When you wrote the lines that lead this article, Francisco de Cuellar , former captain of the San Pedro, galleon of the Castile squadron, rested in Antwerp after more than a year of hardship. It was November 4, 1589. Shortly before, he had entered Dunkirk almost naked after a Dutch warship riddled with cannon fire and sank the ship he was traveling on, a merchant ship that, together with three others, was transporting the Netherlands. Low to how many castaways from the Great Armada had managed to reach Scotland. Cuéllar's story constitutes the best and most exciting testimony of the experiences that the Spanish sailors and soldiers had to face who, after surviving the marine hecatombs on the northwestern coast of Ireland, managed to get ahead in an unknown and often hostile environment.
From Portugal to the English Channel
Little is known about Captain Cuéllar beyond his service record. Probably, although we cannot say with absolute certainty, he was born in Valladolid in 1562 into a noble family. He soon opted for the profession of arms, since, in the certificate he sent in 1585 to Antonio de Eraso, Secretary of the Indies and War of Felipe II, he recorded that "he has been a soldier of V. Mag. since the age and how long it could have been." His first campaign was that of Portugal, in 1580-1581, after which he thought of embarking for Flanders. At that time, however, he presented himself with a more propitious opportunity to climb the ladder:the expedition of Diego Flores de Valdés and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa to the southern waters of South America, which lasted from 1582 to 1584 (see "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. Tragedy in the Strait of Magellan" in Desperta Ferro Especiales XVIII ). The Council of the Indies offered him the command of an infantry company, "which he accepted although others did not want it due to the obvious dangers and jobs that were offered on that day."
Cuéllar was one of the lucky survivors of the disastrous expedition, from which, however, he returned battered and ruined. It seems that his appeals to Antonio de Eraso, and perhaps to other instances, bore fruit, for he soon entered the service of Álvaro de Bazán, Marquis of Santa Cruz, and was given command of the galleon San Pedro. With this ship, manned by ninety sailors and 184 soldiers, Cuéllar participated in the England company framed in the squad of Castile, commanded by his old acquaintance Flores de Valdés. His ship was involved in the most important battles against the English navy, especially in the last one, in Gravelines. As he recounts in the extensive account he wrote in Antwerp:“The galleon San Pedro, in which I came, received a lot of damage, with many very thick bullets that the enemy put into it from many places, and although they were later remedied as best they could being, there was still a hidden shot, so there was a lot of water there.”
Two days after the battle of Gravelines, the San Pedro broke formation without orders from her captain, who reacted when it was too late:“For my great sins, while I was resting for a little, that there were ten days that I did not sleep or stop to go to what was necessary for me, a bad man pilot that I had, without saying anything to me, set sail and left in front of the Captain about two miles, as other ships had done done, to get ready”. Cuéllar was immediately arrested and taken aboard the ship of the auditor Martín de Aranda, where he was appropriately subjected to a council martial . Cristóbal de Ávila, captain of a urca that had also broken formation, was sentenced to death and hanged, but Cuéllar was exonerated. However, he was unable to return to his ship, because then a storm broke out:“Stay in your ship in which we all went through great danger of death, because with a storm that came, it opened up so that every hour it was flooded with water and we could not exhaust it with the pumps. We had no remedy or help, but it was God's, because the Duke [Medina Sidonia] no longer appeared and the entire army was in disarray with the storm.”
Streedagh's shipwreck
The ships that suffered the storms with greater intensity were the heavy merchant ships of the Levante squadron. On September 16, three of these ships, the Catalan the Juliana, from Mataró, the Santa María de Visón, from Ragusa, and the Lavia, from Venice, where Cuéllar was embarked, anchored in Donegal Bay in search of safety. Five days later, however, the storm became so virulent that all three ships were thrown against the rocky beach at Streedagh. More than a thousand sailors and soldiers drowned there. As the catastrophe raged, a mob of Irish locals flocked to the beach to loot whatever they could. Cuéllar vividly describes the scene:
When the strong waves finished destroying the Lavia against the rocks, Cuéllar and the auditor Martín de Aranda –who had his money sewn inside his doublet and breeches–, grabbed hold of a hatch the size of a table. A wave swept the auditor, who drowned screaming. Cuéllar received a blow that left him bloodied, but he entrusted himself to the Virgin of Ontañar and managed to reach land "made a soup of water, dying of pain and hunger." Shortly thereafter, the first of the many encounters he would have with the Celtic Irish, whom he calls "savages", as they were dressed in furs and barefoot, and would remind him, perhaps, of the indigenous South Americans. Two of those men, one of them armed with a huge axe, took pity on the captain and another castaway who had joined him and hid them under a blanket of reeds.
The next morning, the pounding of cavalry hooves woke Cuéllar up. It was two hundred English soldiers from a nearby garrison who came looking for loot and slaughtering the survivors. The captain's companion had perished of cold during the night; and "there he remained in the field, with more than six hundred other bodies that the sea threw out, and they were eaten by ravens and wolves without anyone burying any of them." Bruised and practically naked, Cuellar fled inland. By day, he came across a monastery where he believed he would find help. However, he explains:“I found it depopulated and the church and saints burned, and everything destroyed, and twelve Spaniards hanged inside the church by the English Lutherans who were looking for us to finish off all of us who had escaped from the fortune of the sea. Thus began Cuéllar's adventures in Ireland, which he himself judged seem to have been taken "from some book of chivalry."
