Great loss of life.
Three large ships were wrecked on the seaboard immediately to the north of Sligo Bay. A survivor recorded their failure to double the ‘Cabo di Clara,’ owing to a head wind. Erris Head was probably the actual promontory, and the Spaniards must have thought it was Cape Clear. Their ignorance of the coast is evident, and it seems certain that they mistook the north-west corner of Connaught for the south-west corner of Munster. Cape Clear was well known by name, and they would have been in no danger after doubling it. As it was, the west coast was a trap into which they drifted helplessly. Even of those who succeeded in rounding the Mullet we have seen that few escaped. Of the three who were lost near Sligo, one was the ‘San Juan de Sicilia,’ carrying Don Diego Enriquez, son of the Viceroy of New Spain and an officer of high rank. They anchored half a league from shore. For four days the weather was thick, and on the fifth a stiff nor’-wester drove them all aground. The best anchors lay off Calais, and there was no chance of working her off shore, for sails and rigging were injured by the English shot. The beach was of fine sand, but there were rocks outside, and in one hour the three ships, badly fastened in the best of times, and kept afloat only by frequent caulking, had completely broken up. Don Diego, foreseeing this, got into a decked boat with the Count of Villafranca’s son, two Portuguese gentlemen, and more than 16,000 ducats in money and jewels, and ordered the hatches to be battened down. With a proper crew she might have reached land safely, but more than seventy despairing wretches flung themselves into her, and the first great wave swept them all into the sea. The imprisoned hidalgos had no control over the boat, which was driven on to the beach bottom upwards. More than thirty-six hours later the natives came to rifle her, and dragged out the bodies. Three were dead, and Don Diego expired immediately after his release. According to the Spanish account more than 1,000 were drowned altogether, and less than 300 escaped, and this agrees pretty well with what we learn from English sources. ‘At my late being at Sligo,’ says Fenton, ‘I numbered in one strand of less than five miles in length above 1,100 dead corpses of men which the sea had driven upon the shore, and, as the country people told me, the like was in other places, though not of like number.’[173]
The survivors are stripped and robbed by the Irish,
who rejoice over their prey.
But some are more humane.
The smallest of the three ships was that which carried Don Martin de Aranda, who acted as judge-advocate-general or provost-marshal to the Armada, and who had been ordered by the Duke of Medina Sidonia to hang Don Cristobal de Avila and Captain Francisco de Cuellar for leaving their places in the line. The first was actually hanged, and carried round the fleet at the yard-arm of a despatch boat to encourage the rest. Cuellar was spared at the provost-marshal’s earnest request, and with him he remained until the loss of the ship. He stood on the poop to the last, whence he saw hundreds perish and a few reach the shore astride on barrels and beams, to be murdered in many cases, and stripped in all, by ‘200 savages and other enemies,’ who skipped and danced with joy at the disaster which brought them plunder. Don Martin de Aranda came to Cuellar in tears, both sewed coin into their clothes and after some struggles found themselves together upon the floating cover of a hatchway. Covered with blood and injured in both legs, Cuellar was washed ashore, but Don Martin was drowned. ‘May God pardon him,’ says the survivor, and perhaps he needed pardon, for it was he who had signed the order to kill all the French prisoners after the fight at Terceiras. Unobserved by the wreckers, Cuellar crawled away, stumbling over many stark naked Spanish corpses. Shivering with cold and in great pain he lay down in some rushes, where he was joined by ‘a cavalier, a very gentle boy,’ who was afterwards discovered to be a person of consequence, stripped to the skin, and in such terror that he could not even say who he was. He himself was a mere sponge full of blood and water, half-dead with pain and hunger; and in this state he had to pass the night. Two armed natives who chanced to pass took pity on them, covered them with rushes and grass which they cut for the purpose, and then went off to take their part in the wrecking. Green as the covering was, it probably saved Cuellar’s life, but at daybreak he found, to his great sorrow, that the poor, gentle lad was dead.[174]
Adventures of Francisco de Cuellar.
A devout damsel.
Slowly and painfully Cuellar made his way to what he calls a monastery, probably the round tower and church of Drumcliff, which is about five miles from the scene of the shipwreck. He found no living friends in this ancient foundation of St. Columba, but only the bodies of twelve Spaniards, hanged ‘by the Lutheran English’ to the window gratings inside the church. An old woman, who was driving her cows away for fear of the soldiers, advised him to go back to the sea, where he was joined by two naked Spaniards. Miserable as they were, they picked out the corpse of Don Diego from among more than 400, and buried him in a hole dug in the sand, ‘with another much-honoured captain, a great friend of mine.’ Two hundred savages came to see what they were doing, and they explained by signs that they were saving their brethren from the wolves and crows, which had already begun their ghastly work. As they were looking for any chance biscuits which the sea might have cast up four natives proposed to strip Cuellar, who alone had some clothes, but another of higher rank protected him. While on his way to this friendly partisan’s village, he met two armed young men, an Englishman and a Frenchman, and a ‘most extremely beautiful’ girl of twenty, who prevented the Englishman from killing, but not from stripping, the wretched Spaniard. A gold chain worth 1,000 reals was found round his neck, and forty-five ducats sewn up in his doublet, being two months’ pay received before leaving Corunna. He protested that he was only a poor soldier, but it was nevertheless proposed to detain him as worth ransom. Cuellar records, with some complacency, that the girl pitied him much, and begged them to return his clothes and to do him no more harm. His doublet was restored, but not his shirt, nor a relic of great repute which he had brought from Lisbon, and 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 Mahomet was.’ A boy was ordered to take him to a hut, to put a plaster of herbs on his wound, and to give him milk, butter, and oatmeal cake.[175]