Girona

The Vessel

The Girona was a galleass of the Spanish Armada, a hybrid sail-and-oar warship of the characteristic Neapolitan type, built at Naples in 1587 under Spanish administration of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. She was approximately 55 metres long, 650 tons, and was designed to combine the firepower and capacity of a galleon with the oared manoeuvrability of a Mediterranean war galley. The four Neapolitan galleasses of 1588 were the most advanced hybrid warships in European service.

Her complement at her assignment to the Armada included 122 sailors, 300 rowers (mostly Spanish, Italian, and North African conscripts and prisoners), 197 soldiers, and a command staff of Neapolitan nobles and Spanish officers. She carried 50 heavy bronze cannon on three decks, a heavier main battery than any English ship of the Armada campaign. Her commander was Fabrizio Spinola, scion of the Genoese banking house, with overall galleass command under Don Hugo de Moncada.

The Spanish Armada's four galleasses were, on paper, the most formidable ships of the invasion fleet. They sailed from Lisbon in May 1588 with the overall fleet of 130 vessels under the Duke of Medina Sidonia, reached the English Channel in July, and fought at the running engagements of Eddystone, Portland Bill, Isle of Wight, and Gravelines between 31 July and 8 August. The galleasses' heavy guns were effective in those actions; their rowed manoeuvrability less so in the open Channel.

The Voyage

After the Armada's defeat in the Channel, Medina Sidonia led the surviving fleet northward in a forced retreat around Scotland and Ireland, the long way home. The galleasses were among the best-armed ships but the most vulnerable to the weather of the Scottish and Irish Atlantic coasts; they had been designed for the Mediterranean, not for the North Atlantic.

The Girona herself passed the northwest tip of Scotland in late September 1588 and worked slowly southwest toward the north coast of Ireland, by then in the company of her surviving galleass sisters San Lorenzo, Zúñiga, and Napolitana. She took aboard the survivors of two other Armada ships lost on the Irish coast: the Duquesa Santa Ana, wrecked at Loughros Bay on 13 September with survivors who had made their way by land to Killybegs; and the Rata Encoronada, wrecked at Tullaghan Bay on 21 September.

By 26 October 1588 the Girona had been overloaded with the survivors of three lost Armada ships. She was now carrying some 1,300 men on a ship that had originally shipped 619; her draft and her stability were both severely compromised. She left Killybegs on 26 October for Spain, running southwest under light sail. The weather that night developed into one of the worst autumn Atlantic gales of the decade.

The Disaster

She lost her steerage on the night of 26-27 October 1588 in a full westerly gale off the Antrim coast of what is now Northern Ireland. Driven eastward by the wind, she struck the rocks of Lacada Point on the Giant's Causeway some time before midnight on 26 October. The Giant's Causeway basalt is characteristic north Antrim coastline: a forty-metre cliff face rising from deep water, fronted by hexagonal basalt columns that form a natural serration at the waterline.

She broke up in minutes. The galleass design, with its high upperworks for the oar banks and its narrow waist, was particularly vulnerable to basalt serration; her hull was destroyed before most of those aboard could reach the weather decks. Of the approximately 1,300 aboard, five made the shore alive; the rest drowned in the surf or were crushed on the rocks. She is, by casualty count, one of the worst losses of the entire Armada campaign.

Survivors of the wreck who reached land were, under the standing orders of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir William Fitzwilliam, to be executed as Spanish invaders. Five of the Girona's survivors apparently escaped this fate through the protection of the O'Neill and O'Cahan Irish Gaelic chieftains, whose Counter-Reformation sympathies with Catholic Spain ran stronger than their fear of English reprisal; they were smuggled eventually to Scotland and from there to the Spanish Netherlands. The 1,295 dead went into the North Antrim surf; some of their bodies were recovered over the following weeks by Irish coastal families and buried in unmarked graves above the Giant's Causeway cliffs.

The Legacy

The Belgian diver Robert Sténuit located the Girona site in 1967 at the base of the Lacada Point cliffs. Sténuit had researched the original Spanish Armada orders and the letters of Medina Sidonia's staff officers; he had narrowed the search to a 500-metre stretch of the Antrim coast by archival work alone. He was then 34 years old and worked from a small boat hired from the village of Portballintrae. The 1967-1969 Sténuit excavation was the first scientific underwater archaeology of an Armada wreck.

The recovered artefacts include the most complete inventory of high-Renaissance Spanish and Neapolitan luxury goods from the sixteenth century: gold chains in pre-Columbian Peruvian loop-in-loop pattern, dolphin pendants, signet rings with unbroken wax seals, cameos, 1,400 gold and silver coins, navigational instruments, and personal armour. The Ulster Museum in Belfast acquired the collection from Sténuit in 1972 and built a dedicated Spanish Armada gallery around it. The Ulster Museum Armada collection is the largest and best-preserved single body of late sixteenth-century material artefacts in Europe.

The five survivors' identities, reconstructed by Sténuit and the Ulster Museum's Armada curator Colin Martin, include Giovanni de Mendoza de la Torre, a Spanish noble servant of the Duke of Medina Sidonia; and James Machan, an Irish priest attached to the Duke of Alba's household who had been a chaplain on the Rata Encoronada. Machan's surname is preserved in the Irish Catholic records of Ardstraw parish.

The wreck site remains a protected archaeological area under the Northern Ireland Protection of Wrecks Act 1973. Annual survey and conservation work continues under the Ulster Museum's archaeology department. The Girona remains the single most important non-Spanish archaeological site for the material culture of the Spanish Empire at its sixteenth-century zenith; the gold salamander brooch recovered by Sténuit in 1968 has been exhibited around the world and is, by continuing vote of the Belfast public, the most-loved single object in the Ulster Museum.