Category Archives: Military History

My past two articles have been about everyday phrases with maritime roots; not only is a language affected by sailors, but sometimes entire populations.

Around the British Isles, there have been countless shipwrecks. The waters can be treacherous, with islets and rocky outcrops just under the waves – splinters of divided continents worn down by the power of the sea until they become hidden snares. My husband and I were once on holiday on St Mary’s, Scilly Islands; with every tide, flotsam fragments of shipwrecks (nearly 1,000 known so far) from the 16^th through the 19^th centuries wash ashore, and I gathered a handful of beach pottery and glass, not knowing at the time that the worn but still decorated pieces could be centuries old. Buried beneath the sand, they’d retained their colourful glazing until washed ashore.

That’s the goods and plates aboard; but what of the people? Many sailors of past centuries couldn’t swim; if their ships foundered too far from shore, they sank to Davy Jones’s Locker. Those who were fortunate enough to make it ashore were not guaranteed a safe sojourn; if the island had scant supplies, it could get ugly – as it did for Spanish sailors on Fair Isle (more on that in a moment). But first, a brief background on the situation that led to the Spanish Armada being in British waters, and their shipwrecks:

The reasons the Armada moved to attack England are complex; let’s just say that Philip II, heir apparent to the Spanish throne, had married (in a political manoeuvre) Bloody Mary, the Catholic queen of England, who’d had her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, placed under house arrest to prevent any political ambitions from growing in the Protestant faction. When Mary died childless, Philip (King of Spain and Portugal, as well as of Ireland and England through marriage and until Mary’s death in 1558) returned to his own kingdom in Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I ascended to the throne of England. But being the daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn (whom he’d had executed when Elizabeth was two years old), Elizabeth was illegitimate in the eyes of many Catholics, as her parents’ marriage had been annulled two days before her mother’s execution. Ironically, confinement hadn’t taught Elizabeth any compassion; she had her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned for nineteen years, and eventually executed in February of 1587. Mary had been Spain’s Catholic ally, and her death was the final straw for Philip II of Spain, as the religious tensions had been mounting between England and Spain. Philip prepared his Armada, sailing out of Lisbon in 1588.

If you look at a map of Europe, you will see that Spain is southwest of the British Isles; they had to sail through the Bay of Biscay, and then either west of England through the waters between England and Ireland, or east through the English Channel and French waters (and the French were usually at war with everyone) to reach the east coast of England.

The battle ensued; the English ships had superior long-range cannon, with which they harried the Spanish fleet. Weather and prevailing winds interfered; battle lines were redrawn, only to be scuppered again. In August 1588, the Spanish fleet had been defeated by Sir Francis Drake’s command of the English ships, and the remnants of the fleet retreated into the North Sea. By early September, seventeen ships had been lost to storms. Many of the ships not sunk by the British navy or taken out by the sea were blown onto the rocky shores of Ireland and Scotland; of the 150 ships that set out from Lisbon, only 65 returned.

Three of the ships were separated in the storm from the rest of the fleet: The Barca de Amburgo foundered off of Fair Isle, but the crew was rescued by the El Gran Grifón and the Trinidad Valencera. With the extra crew aboard, the El Gran Grifón tried to anchor to make repairs but was wrecked on the rocks of Stroms Hellier, Fair Isles (a steep, rocky outcrop of land halfway between Shetland to the north and Orkney to the south). According to historian Sir Robert Sibbald (1641-1722), the crew was on the island for two months (~August-September 1588); though they paid for their supplies, tensions were high with locals as food stores were meagre and “Spanish money doesn’t fill hungry bellies”. The island itself has never supported more than 400 inhabitants (today’s population is 65); the Spanish shipwreck brought 300 to shore. 50 of the crew either starved to death or were killed when the locals turned on them: Any Spaniard found alone was tossed over a cliff; when that wasn’t efficient enough, the islanders deliberately collapsed a flagstone roof over the sleeping crew.

The survivors fled; some to Shetland, and some to Orkney. Enter that dusty bit of history, the Westray Dons.

Westray is the northernmost island of the Orkney archipelago, a group of 70 islands*, 16 of which are inhabited (*or more, depending on who you ask – skerries or uninhabited islets may or may not count). They not only welcomed the Spaniards but intermarried with them. The men remained on the island, and their descendants became known as the Westry Dons. Spanish heritage is still seen in the Orcadian population today, though the Dons are no longer a separate community; Orkney has a higher percentage of dark-haired, dark-eyed inhabitants than any other Scandinavian-heritage region. Orcadian oral tradition, according to the Sanday folklorist Walter Traill Dennison, says that the Dons were exceptional seamen, many of whose descendants went on to become sailors and sea captains. The Dons largely adopted Orcadian surnames, the most common (but not exclusively) being Petrie, Hewison, and Reid.

I hope you enjoyed this quick dive; if you’d like to read and hear a Scottish song about the Dons, just click here (warning: It’s in thick Scottish brogue!).

To see a timeline of the Spanish Armada battle, just click on the image below.