Savages

A few weeks ago I picked up a couple of 'Folio' books from somewhere, possibly the Raynes Park platform library, one about Venice and the other about the Spanish Armada, or as they called it, The Great Enterprise. This last being a collection of documents selected and edited by one Stephen Underwood. Not usually a great fan of Folio, but these two were nicely enough produced, with a selection of pictures, so they were picked up.

Both have become books that I read in the gaps between doing something else, perhaps during the advertisement breaks on ITV3. And the reason for the present post is the last document in the Armada book, a long letter written by one Francisco de Cuellar to a friend in Spain, on arrival in the Spanish Netherlands in 1589, after a long and dangerous journey starting from shipwreck in Sligo, on the north western coast of what is now Eire.

I have not found out anything about the provenance of the letter itself or of its translation, but I have been rather struck by the indigenous inhabitants of Ireland being consistently described as savages, with behaviour to match, with that of the English garrisons scattered about the place not being much better. Much talk of the savages doing this and the savages doing that.

It seems that three large galleons were driven onto the shore in a storm and broke up, with two thirds of the 1,000 or so people on them being drowned on arrival and with most of the remainder being stripped naked and badly bashed about, if not killed, by the hordes of savages lined up to watch. Anything they had on or had on them - this appearing to include a fair amount of gold coin sewn into clothes and jewellery - was stolen. A proceeding perhaps understandable in a poor part of the country, well before the invention of the potato, well beyond the Pale. A part of the country which still looks a bit wet and wild in Street View. With this Cuellar living to tell the tale.

Helped along by the odd bandit, the odd priest and the odd lady. He mentions the beauty of the local ladies several times - along with their rather rudimentary sense of dress and manner.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Cuellar. Wikipedia knows all about the chap.