it was addressed to two hundred and eighty horrified men, or simply to a clutch of officers, the speech has a backs-to-the-wall, Faith-of-our-Fathers resonance that can still move the heart four centuries later at the thought of a famished remnant facing an army of well-fed troops.
Since our desperate fortunes have left us here without means or country, wives or children to fight for, the struggle with our enemies before us now is for our bare lives; we have nothing else that we can lose …. In God’s eternal name I ask you, men, will you not rather fall gloriously in battle, avenging your blood, than die like brute cattle in a cowardly fight? Our ancestors would never seek to avoid an honourable death. Let us follow in the footsteps of our sires: there is no other salvation. See around you the country is bare of woods or bog; there is no concealment; the people of these parts offer us no aid. Roads and passes are blocked, even if we had strength to fly. Our only hope is in our own courage, and the strength of our own arms ….
A note of manic confidence then:
Remember that everywhere hitherto, enemies who attacked us were routed by the Divine Mercy. Victory is the gift of God ….
As the opposite had, in fact, been the case, he moved swiftly to conclude:
Fear not this worthless mob: they are not men of such fame as we, nor used to fight as we are ….
Versions of this punch line have resounded in the ears of soldiers down through the centuries, before and after O’Sullivan. No doubt, the Celts in their time used it against the Romans and vice versa.
Malby’s cavalry was charging even as O’Sullivan deployed his men. A second column closed on him in a pincer movement. He raced over boggy ground to gain a wooded rise. Forty musketeers protected the rear. Malby’s charging horsemen were forced to dismount in the swamp. Pikes swinging, they joined their own infantry in the attack. Meanwhile, O’Sullivan’s rearguard of musketeers was overwhelmed by the enemy column, and fo
urteen of the Irish were killed. In a sudden move, O’Sullivan flung his entire force around to confront this threat. We have seen him do that before. This defiance unnerved the enemy, who were expecting an easy rout. They may have assumed that the Irish were already in retreat. O’Sullivan’s musketeers shot down eleven, in exchange for the fourteen lost. A number of the attackers broke ranks and fled. There is a tight-lipped hint that some of O’Sullivan’s men pulled out too. It was hand-to-hand fighting then, with spears, pikes and swords: stabbing, flailing, chopping.
Immediately, the outnumbered Irish fastened on the opposing leaders in a do-or-die attack. They went straight for the top. Malby was chopped down by O’Houlihan and O’Murrough (the Four Masters claim he was killed by Donal Cam); Malby’s senior officer, Richard Burke, was hacked to death by Maurice O’Sullivan and two others, each strike described in detail. Thomas Burke was left in command. He had himself and his armour hoisted onto his horse and he rode urgently away.
It is impossible to stall such ferocity once unleashed. Fighting continued until the English army, leaderless, retreated to the nearby garrison. They were chased by the Irish – in particular, it seems, by those who had wobbled earlier and were keen now to retrieve their honour. This faction is awarded a special sting of contempt. The field was strewn with dead English and with Queen’s Irish. O’Sullivan had some of their fallen banners gathered. He scattered the rabble who were plundering his baggage under cover of the battle, and he continued northwards.
It is claimed that he lost no more than the original fourteen while a hundred of Malby’s force were killed. Such figures are rhetorical propaganda, but there is no doubt that the Battle of Aughrim, 1603, was a stunning victory for O’Sullivan. Eighty-eight years later, in 1691, during the Williamite war, another battle was to take place on the same ground. Saint-Ruth, leader of the Jacobites, on whom native Irish hopes were pinned, was decapitated by a cannon ball. Over seven thousand Jacobites were killed, and the Battle of Aughrim, 1691, became the bloodiest battle fought in Ireland.
The flush of victory was soon to fade from O’Sullivan’s column, which had not a moment’s rest after Aughrim. There were many wounded, and while the soldiers had managed to re-arm themselves from the debris of the battlefield, their defiance could only arouse greater resistance from surrounding garrisons. In order to outflank this threat, O’Sullivan carried out a twenty-mile march into the night through O’Kelly country, the beginning of an extraordinary loop to the west. His destination was Leitrim, where the rebel chieftain, O’Rourke of Breifne, still held out. Although close at hand, Breifne could be reached in safety only by a hook-shaped detour via the Curlew Mountains, which would double back into Leitrim from the west.
The next encounter is almost embarrassing in its pathos. Approaching Glinsk, a village of the MacDavitts, after a snowy night march, O’Sullivan’s men tried to pass themselves off as an English column, displaying the Aughrim banners and beating the captured drums. They must have presented a dreadful spectacle – starving, dishevelled, bloody, flaunting the stolen colours, like ghosts of the hundred slain. The wooing of Glinsk was an attempt to fool the MacDavitts and to lay hands on unprotected food. It cannot have been a spontaneous flourish, because they had obviously carried drums and banners all night through the bogs as winter closed in around them and exhausted people fell by the wayside. Maybe they hoped to be ahead of the bad news of their own arrival. The hungry locals were not fooled. With jeers rather than weapons, they drove off their starving countrymen who, the previous day, had routed a royalist army in a savage welter of blood. As if he were chasing stray animals, MacDavitt harassed them northwards, so that they could not lay their hands on a scrap of food all day.
