by Neil Hanson
Later that day, 18 August, the wind swung north-easterly and the San Martin’s pilots estimated that the Armada ships had made enough ground to northward to allow them to change course to the west-south-west, clearing Fair Isle and the Orkneys, and steering clear of the ferocious tidal rips, whirlpools and boiling surf around the Western Isles that made these some of the most treacherous waters in the world. They could do nothing to avoid the mists and fogs that cloaked the sea for days on end, shrouding the black rocks that might at any moment send their ships to their doom. They saw the sun little by day, and the phosphorescence of the waves and the spectacle of the Northern Lights at night filled them as much with superstitious terror as awe, for fear that they too were harbingers of some dread fate awaiting them. Even with a strong wind at their sterns most of the way, it had taken them ten days to round the north of Scotland from the Banks of Zeeland. It was a pitiful rate of progress, barely fifty miles a day, their ships’ poor sailing qualities made even worse by leaks and holes, damaged masts and missing sails, and the accumulations of weed and barnacles on their hulls after months at sea.
As they cleared the Scottish mainland, Medina-Sidonia summoned a council of war near an island “off the north part of Scotland, where they stayed not, nor had any relief,” and called in Pedro Coco Calderon, an officer aboard the San Salvador and an expert navigator with experience of sailing these waters. His advice was to keep well to the west and make directly for Spain in order to avoid all risk of coming to grief on the treacherous Irish coast. Diego Flores de Valdes again disagreed, arguing that only by taking the most direct route—due south, close to the Irish coast—could they hope to reach Spain alive. The inhabitants of Ireland and the Western Isles of Scotland were Catholics who traded regularly with Spain and would provide food and fresh water. To make for Spain by the route Calderon had suggested would risk the death of everyone from starvation.
Backed by the pilots of the San Martin, Calderon’s argument won the day and Medina-Sidonia ordered all his captains to take the western route, but “haste themselves to the first place they could get to of the coast of Spain or Portugal, for that they were in such great distress through the great want of victuals.” He also sent off Don Balthasar de Zuniga in a fast pinnace, to give Philip the bitter news of the Armada’s defeat; Medina-Sidonia did not attempt to disguise it as anything else. “This Armada was so completely crippled and scattered that my first duty to Your Majesty seemed to save it, even at the risk which we are running undertaking this voyage, which is long and in such high latitudes. Ammunition and the best of our vessels were lacking and experience had shown how little we could depend upon the ships that remained, the Queen’s fleet being so superior to ours in this sort of fighting, in consequence of the strength of their artillery and the fast sailing of their ships . . . We have . . . over 3,000 sick without counting the wounded, who are numerous on the fleet.” Medina-Sidonia also asked Philip to begin preparations to feed and house the returning men but in the end de Zuniga was so much delayed by storms that he arrived back in Spain no sooner than the first ships of the returning Armada.
Day after day, huge Atlantic seas pounded them, and their progress was now even slower as they tacked into the wind through frequent showers and rainstorms. The gales drove some ships so far north that they were within fifty miles of the coast of Iceland. As the famines following poor summer harvests and the “Frost Fairs” held for weeks on end on the frozen surface of the Thames clearly show, the climate during the “Little Ice Age” that lasted from the mid-sixteenth century to the eighteenth century was generally much colder than it is today, exacerbating severe weather conditions and storms. At those latitudes, even in late August, the Spaniards found themselves facing raw and bitterly cold conditions. The men of the Mediterranean squadrons in particular were suffering badly. Every labour was made harder by the cold, hunger, thirst and sickness, and the numbing knowledge of defeat.2
The seamen were malnourished and bone-weary from days of unceasing work and nights of gut-gnawing tension, their faces grey and lined and their calloused hands bruised, bloodied and torn by sea-cuts from hauling on sodden, fraying ropes. But still they were forced aloft, reefing and furling sails as the winds again strengthened, patching torn canvas and securing flying ropes. Salt caked the masts and rigging like hoar-frost and the wind keening over the sullen ocean sent skeins of spume and spray snaking through the air, drenching anyone above decks. The bows bucked and plunged in the heavy swell and great grey-green waves cascaded over them and swirled away through the scuppers.