Among the Irish
Cuéllar waited two days before returning to the scene of the shipwreck in search of something to eat. There he was reunited with two other castaways. Suddenly, a large group of Irish appeared, which made Cuéllar fear for his life. However, one of the natives picked up the three Spaniards to put them safely in his town. Cuéllar, barefoot and with an open wound on one leg, lagged behind and came upon “an old savage over seventy years old and two other young men with their weapons, one English and the other French, and a young woman twenty years old, extremely beautiful in every way, that everyone went to the marina to steal.” The soldiers stabbed the captain in the right leg and robbed him. Then they took him to a neighboring cabin, where the old man and the young woman dressed his wounds, fed him milk, butter and oatmeal bread, and advised him to go to the interior mountains, where the castle was located. by Brian O'Rourke , one of the most important Gaelic noblemen in Ireland, Catholic and at war against the English.
The trip started well, as Cuéllar passed through a village whose inhabitants, one of whom spoke Latin, fed him and provided him with a horse and a guide. Later they ran into a hundred and fifty English soldiers returning from Streedagh laden with loot, but the boy who was leading Cuéllar managed to make them believe that the Spaniard was a prisoner of an English officer whom he supposedly served. Before long, however, less friendly locals frightened off the guide and beat and stripped the captain. Bruised and dressed "in some fern straw and a piece of matting", he managed to make it to a village by Lake Glencar. There he met three other Spaniards, who were also on their way to O'Rourke's lands, and an effusive moment ensued:“I told them it was Captain Cuellar; They couldn't believe it because they thought I had drowned, and they came to me and almost killed me with hugs.”
On O'Rourke lands seventy Spaniards came together castaways of the Great Army. Cuellar, with twenty others, shortly set out again for the coast, as news spread that a Spanish ship had anchored there. However, before they arrived, it was learned that the ship had returned to the sea to end up shipwrecking shortly after. Cuéllar decided to return and, after several ups and downs, ended up at Rosclogher Castle, which belonged to another Catholic Gaelic nobleman, MacClancy. There he decided to stay until he found a way out of Ireland. Thus, he says that "I spent three months as a savage like them", and he became the favorite pastime of the castle's inhabitants. As he explains:
Cuéllar outlines at this point in his story a curious ethnographic portrait about the Irish and their customs and way of life:
The presence of the Spanish among the Irish rebels did not go unnoticed by the English authorities yes Connacht's governor, Richard Bingham, sent seventeen hundred soldiers to besiege Rosclogher, whereupon MacClancy decided to flee to the mountains with his family, his retinue, and all his cattle. Cuéllar and the other Spaniards, however, were tired of fleeing:
The Spaniards were only nine, armed with six muskets, as many arquebuses and knives. However, the castle, on the shores of Lake Melvin, was surrounded by water on all sides except one, by marshy ground. The English offered Cuéllar and his men free passage to Scotland. They declined, so the attackers hanged two Spanish prisoners to intimidate them. After seventeen days of siege, however, winter took its toll with a heavy snowfall that forced the English to fall back. MacClancy was so pleased that, on his return, he offered Cuéllar the hand of his sister. But the Spanish believed that the time had come to leave, so they headed north to Derry, where Bishop Redmond O'Gallagher, incognito, for he was outlawed, sought passage to Scotland to the Spanish castaways of the Great Armada. After spending some time in hiding, recovering from his leg injury, Cuéllar took a barge that took him to Scotland.
Return and afterlife
After six months of negotiation, the Scottish authorities let the Spanish go, embarking on four merchant ships bound for Flanders. In the Dunkerque roadstead they were attacked by Dutch warships, and the ship in which Cuéllar was traveling sank. Two hundred and seventy men who had survived the wrecks of the Great Armada then perished. As for the captain, who swam to the beach with two other men, after leaving his misadventures in writing, he joined the Army of Flanders and served eight years under its flag. He participated in the relief of Paris with Alejandro Farnesio (see Desperta Ferro Historia Moderna #22:Farnese in France ) and at the sites of Laon, Corbeil, La Capelle, Châtelet, Doullens, Cambrai, Calais, Ardres and Hulst. After the Peace of Vervins with France (1598), he went to Naples in the service of the VI Count of Lemos. In 1601 and 1602 he commanded a galleon in the Fleet of the Indies. The trace of him is lost in 1604, when we know that he lived in Madrid with the salary of a reformed officer. To this day, a tourist route, The De Cuéllar Trail, recalls the captain's adventures in Ireland.
Primary sources
- Cuéllar, F. de (1885):“Letter from one who was in the English Navy and recounts the journey”, in Fernández Duro, C.:La Invincible Army , II. Madrid:Royal Academy of History, pp. 337-359.
Bibliography
- Girón Pascual, R. M. (2012):“Captain Francisco de Cuéllar before and after the day in England”, in Jiménez Estrella, A.; Lozano Navarro, J. J. (eds.):Proceedings of the XI Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Foundation for Modern History . Granada:University of Granada, p. 1051-1059.
- Stapleton, J. (2001):The Spanish Armada 1588:The Journey of Francisco de Cuéllar . Sligo:From Duellar Project Committee.