Lamentación de La Rata Santa María Encoronada
In the aftermath of a storm, such as we have faced, and in expectation of storms to come:
Sebastiano Ricci, ‘Alessandro Farnese Witnesses The Destruction of the Invisible Armada - From the Series of the Life of Pope John Paul III’. Museo Civici di Palazzo Farnese. 1687.
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
Philip Larkin, ‘Next, Please’ (1951)
I.
All burdens are unlade: the dank tonnage
of hawsers, anchor cables lopped off
as salt-gnarled slaves and grandees slosh ashore -
no tercio inroading surf - drenched, dog-rough,
waist-deep in seawater, compañeros’ squelch
through oceanic mist, the surge’s musketry
pelting its plunge, sinews taut as the chain
trailing out, not to any mooring buoy
Detail from the Armada Tapestries in the House of Lords.
nor the waves’ fizzing tracery, sibilance of salt,
teeth of a westerly bared stiff
and swirling as they glissade the numb coalface,
catching breaths over hurdles of surf,
but to a lone pinaza, bobbing jerkily at low tide
where breakers gulp the clammy scrape of sand,
spew white shards of rage to crest a conquest’s
abject residuum, strewn over this miry strand.
Dragged by the rip, silt juts like black marrow
from a crushed limb; kelp sprawls and flutters,
slack as bowels greasily skinned and vivisected,
ensnared in the throat-grip of harbours.
Their fire-vexed venture veered well off course -
that iron star a cold pull in the heavens
yanking them, uncharted, inland, to the earth’s dark arm,
away from the loose deadweight of cannons.
Detail from the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, depicting Spanish vessels foundering on a rocky coastline, Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich. Artist unknown.
II.
Was it Euroclydon that gusted in their wake,
skirling foggily to whoosh a final whiff
of del mar Balear’s crisp green tang as they knelt
in prayer, a tear-clogged beachhead, Erris’s bluff
a jagged pike stabbing stonily heavenward? Briefly,
they are returned to Seville, Coruña, Palermo.
But scarlet saltires ripple from torn canvas, luff
like a blazoned match for a fuse’s oily halo
as by a sawtooth shoal, swells rattle their roar. Just this cove
to winter in, boasting no creation myth: no moonless
hour, no meteoric vision roiling in rings of ophanic
radiance to sear oblivion through, no blinding genesis,
no god of bladderwrack and brine to blag or convince -
and their gran tristeza surely akin to that of Zeno
scavenging for solace amid purplish jetsam
(deliquesced, fizzing splotches of his Tyrian cargo),
as they, too, shed opulence: lily-hilt and astrolabe,
a salamander’s ruby scale, molten in its brass spine,
ducats to quicken a drowning, doublet and doubloon
now valued as driftwood and rusted red with brine,
El Capitán’s cross awaiting salvage, his rosary jagged
in dulse, anemone to sprout on sash, brocade,
buckle, as he wonders how to right their mission now
with neither sun nor stars visible to the waterlogged
nao careening a half-mile hence, long dead on arrival,
canvas in a lather of salt from the sea’s abyssal arboretum,
and beneath her plumage of smoke, her hull still visible:
her final haven shall be not in water, but in flame.
III.
It’s no rite for a chieftain, honourably slain, shouldered
back to the sea, his funerary drakkar berthed
and freighted with much magnolias cargo, to be cast off
on its final blazing drift through wind and tide
nor an argizailoa flame thrashing as an afterthought
for lichen-gnawed txalpus littering the seafloor,
Basque killing-iron sweeping for the Atlantic’s raw edge
seasoned keels once deft as ducks to turbid water,
nets pulsing silvery with the heft of hake and herring.
Better claimed by their tapers than by a Plymouth fireship -
brief incandescence as livid gold blazes up from the brig,
cannonade of spindrift and the blood-tinged flap
of crosses. Stern lamps sputter, choke, are doused in a glaze
of drizzle, her scorched keel entrenched in bladderwrack,
decks tilting wildly as if all the earth were upheaved,
dolerite surf hissing, livid as muzzle flashes at the hulk.
Here, the flame blushes into ignition, spurts eerily skyward,
smoke swirling in a quartz-thick pall and besmirches
daylight to counterfeit dusk, charred shadow and timbers
tar melting like syrupy tears in tenebrous smudges,
bubbling on splintered pine, scalpings of sea breeze
teasing sooty roars from a lantern’s slivered lacuna,
and the kindling’s red seethe, guttering acridly,
dancing with malevolent grace, an aground pyre.
Undone, all hands barely look on from the sunless sand,
eyes stung with smoke, ebb of salt spat sharply,
the tide’s slow tongue and dry, whispering marram
echo under a bloodless welkin fit to burst biblically.
IV.