Belowdecks the guncrews looked like creatures from hell, their faces blackened by powder smoke and their skin pitted with burns from particles of spent but still red-hot powder. The men’s quarters were a reeking mess, among which sprawled the sick and wounded and the few able-bodied men who could be spared from manning the ship, their faces devilish in the flickering glare of torches. They lay in semi-darkness, wrapped in sodden, mildewing blankets, and surrounded by filth and the stench of decay and death. Damp and condensation penetrated every corner and no man, not even the greatest officer or the most noble lord, had dry clothes to wear. The firewood was sodden, the stoves extinguished by waves breaking over the hatches or water leaking through the planking, and the pitiful, tainted scraps of food that were all that remained were eaten cold. Men could barely sleep for the incessant dull pounding of the waves battering against the hull, counterpointed by the rheumy, phlegm-ridden wheeze, suck and cough of the pumps. Manned night and day, their endless, dirge-like rhythm as they spilled constant spurts of foul bilgewater over the side still barely kept pace with the seawater seeping through the battered hulls.
By Sunday, 21 August, the pilots estimated that the Armada had reached 58° N, some ninety leagues to the north-west of the Galway coast. As he prepared to alter course again to make the run for home, Medina-Sidonia made a final attempt to gather his Armada around him and take a muster of his men. Malnutrition and disease, exacerbated by the cold and damp, were taking a fearsome toll of his already depleted crews. More than 3,000 men were sick and the water situation had grown markedly worse; either the supplies were leaking away or the rations were not being enforced. His men grew fewer and weaker with every passing day. In the San Juan de Portugal alone, there were “200 dead, twenty slain in the fight with the Queen’s ships, the rest dead of the sickness.” “There died four or five every day of hunger and thirst, and yet this ship was one of the best furnished for victuals,” so much so that some of the crewmen of other, less well-supplied ships were transferred to it. The San Juan de Sicilia was “so much damaged that not a span of her sails was serviceable,” and Medina-Sidonia’s flagship, the San Martin, was in an even more desperate plight. “The admiral’s mast [was] so weakened by the shot through it that they dare not bear the sails they might to take them to Spain. The best that be in the admiral’s ship are scarce able to stand . . . if they tarry where they are any time, they will all perish.”3
The Armada ships kept trying to battle towards the south-west, but the wind blew unrelentingly from that quarter, often reaching storm force, and the fleet was then “severed by a great storm which held from four of the clock in the afternoon of one day to ten in the morning of the next,” and another “great storm with a mist” ten days after that further scattered the remnants of the Armada. By Saturday 3 September, the pilots were again estimating the San Martin to be at 58° N and a little to the east of the position of a fortnight before. Over those fourteen days another seventeen ships had disappeared, including the San Juan, two of the remaining galleasses, and de Leiva’s great carrack, the Rata Santa Maria Encoronada. During that Saturday the wind at last veered, backing round to the north-east. Medina-Sidonia sent off another pinnace with an updated report for Philip as the remnants of the Armada sailed for home.
While the flagship led its diminishing retinue of ships on the long sweep through the Atlantic, other commanders found themselves much closer to the Irish coast. Calderon i
n the San Salvador was driven by gales near to land but followed his own advice to Medina-Sidonia by tacking away into deeper waters well to the west before making course for home. “It is believed the rest of the Armada will have done the same. If not they will certainly have lost some of the ships, as the coast is rough, the sea heavy and the winds strong from the seaward.” Other captains were less prudent or less fortunate, their ships “sore bruised and the men much weakened and almost starved,” and, as Calderon had predicted, many came to grief on the coast. Storms in August and September are rarely dangerous to seaworthy ships, and significantly, though the English fleet was pounded by gales severe enough to damage sails, rigging and yards, no ships were lost and there are no accounts of other ships being sunk in the North or Irish Seas or the North Atlantic during this period. The only corroboration, if such it is, of the extreme violence of the weather comes from a legend that the entire village of Singleton Thorp on the Fylde coast in Lancashire was swallowed by the sea in the summer of 1588, never to reappear.4
The Armada ships approaching the unforgiving coasts of Western Ireland had been rendered barely navigable by English gunfire, and their crews were so depleted and weakened by battlefield fatalities, casualties, starvation and disease that they could barely work them. They had few or no anchors, having cut them loose in the panic-stricken flight from the fireships at Gravelines, their maps were inaccurate, placing the Irish coast well to the east of its actual position, their navigation was poor, they lacked pilots familiar with the waters and most were driven towards the coasts by relentless westerly gales. Others sought the coast deliberately, disobeying Medina-Sidonia’s orders in their desperate need for food and water, and one or two commanders may even have harboured ambitions of salvaging something from the defeat of the Armada by establishing a base on the Irish coast from which a fresh invasion of England could be attempted. Whatever the causes that brought them to the Irish coast “like flocks of starlings,” for the vast majority of the officers and men those great grey cliffs and wind-lashed strands were the last lands they were ever to sight.
