cas_ or storeships, drove on the rocks of Fair Isle, the solitary
cliff-bound island in the channel between the Orkneys and Shetlands. Here
such few as escaped the waves lived for some six weeks in "great hunger
and cold." Then a fishing-boat took them to Anstruther in Fifeshire, where
they surrendered to the bailies. Lopez de Medina was among this handful of
survivors. Melville, the Presbyterian minister of Anstruther, describes him
as "a very reverend man of big stature and grave and stout countenance,
grey haired and very humble like," as he asked quarter for himself and his
comrades in misfortune.[13]

[13] In some histories of the Armada and in more than one
standard book of reference Lopez de Medina is confused with
Medina-Sidonia, and it is stated that it was the flagship of the
whole Armada that was lost on Fair Isle.

Other distressed ships fled from the Atlantic storms for shelter inside the
Hebrides. Three entered the Sound of Mull, where one was wrecked near
Lochaline, and a second off Salen. The third, the great galleass
"Florencia," went down in Tobermory Bay. The local fishermen still tell the
traditional story of her arrival and shipwreck. She lies in deep water,
half-buried in the sand of the bottom, and enterprising divers are now busy
with modern scientific appliances trying to recover the "pieces of eight"
in her war-chest, and the silver plate which, according to a dispatch of
Walsingham's, was the dinner-service of the "Grandee of Spain" who
commanded her.

But it was on the shores of the "island of Ireland" that the most tragic
disasters of the Armada took place. Its wrecks strewed the north and west
coasts. Fitzwilliam, the "Deputy" or the Viceroy, in Dublin, and Bingham,
the Governor of Connaught, had taken precautions to prevent the Spaniards
finding shelter, water, and food in the ports by reinforcing the western
garrisons. Bingham feared the Irish might be friendly to the Spaniards, and
industriously spread among the coast population tales that if they landed
the foreigners would massacre the old and carry the young away into
slavery. The people of the ports, who had long traded with Spain, knew
better, but some of the rude fisher-folk of the west coast perhaps believed
the slander. Where shipwrecked crews fell into the hands of Bingham's men
no mercy was shown them. He marched four hundred prisoners into Galway, and
his troops massacred them in cold blood, and then he report