Book Review: a Spanish captain's account of 1500s Ireland
Fighting between the English fleet and the Spanish Armada during the abortive attempt by Spain to invade England in 1588.
- Captain Francisco de Cuéllar: The Armada, Ireland and the Wars of the Spanish Monarchy, 1578-1606
- Francis Kelly
- Four Courts Press, €31.50
- Review: David Kernek
It's September 1588 and what remains of the ill-starred Spanish Armada – possibly 30 ships – having been pursued up the North Sea by Francis Drake’s navy, is making for the Atlantic route home. Lashed by fierce gales, set back by navigation errors and with crews unfamiliar with these northern seas, the squadrons are in severe distress. They are leaking heavily, masts and rigging are damaged, and most of them have lost anchors. An exceptionally wild south-west gale brings a humiliating end to seven hard weeks at sea; day by day, the forlorn fleet now estimated at 17 to 24 ships carrying 6,000 men, makes landfall in Ireland.
England’s coastal settlements in Ireland are alarmed; the news Dublin gets from London is wrong. It’s that the Armada had triumphed in the English Channel, England’s south coast had been taken, and Spain was on its way to finish off Elizabeth’s garrisons in Ireland. But English angst about the arrival of disciplined Spanish formations was shortlived as they saw enemy ships being wrecked on rocks and dragged by the tides into well-defended bays along 300 miles coastline.
The ocean took most of the Spaniards, and garrison hangmen took most of the rest. One hundred or so survived, weak and bloodied, washed up on beaches. One of them, in Streedagh, Co. Sligo, was Francisco de Cuéllar, a senior military officer who’d seen service in Portugal, Brazil and the Azores and who was now being nursed, sheltered, fed and clothed by the ‘savages’ who’d carried him off to their mountain hide-aways.
Francis Kelly – awarded a PhD from University College Cork for his thesis about the captain’s career – explains in this story of de Cuéllar’s life that to gentlemen of standing in Spain, all of the natives in their burgeoning empire were customarily described as ‘savages’, even those who’d mastered church Latin.
Captain de Cuéllar wrote himself into Ireland’s history with his Carta, a vibrant 11,000-word account – which is included in full as an annex in this book – of his seven months with the Gaelic Irish of the north-west before he was helped to reach the Spanish-controlled Low Countries via Scotland.
“The custom of these savages,” de Cuéllar writes, “is to live as the brute beasts among the mountains, which are very rugged in that part of Ireland where we lost ourselves. They live in huts made of straw. The men are all large bodied, and of handsome features and limbs; and as active as the roe-deer. They do not eat oftener than once a day, and this is at night; and that which they usually eat is butter with oaten bread. They drink sour milk, for they have no other drink; they don't drink water, although it is the best in the world. On feast days they eat some flesh half-cooked, without bread or salt, as that is their custom. They clothe themselves, according to their habit, with tight trousers and short loose coats of very coarse goat's hair. They cover themselves with blankets, and wear their hair down to their eyes. They carry on perpetual war with the English, who here keep garrison for the Queen.”
The captain’s eye is taken by the ‘savage’ women, before going on to acknowledge the soul-saving work of Catholic missionaries. ‘Most of the women are very beautiful, but badly dressed … They do not wear more than a chemise, and a blanket, with which they cover themselves, and a linen cloth, much doubled, over the head, and tied in front. They are great workers and housekeepers, after their fashion.
"These people call themselves Christians. Mass is said among them, and regulated according to the orders of the Church of Rome. The great majority of their churches, monasteries, and hermitages, have been demolished by the hands of the English, who are in garrison, and of those natives who have joined them, and are as bad as they. In short, in this kingdom there is neither justice nor right, and everyone does what he pleases.’
Having trawled through previously unpublished papers in Spanish and Belgian archives – most of them about a variety of disciplinary disputes and pleas for mounting salary arrears – Francis recounts for the first time de Cuéllar's entire 28-year career in Spain’s navy and army from its outset in Portugal and Central and South America, through the Armada’s doomed ‘Enterprise of England’ to its conclusion in 1606 after Spanish campaigns in the Netherlands, France and Italy.
His service began as a young recruit, possibly in his late teens, with the Indies Guard, a squadron tasked with protecting Spain’s Caribbean colonies and the growing empire’s shipping routes to and from New Span (Mexico) and what is now Colombia and Venezuela. Spain was not yet at war with England, but its Caribbean settlements and treasure ships were the pray of Elizabeth’s licensed pirates. After promotion to a captaincy – giving him command of ships and infantry – and Spain’s calamity in the English Channel, de Cuéllar survived combat here and there in the Low Countries, France and Italy as Spain found itself threatened by a triple alliance comprising France, England and the Dutch. His career was to end with a relatively uneventful last escort mission to South America, after which commissions for de Cuéllar came there none.
His thinking at this stage of his life cannot be known. Kelly wonders if he was disillusioned, or tired of life with the military – one recognized by the Indies Council as that of a ‘very good soldier of merit, skill and experience’ – that had seemingly left him penniless and apparently without a life beyond the empire’s service. The archives tell us only that the captain made an application for a licence to settle in the Indies – and, pleading penury, for money to cover the cost of the journey – which after a leisurely bureaucratic deliberation was approved. The very last heard of him was in a letter sent by the king in Madrid to the viceroy of New Spain, in which de Cuéllar was given permission to move to the colony and recommended for “positions and offices of my service commensurate with his quality, sufficiency and merits…”.
Kelly assumes – but cannot know – the captain went to New Spain, hopes he might have found a post commensurate with his quality, sufficiency and merits…’, and might have found contentment after a final Atlantic voyage. And he suggests the study of the captain’s career provides a picture of the “nitty-gritty of life in the military at the end of the 16th century”.
He concludes his meticulously detailed study – not only of the captain’s life but also of Spain’s role in the geo-politics of 16th century Europe – by recalling the words of General Douglas MacArthur when dismissed in 1951 as US commander in Korea. “I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And like the old soldier of that ballad I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.”
Kelly takes that as a fair verdict on de Cuéllar’s contribution to the defence of Spanish interests during an exceptionally turbulent period in Europe’s history. “ … His largely successful career as a professional soldier slowly receded into obscurity,” adding that his greatest achievement, perhaps, was that he lived to tell the tale … or, at least, the Irish part of it.