Covering another twenty miles or so, O’Sullivan seemed to have shaken off the pursuit. The convoy stopped for the night on high ground beyond the present town of Ballinlough. As soon as the campfires had been lit on the sodden ground and bodies had sunk to rest, they realised that an attack was being prepared in the darkness behind them. Banking up the campfires, they slipped away, just as they had done in Glengarriff, eleven days earlier. Now they were little more than a handful of refugees, of whom only about sixty were capable of fighting. The flurries of snow had given way to rain so heavy that ‘they were scarcely able to bear the weight of their soaking clothes’. They became hopelessly lost in woodland during the night and covered no more than four miles. MacDavitt, who had set up the earlier ambush, caught up during the morning, and they were forced to draw up a ragged formation and drive him off.
There was a brief remission then, as if extremity had reached such a pitch that it could only relent. In the breathing space, the soldiers managed to feed themselves on the carcasses of two horses, and to bind their bare feet with scraps of rawhide. The two senior O’Sullivans again refused horseflesh, and again there is an eerie sense of dignity asserting itself and being seen to do so.
They slept that night undisturbed – hardly worth disturbing what remained of them. Afterwards, they wandered on and became scattered. It is as if they were sleepwalking, or blundering in circles on unknown ground. It has been pointed out that their perception at this stage would have been a kind of waking nightmare and that descriptions given years later would reflect that confusion. Rain and snow fell on endless muck, but the unremitting opposition of their own countrymen must have been the bitterest element of all. O’Sullivan continued his obsessive pace because if momentum were allowed to flag for a heartbeat, there might be no moving on again. The pace did not allow opposition to build ahead of him; no sooner had word reached his enemies of his approach than he was looming out of the rain and lurching past.
CO. ROSCOMMON
On the twelfth night of the march, O’Sullivan found himself with only a dozen men on a wooded hillside. Groups and individuals stumbled along behind in the darkness, some doomed to death as a result, others to wander further and further astray. The Connacht mercenaries, buannachta, must have melted homewards by then – those who had survived. One can only hope that they were paid. Soldiers were not hired individually, but delivered by their own leaders, operating like military subcontractors.
A large bonfire was lit on the hillside as a signal to the stragglers. It drew in some locals as well. For once, they were friendly. They even brought a present of food to O’Sullivan – a token probably, as there is no sense of riotous feasting. The locals also spread a story to the garrison that the fire had been lit by woodcutters. The garrison was based at Boyle, just south of Lough Key, blocking the shortest route to Leitrim. O’Sullivan remained where he was that day. Then, to outflank the military, he forced a night march through the Curlew Mountains and north of Lough Arrow, adding a final loop to the journey.
Today, the motorway to Sligo skirts the Curlews in a disdainful stride that reduces this once-crucial barrier between Connacht and Ulster to an undulation, a drop in the gears from fifth to fourth. Above the road, there is a striking sculpture in ragged steel of a chieftain on horseback – an Irish Apache – that gives a flash of what the landscape may once have been. On the margin of the European road, the mounted warrior represents an Irish triumph at the Battle of the Curlews, 1599, when the Nine Years’ War was going well. The wind whistles through the steel; rust gathers like dried blood. However battered it becomes, it cannot quite reflect O’Sullivan’s convoy passing by. They were without horses by then.
Fifteen miles remained to the castle of O’Rourke of Breifne, now Leitrim village on the banks of the Shannon. The account focuses on the venerable chieftain, O’Conor Kerry, whose stamina so far had been inspiring. After the halt of the previous day, his legs refused to carry him. They were lacerated with wounds, encrusted with sores and blisters. He addressed his feet with a tragicomic speech, straight from Cervantes or a subplot of Shakespeare, and hammered them against the ground to show them who was boss. Then he got up and marched with the rest.
CO. LEITRIM
In that confused terrain, a guide mysteriously appeare
d. He is described as a cross between a druid and an angel. The image probably embodies the amazement of the wanderers at any kind of assistance, compounded years later by the imagination of a young listener in a different culture. They were in friendly territory now, within the ambit of O’Rourke of Breifne. At the last moment, a rescuer appeared, and the episode is presented in the surreal glow of that perception. That is to be kind to Philip O’Sullivan, whose work was unfortunately prone to excesses, both of gullibility and of guile. It was not beyond him to conjure divine intervention.
During the night, they passed through the village of Knockvicar where they were able to warm themselves and even buy some food. By a strange irony, the only venue on the 2003 march which failed, by an oversight, to welcome the walkers was the same Knockvicar. Perhaps once was enough to rise to the occasion. A blind old nag was procured, its spine a rack of bones, and O’Conor Kerry was mounted upon him ‘without bridle or saddle’ – an image closer to the truth at that stage than the defiant warrior bone-welded to his horse on the rim of the Curlews just behind.
In the morning, the guide pointed out O’Rourke’s castle in the distance and left with two hundred gold pieces O’Sullivan had given him without being asked. So, the real and terrible journey concluded, like a fable, with symbols of generosity and trust. In Philip’s words:
They reached Leitrim fort about eleven o’clock, being then reduced to 35, of whom 18 were armed…and one was a woman …. Some followed in twos and threes. I am astonished that Dermot O’Sullivan, my father, an old man near 70, and the woman of delicate sex, were able to go through these toils, which youths in the flower of age and height of their strength were unable to endure. O’Rourke received O’Sullivan with most honourable hospitality, giving directions to have his sick cured, and all necessaries supplied …. And he would have succoured O’Sullivan had he delayed longer there.
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