Page:Royalnavyhistory01clow.djvu/658

 lost in Glennagiveny Bay, near Inishowen Head, and again De Leyva barely escaped with his life, only to lose it a little later in the Girona. The N. S. de la Rosa went to pieces among the Blaskets. The San Marcos, the San Juan, of the squadron of Diego Flores, the Trinidad Valencera, and the Falcon Blanco Mediano, also left their bones in Ireland. And the San Pedro Mayor, after having escaped the perils of Scotland and Ireland, lost her way in the mouth of the Channel, and met her end in Bigbury Bay, Devonshire. These are about all that can be identified, but they are by no means all that perished. Writing on October 1st, to Walsyngham, Sir Richard Bingham, Governor of Connaught, said: —

"After the Spanish fleet had doubled Scotland and were in their course homewards, they were by contrary weather driven upon the several parts of this province and wrecked, as it were, by even portions, 3 ships in every of the 4 several counties bordering upon the sea coasts, viz., in Sligo, Mayo, Galway, and Thomond. So that 12 ships perished, that all we know of, on the rocks and sands by the shore side, and some or 4 besides to seaboard of the out isles, which presently sank, both men and ships, in the night time. And so can I say, by good estimation, that 6 or 7000 men have been cast away on these coasts, save some 1000 of them which escaped to land in several places where their ships fell, which sithence were all put to the sword."

The cruelties practised on the shipwrecked Spaniards, whose miserable situation should have given them a claim to protection, were as bad as any practised by Alva in the Low Countries. There were other wrecks, both in Munster and in Ulster. The ships must have been in terrible straits for lack of provisions, and especially of water. The San Juan, flagship of Juan Martinez de Recalde, seems to have landed a party at Dingle and to have obtained water by force. A prisoner, taken in a skirmish there, said, when examined, that in the San Juan three or four men a day had died of hunger or thirst, although she was one of the best furnished ships in the Armada; and that men had been dying daily of sickness. Another prisoner averred that two hundred persons in the San Juan had died.

Of the one hundred and twenty-eight or one hundred and