The gales drove them shorewards over boiling seas with salt spray hanging in the air and ropes of spume tangling with the rigging, then torn away by the shrieking wind. Somewhere ahead, where sea and sky seemed to merge into each other in a maelstrom of wind and water, were the black rocks on which the breakers thundered in a long sullen roar that grew in volume until it drowned every other sound. One by one, their ships were wrecked “with all the chivalry and flower of the Armada.” Their bleached bones are buried beneath the sea-washed dunes and the sodden Irish turf, or lie at the bottom of the sea; even today, human bones are still sometimes exposed by storms. “God send that the reader may be able to imagine some small part of what it was like, for after all, there is a great gulf between those who suffer and those who observe suffering from afar.”
There had been initial confusion in Ireland over the first sightings of ships off the north and west coasts. “News of strange ships; whether they be 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 advertise otherwise than by guess.” But by 14 September they had been identified as Armada ships and the first ones had been wrecked. It took four days for even the fastest messenger to carry news from the west coast to Dublin, and it was 20 September before reports were dispatched to London. “On Thursday last, and since that time, there arrived first a bark which wrecked at the Bay of Tralee, another great ship being also now near that place; after that, two great ships and one frigate at the Blaskets in the Sound there, seven other sail in the Shannon . . . at the Lupus [Loop] Head, four great ships, and toward the Bay of Galway, four great ships more. It is thought that the rest of that fleet wherein the Duke was, which were severed by a late tempest, are also about some other part of this land . . . The people in these parts are for the most part dangerously affected towards the Spaniards, but thanks be to God, that their power by Her Majesty’s good means, is shorter than it has been and the Spaniards’ forces are so much weakened . . . there is no great doubt had here of any hurt that may grow thereby.”
Parted from the Armada by the winds and heavy seas, de Leiva’s Rata Encoronada had led a group of ships, including the San Juan de Portugal, the San Juan Bautista, the Santa Maria de la Rosa and three hulks, towards the west coast seeking water, food and shelter to carry out repairs. De Leiva’s ship then lost touch with the rest, but Recalde knew the coast from his voyage during the doomed attempt to initiate a rising at Smerwick. Roused from his sickbed one last time—“after such time as the fight was at Calais [he] came not out of his bed till . . . the morning that they came upon this shore in Ireland”—he helped to guide the San Juan de Portugal through a perilous narrow gap in the breakers, “an entrance between low rocks about as wide as the length of a ship,” to an anchorage in the lee of Great Blasket Island in Dingle Bay. Marcos de Arambaru’s San Juan Bautista, the vice-flagship of the squadron of Castile, and the hospital ship San Pedro el Mayor followed his lead and also reached the relative safety of the bay. There they aimed to take on water and food, if any were to be had, for their men were “sick, destitute of victual, and in great extremity . . . they are dying daily in great numbers and being thrown into the sea.” “The ship had been shot through fourteen or fifteen times, her mainmast so beaten with shot as she durst not bear her full sail, and now not sixty mariners left in her, and many of them so sick that they lie down, and the residue so weak that they were not able to do any good service, and there are daily cast over the board out of that ship five or six of the company.”5
They had a near-miraculous escape from wrecking when surprised by a ferocious storm, though Recalde’s ship dragged its anchor and was driven into the San Juan Bautista, damaging her stern lantern and rigging. Another ship was driven into the bay by the same storm, “all her sails torn to ribbons except the foresail,” but also dragged her anchor and was driven onto a rock “and in an instant we saw she was going to the bottom, with not a soul escaping.” Yet another hulk arrived in the bay later, her masts bare as winter trees and so badly damaged that she was abandoned and the surviving crew transferred to the San Juan Bautista. Don Pedro Pacheco’s Santa Maria de la Rosa went down in the same storm after striking Stromboli Rock, yet as the moment of their death approached, the soldiers and mariners aboard still found time to feud with each other. Francisco de Manona, pilot aboard the ship, was accused of trying to run aground “by treason,” and even as the storm was driving them towards the rocks he was murdered by one of the military captains. Every man aboard was drowned, “not a soul escaping,” except for a Genoese seaman who was captured and interrogated by the English soldiers “waiting like hoodie crows on the tops of the dark cliffs,” and in his terror or desperation to please his captors, he gave increasingly wild accounts of the nobles aboard his ship. It availed him nothing; once his interrogation was complete, he was executed. A party of eight men sent out as scouts by Recalde suffered the same fate.
