Spanish Armada Wreck At Streedagh Beach

On 21 September 1588, three damaged vessels of the Spanish Armada were blown ashore during a violent storm on Streedagh Beach in what is now County Sligo, Ireland.

The three ships were carracks, armed merchant ships.

The three ships were the La Lavia (25 guns), a Venetian merchantman and the vice-flagship; La Juliana (32 guns) a Catalan merchantman; and Santa Maria de Vison (de Biscione) (18 guns) a Ragusan merchantmen.

The ships were 3 of 28 from the Spanish Armada, part of an unsuccessful attempt to invade England, that had fled to the Irish coastline after the invasion plan collapsed in August 1588. The three ships retreated to the west coast of Ireland and were anchored about a mile offshore when a major storm began.

On 21 September, the ships’ anchor cables gave way in heavy seas. When the storm began on 17 September all three ships were already in serious trouble.All three were heavily damaged from battle in the English channel.

All three had cut their main anchors to flee the English fleet when the battle of Battle of Gravelines began.

Having no main anchors made anchoring near to shore difficult. When the ships hit the shore, they broke apart in less than hour.

Accounts differ by about 1,800 men drowned, according to an account by Captain Francisco de Cuellar, one of the few survivors.

Approximately 300 made it ashore.“ ..and not being able to weather round or double Cape Clear, in Ireland, on account of the severe storm which arose upon the bow, he was forced to make for the land with these three ships, which, as I say, were of the largest size, and to anchor more than half a league from the shore, where we remained for four days without being able to make any provision, nor could it even be made.

On the fifth day there sprang up so great a storm on our beam, with a sea up to the heavens, so that the cables could not hold nor the sails serve us, and we were driven ashore with all three ships upon a beach, covered with very fine sand, shut in on one side and the other by great rocks. The likes of this had never been seen for, within the hour, our three ships broke up completely, with less than three hundred men surviving.

Over a thousand drowned among them many important people, captains, gentlemen and regular officers….many men drowned inside the ships, while others jumped into the water never to come up again.” — Captain Francisco de Cuellar
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i…

Once ashore, most of the survivors were attacked by locals and robbed of everything, including their clothes, or they were attacked by English soldiers and slaughtered. De Cuellar managed to survive a number of encounters with robbers and the English.The late sixteenth century. and 1588 in particular, was marked by unusually strong North Atlantic storms.

Most of the 28 Spanish ships lost in the storms were along the jagged steep rocks of the western coast of Ireland.

About 5,000 men died by drowning, starvation and slaughter by local inhabitants after their ships were driven ashore on the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland.

English soldiers in Ireland were ordered to kill any Spanish prisoners, England’s Lord Deputy William FitzWilliam instead of asking for ransom as was common during that period.

The locations of the wrecks were discovered in 1985.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqCs-… and some other artifacts were recovered in 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOyas… The local community commemorates the event each year on the third weekend in September. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj5jx… Armada In Irelandhttps://spanisharmadaireland.com/