Here, perhaps, I should refer to the fact that two other translators of Cuellar's narrative—Professor O'Reilly in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, December, 1893, and Mr. Sedgwick in a small volume recently published by Mr. Elkin Mathews, of Vigo Street, London—give this passage a very different meaning to that which I attach to it, while they agree tolerably closely with each other.
Professor O'Reilly omits all mention of the mountains, and translates only the rest of the sentence, as: "Taking the northerly direction pointed out by the boy"; while Mr. Sedgwick puts it in this form: "Striking north for the mountains the boy had pointed out."
This latter reading gives the preposition (de) exactly the opposite signification to that which it usually bears.
But, apart from this, there is another and, I think, a fatal objection to the two foregoing translations of the phrase.
Both agree that the boy told Cuellar to go straight on to mountains, pointed out by him, as the place behind which O'Rourke lived. If so, these mountains could not have been situated to the north of where he was at the time, as to go from thence in anything like a northerly direction would have brought him at once into the sea, which lay to the north of him, and extended for several miles farther eastwards.
That this fact must have been apparent to both Cuellar and his guide as they went along will be recognised by those who are acquainted with the locality, which everywhere looks down upon the ocean.
There is another rather important point upon which I differ from the two gentlemen already named, who here again agree closely with each other. It relates to the position of the village in which MacClancy's retainers lived. Cuellar says it was established upon "tierra firme," which one translates as firm, the other as solid, ground. To me the context appears to indicate clearly that the expression was intended to bear its ordinary idiomatic interpretation of mainland in contradistinction to the position of the castle itself, which we are told was built in the lake.
There are several other expressions about the meaning of which we differ; but I will only refer to some of them, that are of sufficient importance, either directly or indirectly, to make it desirable that Cuellar's statement concerning them should be correctly given. I do not refer to them in any spirit of adverse criticism, but in the interests of accuracy, as regards details, in the description of an important historical event.
Both parties translate montes as mountains. This, I think, is a mistake: it should be woods. Cuellar repeatedly uses the correct word, montañas, to express mountains; so that when we find him writing montes, the natural inference is that he was referring to something of a different nature; besides, montes is frequently made use of in Spanish to denote woods.