Kevin Green recounts an old story of the legendary Spanish fleet that passed through Caithness waters in 1588…
El Galleon replica was launched in 2009 from the Huelva shipyard in Andalucia and has sailed across a large part of the world, using her square sails. Picture: Paul VanDerWerf
Among our family of dark-haired folk there was an old story that we may have been spawned by crews of the Spanish Armada fleeing homeward via the far north of Scotland.
Of course, the Armada sailors of 1588 were too much johnny-come-latelies for our long family history, which harked back beyond the Norsemen who ruled our shores for 500 years.
Some thought we may have come over from the northern isles of Orkney, with appropriate name change from Grun or such like, to become Green. But the Armada story that my Great Aunt Elizabeth espoused after a few sherries – a tall olive skinned OBE-honoured former African missionary – was a good yarn we enjoyed while sat around our peat fire during the long winter nights in John O’ Groats.
As a boy, the story resurfaced again when our school was recruited by archaeologists to take part in a dig among the sand dunes in the place known as the “sailors graves” where we found coins that we thought could have been Spanish.
As the south-easterly gale shrieked off the sea stacks a mile across the heather moorland and onto our roofs, rattling the slates and sending a draft down our chimney, I imagined the hulking square rigs of El Gran Grifón, San Juan de Sicilia and about 110 other a battered Armada ships approaching.
An Armada chart showing the voyage around Scotland. Picture: Greenwich Museum
El Gran Grifón was the flagship of the Spanish Armada’s supply squadron of German-built Baltic hulks. The 650-ton, 38-gun ship sailed under the command and flag of Juan Gómez de Medina.
They had just outrun the English navy who had chased them north to the Firth of Forth. Running and rolling in North Sea swells that early August night in 1588 with their deck officers peering pensively into the grey gloom must have been frightening for the battle-weary sailors.
Ahead, they’d have seen smudges of white where swells exploded into the chain of low lying islands marking the Norse-named Skerries at the mouth of the Pentland Firth.
The Spanish galleons and supply ships approaching our village were some of the remnants of the estimated 137-strong Armada, with 30,000 men led by the Duke of Medina Sidonia that had planned to invade, to remove the Protestant Queen Elizabeth from the English throne, replacing her with our Scottish Catholic queen, Mary Stuart.
Mary was on borrowed time, given that, after the Reformation, Scotland was officially a Protestant nation, so under the same church as England. The final straw for King Philip II of Spain was the beheading of Mary (Queen of Scots) by the English monarchy in February 1587.
In August 1588 this view from the cliffs of John O’ Groats would have included the Spanish Armada being blown north. Picture: Kevin Green
Weather-beaten
But as history tells us, a storm in the English Channel scuppered Spanish plans, along with English ships attacking them, including some bravado from the Queen’s favourite opportunist, Sir Frances Drake.
Four centuries later, living in Andalucia for seven years, I would still see the deprivations of this massive failure that King Philip and Queen Isabella wrought on Spain – in the sparse forests that were cleared to build the largest fleet ever seen in the Middle Ages.
All this was known to us as we sat around our fireside in Groats. Grandad in his chair with pipe in hand and a dark lump of Walnut Plug tobacco that he occasionally scraped with his worn penknife. Drake would have laughed, since he’d brought the first tobacco leaves from the Caribbean to win favour from the flame-haired English virgin Queen.
Scowling at Grandad on the other side of the fireside was Granny, her blue eyes shining in disapproval at the clouds of tobacco smoke obscuring his sister Elizabeth, sitting upright between them in plaid dress and heavy brogues. Lizzie, as we called her, much to her annoyance, was a staunch royalist after being honoured at Buckingham Palace by our modern Queen Elizabeth II for her time in Africa, so had limited sympathies for our beheaded Mary Queen of Scots.
Images from the KLB Dive Team in 2021 show the cannon and anchors but not the many pieces of pottery among the Spanish wreck at Kinlochbervie. Picture: KLB Dive Team
Atlantic escape
Out at sea that August night must have been hellish for the thousands of sailors in the Armada as their navigators feverishly worked out a plan based on the basic navigational charts they’d made – called Rutters – gleaned from information supplied by friendly Scots and merchant ships.
