Spanish Armada Wreck On Streedagh Beach, Co. Sligo, Ireland

Posted on December 3, 2022 by irelandinsideandout

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/

Who Is Buried in Yeats’ Grave?

Posted on November 30, 2022 by irelandinsideandout

William Butler Yeats, renowned Irish poet, playwright and writer, winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature, is buried in St. Columba’s church graveyard in Drumcliff (sometimes spelled Drumcliffe) in County Sligo, Ireland.

Or is he?

Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939. He was 73.[1] Yeats was buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin following a discreet and private funeral.

But Yeats’s family wanted him buried in Ireland, in the graveyard of the neo-Gothic style St. Columba’s, where his great grandfather had been rector.

Attempts were made in France to dissuade the family from relocating the remains to Ireland due to the uncertainty of their identity.
Yeats’s body was exhumed in 1946 and transferred to the cemetery’s ossuary and mixed with other remains.[2] French Foreign Ministry authorities were worried about the fact that Yeats’ remains were thrown into a communal grave.[7]

Yeats’ wish was that he be buried quickly in France. According to his wife, George, “His actual words were ‘If I die, bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo’.”[3]

Positively identified or not, in September 1948, nine years after his death, Yeats’s remains were moved to the graveyard of St Columba’s.[4]
The remains buried in Drumcliff, Co. Sligo, may – or may not – be those of William Butler Yeats.

The man in charge of repatriating the poet’s remains for the Irish Government was Seán MacBride, Minister of External Affairs, the son of Maud Gonne MacBride, who was one of Yeats’s former lovers. [5][6]

Yeats married 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees, known as George, in 1917. He was 51. Despite their age difference and Yeats’ affairs with other women, the couple remained married. They had two children, Anne and Michael. Georgie once wrote to her husband “When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were.”

The epitaph carved into Yeats’s tombstone in Drumcliff is from “one of his final poems Under Ben Bulben”:

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by!

1. Obituary. “W. B. Yeats Dead Archived 28 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine”. The New York Times, 30 January 1939. 2. Jordan, Anthony J. (2003). W. B. Yeats: Vain, Glorious, Lout – A Maker of Modern Ireland. Westport Books. ISBN 978-0-9524447-2-5.3. Foster, R. F. (2003). 3. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-818465-2. 4. Foster, 2003
5. Jordon, 20036.
6. Cahill, Christopher (December 2003). “Second Puberty: The Later Years of W. B. Yeats Brought His Best Poetry, along with personal melodrama on an epic scale”. theatlantic.com. Archived from the original on 29 August 2021. 7. “The Documents”. The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 9 November 2017.