Tides claw at turf. Ghosts in salt, their numbers cruelly few,
their world whittled down to raw need, the bare grace
of shared hardship, half-bound to home, half-unmoored here,
as history re-tangles its roots, pace by skin-burnt pace,
and still buffeting them for now. Old empires waft away
like smoke as kingly claims are mumbled downwind,
the ebb and fizz of politics, a crown’s brass sheen
scabbed with barnacles, gilded creeds stranded -
and I find myself watching them. Why? I can’t put a name
to their compañerismo, their sense to trudge onward
over stone and stubborn grass, the sea’s cold tongue
lashing them still. Is it their death march, or a wearied
lifeline they hand each other as they press inland, deliberate
as ash, their world a cindered offering to the ocean?
They ripple in my mind as I, undone by my own flaws,
aground with doubt, fumble through yet another dawn –
dragging myself from bed at half four to ensure there’s
enough water for a shower, my Armada of small failures
careened in the dew, the rain’s daily grind and seethe
as a straggling gust scrapes through ice-blue air.
My phone buzzes with updates on the storm season,
flood warnings, red alerts and power outages, raw data
trawled up from the drizzly world, flotsam of disaster,
clinical lookouts of frost crystallising to pale insignia
on the glass, naked trees and shivering telephone poles.
On such mornings, as the night’s blue flesh hangs brittle
as the dead with autumnal weight, country air sinks its fangs
into my skin, and I shiver with dejection even as a kettle
thaws out my hands. I gulp black coffee and eye the fields
salted crisply in their white contagions of rime, lie to myself
that even the act of facing the day counts as a minor win -
just as winter dark arches against the glass in gaunt relief.
V.
It’s then I think of them - the walking wounded, bone-chilled,
starvation’s slow, sure knife gutting them open,
heads bowed yet braced. How their courage flickers on, raw, real,
strangely radiant, an ember warming the most misshapen
moment of their lives. They’ll know more on that marble
sandbar than I ever will - though I know what becomes
of them. Yet seeing them in this way, pleats of sand
raked by their boots, they make for nobler phantoms.
Always the constancy of storms! Numberless the human cost.
November’s blistered jaw drips with frost,
fresh relief of a night after gale force winds into them the road,
and the murmur of leaves like banners in grist.
Never did they mean to make landfall here - hollowed out
by the sea, marooned on this rough-ribbed shore,
left athirst by the grey relish of smoke in their mouths –
for inland, they’ll press, and offshore, disappear.
NOTE.
I’ve been working on multiple projects for the past month. However, I was slightly derailed by Storm Eowyn, which caused power outages in Mayo and made most of the province go dark. As a result, we had to live by candlelight until it got back up and running.
We were without electricity and water for a few days. However, compared to people in our locality and the surrounding counties still awaiting repairs to downed power lines and damaged infrastructure, it was a minor inconvenience in the long run. We got off easy.
Storms of Eowyn’s severity, which necessitated a nationwide red alert here in Ireland, are looking to become more frequent over the coming years. As Shakespeare would have it in King Lear:
Since I was man,
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never
Remember to have heard. Man’s nature cannot carry
Th’ affliction nor the fear.
Naturally, my mind drifts to storms of times past and their effect on human life. Having worked extensively on and recently published a book set in and around Blacksod Bay, I came across the account of the Spanish Armada ship La Rata Santa María Encoronada and how she met her fiery end off the Mayo coast. In this poem, I imagine the autumnal thoughts of her surviving crew.
La Rata Santa María Encoronada was a heavily armed Genoese carrack, sailing as part of the Levant Squadron with the Spanish Armada in 1588. At 820 tons, she ranked as one of the heavier vessels in the fleet.
After serving with distinction at Gravelines (she exchanged broadsides with Francis Drake’s galleon Revenge, whilst her formidable size and armament led to her being mistaken for the Armada’s flagship by Lord Howard of Effingham, the English navy’s admiral, who also engaged with her), she was under orders to sail northwards around Scotland and then south past Ireland’s western coast, following the scattering of the Armada by English fireships. From there, she was to make passage for Spain.
However, heavily damaged from both battle and Atlantic storms, she was eventually set on fire by her captain, the aristocratic Don Alonso Martínez de Leyva of the Order of Santiago de Compostela, off Fahy Strand, Blacksod Bay, in Co. Mayo. After disembarking, De Leyva and his men sheltered nearby at Doona Castle before continuing their journey overland to join the ill-fated galleass La Girona at Killybegs. The latter ship, now freighted with an aggregate crew of 1,300 men, ultimately foundered off the coast of Antrim, leaving only nine survivors.
Treasures salvaged from the wreck in the mid-1960s are on display in the Ulster Museum, including a brass salamander brooch believed to belong to de Levya himself.
A tercio (Spanish for ’a third’) was the name of an elite infantry regiment in the early modern Spanish military, comprising 3,000 pikemen and arquebusiers.
Txalupa is a Basque term referring to a type of whaling boat used in the 16th century.
‘Euroclydon’ is the name of a Mediterranean wind that wrecked a ship transporting St. Paul in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles.
Zeno of Citium was a Phoenician-Greek philosopher and a founding figure in the Stoic school of philosophy; he, too, endured a shipwreck before developing his ideas at Athens.