The other three ships remained in Dingle Bay for thirteen days, and every day the bodies of dead seamen were cast overboard and washed up on the shore by the surf. When the wind at last relented, they put to sea again. Recalde’s San Juan eventually reached Corunna on 7 October, and de Arambaru sailed into Santander a week later, but the leaking hospital ship, San Pedro el Mayor, failed to return. Realizing that he would never make Spain, the captain set a course for the Channel, hoping to reach a French port. Instead he was driven aground on Bolt Tail on the Devon coast on 7 November 1588. Some of the crew and a few of the wounded were saved, but many more perished in the surf. To the disappointment of George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, who hurried to the scene, the reports of great treasure aboard and noblemen who could command a huge ransom proved false. “Being at Plymouth to water, I heard of a hulk beaten by foul weather . . . She was one of the Spanish fleet and it was reported the Duke [of Medina-Sidonia] was in her and great store of
treasure . . . we found no such thing.” 6
The galleass Zuniga had anchored near Liscannor Castle on the Irish coast to mend her damaged rudder. “We were in such dire need of food that nearly 80 of our soldiers and convicts died of hunger and thirst but . . . the inhabitants were rustic savages devoted to England” and refused to allow them “to obtain water; nor would they sell us food. By necessity, we took up arms and obtained supplies by force.” Some of the crew were captured and executed and a copy of Medina-Sidonia’s orders for the return voyage to Spain carried by one of them fell into English hands, but the galleass put to sea again on 23 September. Battered and leaking after another gale, and with the rudder once more broken, she was forced to limp into Le Havre, passing the grounded wreck of the Santa Ana that had parted from the Armada two months previously. Only a fortnight before the Zuniga’s arrival, a group of four English ships had sailed into Le Havre to attack the Santa Ana, determined to destroy any Spanish ship that might yet be salvaged and used in a fresh assault upon England, but they had been driven off by the guns of the castle.
The Zuniga was “storm-beaten, with the rudder and spars broken and the ship in a sinking state . . . without a bit of food or a drop of water; a day later and they would all have perished of famine.” “The stores on board were all damaged and rotten and being useless, have been thrown into the sea.” As soon as the galleass came to anchor, the convicts at the oars seized their opportunity to make a dash for freedom. The Frenchmen among them found a sympathetic welcome from their compatriots and they were allowed to make good their escape, but “the rest were detained with great trouble and they are under strong guard.” However, even “the best of guard” proved insufficient “for so many people come on board to see the galleass that they cannot all be watched and they give files to the convicts,” who used them to cut through their fetters and escape. “The Governor himself is beating them off with a stick every day; and if it were not for this, not a galley slave would be left. The Governor has a pair of sentries night and day to prevent any Frenchman going on the ship. Two convicts escaped this morning and I reported to the Governor that the guard at the town gate had aided them to get away. He at once went in person and gave the corporal of the guard twenty blows with his crutch, and . . . sent the corporal to seek the convicts . . . He brought them both back this afternoon, finely tricked out in French clothes. The Governor then issued an order that . . . any person who sheltered or aided a convict should be chained in the place of the man who escaped. God grant that this may be effectual. I have had new fetters made and put them on double.”