How truthful was Captain De Cuellar's Letter about the Armada and his survival?
Uploaded by Kerrytom on Aug 10, 2013
When debating about how truthful Captain De Cuellar’s letter was about his time in Ireland, one must firstly state an opinion one way or the other. Whether it was an accurate account and its integrity stands up to scrutiny or aspects of it seem highly dubious and needs to be questioned. I believe it to be the latter. While clearly a lot of the account can be seen to be truthful, many details just don’t seem to fit or seem too unlikely to be the whole truth. It is true that most Spaniards washed ashore did not escape from Ireland with their lives and to do so was an extremely difficult task. “The fate of those who got ashore was not less miserable. Many had their brains knocked out as they lay stretched exhausted on the beaches where they had come ashore. Others wandered for a while in the desolate parts of the West until they were hunted down and slaughtered like wild beasts by parties of soldiers, or reluctantly handed over by their Irish hosts to English executioners.” Clearly escape from Ireland by any surviving Spaniard would consist of a general story like the one De Cuellar regales us with, but there certainly are aspects of his daring tale which leaves the reader questioning its validity. Over the course of this essay, we will examine the letter chronologically, picking out the stories and encounters which seem to be far-fetched or which do not seem to add up. It would be fair to say that while some of these stories need questioning, this does not necessarily mean that they are definitely false or untrue.
The first aspect of Cuellar’s story which can be called into question is what happens after he escapes from the beach. “At the dawn of day I began to walk, little by little, searching for a monastery of monks, that I might repair to it or might recover in it as best I could, which I arrived at with much trouble and toil.” The issue with this is that Cuellar does not reveal how he knew about the monastery. The only encounter he had at this point was with two ‘native savages’, but clearly they
would not have been able to converse with the Spanish captain. It might seem a bit trifling to point out such a little detail, and one could argue that...