The vagaries of Irish salvage law meant that most of the finds could not be analysed in The Spanish Armada, published in 1988 by the underwater archaeologist Colin Martin and the historian Geoffrey Parker. We found ourselves driven ashore on a beach of very fine sand.’ Within an hour, ‘all three ships were smashed to pieces.’ Nearly four hundred years later, the wrecks were discovered by divers armed with depth sounders and proton magnetometers.
‘The cables could not hold and the sails could not be set. It shot out of the north-west ‘with the waves reaching the sky’. ‘A great gale hit us broadside on,’ Francisco de Cuéllar recalled. They had lost contact with their fleet after rounding Scotland and had no charts to guide them along the wild Atlantic way. One was missing its spritsail and foretopsail. They were riddled with shot, having been raked by English guns the previous month.
On 21 September 1588, three ships from the Levant squadron of the Spanish Armada were anchored a few miles offshore. It’s a place where men and their machines seem small. Out to sea reefs produce mountainous waves. It lies in the shadow of Benbulben, a plateau formed by Ice Age glaciers that is full of the fossils of extinct marine creatures. S treedagh Strand is a long curving beach in County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland.
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