The Mackay Country Project

When Roy Hemming and his fellow members of the RAF Lossiemouth Sub-Aqua Club discovered a piece of sixteenth-century Mediterranean pottery on the seabed off Kinlochbervie in 1997, the find sparked excited speculation that it had arrived there on a ship forming part of the Spanish Armada, the magnificent fleet mustered by Philip II of Spain in 1588 to invade and subdue England and its reigning monarch Elizabeth I. 

 

The Armada was made up of over seventy armed galleons accompanied by fifty-seven support ships, and epitomised the power, ambition and international influence of Spain, hampered only by the activities of England under Elizabeth’s rule. 

 

Spanish galleons were glorious ships, built both as warships and merchant vessels.  During the latter half of the sixteenth century, galleons sailed all over the globe with cargoes of luxury goods.  With piracy commonplace on the high seas, galleons armed themselves with heavy-duty brass muzzle-loading cannon to such an extent that merchant ships could be almost indistinguishable from warships.

 

Although the galleon was descended from the oar-driven galley and the bulkier, Spanish ‘nao’, it was propelled by sails and cut through the water with greater ease of handling than its predecessors, and became the benchmark for shipbuilding all over the world.  Its characteristics included colourful paintwork featuring heraldic devices, an elegant, high stern and, on the bow, an extension of the forward deck and bulwarks known as a beak-head, providing an advantageous position for handling the spritsail.

 

For all its size and style, the galleon was no match for the stormy weather that drove the Armada northwards up the east coast of Britain after engaging only briefly with the English navy at Gravelines.  The fleet sailed with the wind, following the Scandinavian trade route around the north and west coasts of Scotland into the Atlantic Ocean, with the intention of then returning to Spain.

 

Once again the weather proved to be a mightier foe than Elizabeth’s navy, and many Armada ships never reached home, instead coming to grief off Irish and Scottish coasts.  Indeed, it seems that every village on the north-west coast and in the Hebrides has a tale of shipwrecked Spanish sailors settling in the area to marry and raise families of dark-eyed, olive-skinned children.

 

 

Documentation charting the fate of the Armada suggests that though up to 67 ships failed to return to Spain, only six remain unaccounted for, and it has been postulated that one of these, a supply ship named the San Gabriel, may be the luckless Kinlochbervie wreck.

 

The challenge of finding out more was taken up by Channel 4, St Andrew’s University and RAF Lossiemouth, culminating in the underwater dig which was filmed in July 2001 and broadcast as part of the popular ‘Time Team’ television series in January 2002.

 

A reasonable day greeted the arrival of the Channel 4 broadcast unit, divers from the Archaeological Diving Unit (ADU) of St Andrews University and from RAF Lossiemouth’s Sub-Aqua Club, nautical archaeologists, assorted academics and support personnel at Kinlochbervie in July 2001 but, like the sailors of the Spanish Armada, the underwater dig participants were soon to witness the capriciousness of the north-west weather.

 

The wreck site, which lies in unstable conditions at depths of between five and thirty metres on a series of rocky outcrops around four miles south-west of Kinlochbervie, is a protected site in terms of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, requiring divers to apply for a permit before accessing it.  It is a dynamic environment and presented what Martin Dean, director of St Andrews University’s Archaeological Diving Unit (ADU), referred to during the Time Team broadcast as a “classic case of rescue archaeology” – a race to find and recover artefacts before they fell prey to the destructive power of the sea.