But this information didn’t account for major tides and currents, such as the east-flowing Gulf Stream in the Atlantic. They knew the Scottish shore would not be overly friendly because Mary’s son James Stuart (James VI) – who had become king in 1567 (aged one) after her abdication, had received favours from the English to ensure his loyalty and dissuade him from allying with the Spanish.
So, as the south-east gale blew their square rigs and towering hulls further north, they were in a desperate situation. Yet salvation was at hand, if only they’d known. Their Rutters clearly didn’t show they were passing the largest natural harbour in the British Isles – Scapa Flow.
What we do know from Armada journals is that the fleet turned west in deep Atlantic water between the Orkney Islands and the Shetlands; at 61 degrees of latitude.
The Pentland Firth, separating the Scottish mainland from Orkney, was known by mariners as Hell’s Mouth for the ferocity of its tides and weather. Picture: Kevin Green
Many of the Spanish rigs had been damaged by grapeshot and cannon fire because the English realised that their thick oak hulls were impregnable, so targeted their topsides. It’s recorded that Drake’s ship Revenge attacked El Gran Grifón at one stage and she was then in a sorry state.
So, it and other slower cargo ships were caught in a westerly storm for several weeks that forced the stragglers back onto the coasts of the British Isles, powerfully aided by the east-flowing Gulf Stream. Historians estimate about 25 called at Ireland, with most wrecked. It was under English rule, so many sailors were executed on the beaches.
Westray Dons
The Scottish Galleon sailors were mostly treated well, and this is the part of the story my family used to tell. The September storm had nearly sunk El Gran Grifón, so when her crew spotted an island, Fair Isle, they’d already passed going west, they scuppered the ship in the narrow inlet of Swartz Geo on September 27.
Eventually, the surviving Spaniards were taken to Shetland, then Orkney and supposedly through my village of John O’Groats. One yarn among Orcadians is about some of the crew of El Gran Grifón.
A Spanish fighting tactic was to board other ships from their taller Galleons, so the towering poop deck was ideal for this. Picture: Paul VanDerWerf
Folkore tales tell of how some sailors remained where they came ashore on the most northerly part of Orkney, on the island of Westray. They became known as the Westray Dons (’Don’ is a Spanish salutation). They were said to be of dark complexion and with “foreign habits”. This famously aloof group of islanders went through several generations before dying out.
Eventually, Victorian folklorist Traill Dennison gathered these oral stories into a written account. It recorded how the Spaniards “built houses for themselves, married wives, and formed a little settlement, having children with local Orcadian women”.
Anyone with the surname Petrie, Reid, Hewison or Costie may be able to trace their ancestry back to the Spaniards. The Dons clearly became mythologised over time, with Dennison breathlessly describing how “the union of Spanish blood with the Norse produced a race of men active and daring, with dark eyes and sometimes with features of a foreign caste, and more given to gesticulate than the true Orcadian.”
Another Armada ship struck further along our coast at Kinlochbervie, not far from my Granny’s family village of Strathnaver. Archaeologists, including the television show Time Team, excavated the site in 2000.
They found canon, anchor and fine Spanish/Italian crockery which pointed to it being an Armada cargo ship; perhaps the San Gabriel – a supply vessel and horse carrier. So far, no traces of its crew have been found ashore.
The author at Brough on the Pentland Firth. Picture: David Thomas
As for the San Juan de Sicilia, she came into port for provisions on the Isle of Mull. It is suspected that an English spy eventually came aboard and blew her up; along with many of the crew. Yet another unknown ship is said to have put-in just north, on the Isle of Skye and disembarked some crew who had white dogs.
Their descendants were kept distinct from other breeds by the ruling Clan Donald. Other families on Skye preserved both white and sandy-coloured dogs. This unusual race of small white terrier is reputed to have become the famous Scottish West Highland terrier.
Whatever the truth of the Armada in Scotland, it was a good yarn to pass a long winter’s night in the far north, Great Aunt Lizzie always said.