The Last Armada by Des Ekin

Author:Des Ekin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2015-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

‘THEY DIED BY DOZENS ON A HEAP’

The siege continued, with great miseries to both the armies, and not without cause, considering the season of the year, and the condition of the country, that afforded little relief to either.

– William Monson, seventeenth-century English historian

BY EARLY December, both sides were losing soldiers at a truly terrifying rate. Blount was losing forty men every single day to sickness, exposure and exhaustion. Fynes Moryson also reported that the newest arrivals were ‘dying by the dozens each night’.

Meanwhile, inside the town, the bloody flux continued to ravage the Spanish. ‘Dysentery is daily carrying off [considerable] numbers,’ one priest reported.

Let’s take a virtual-reality tour through Kinsale’s two opposing army bases to see what life is like for the pitiable soldiers – few of them volunteers – who are condemned to suffer the rigours of a siege through the worst winter in anyone’s memory. Our tour may be virtual, but the sights we will see are all based on witness records, and the words we hear will all be authentic.

Before we set out, make sure you are well wrapped up – we are in the chilly core of Europe’s Little Ice Age, and the temperature by night is well below freezing. Even in daylight, chilling fogs often enshroud the blighted landscape, locking out any cheering rays from the sun. On a bad day, the lashing rain will soak you to the skin within seconds. On a good day, the insidious misty mizzle will have the same effect within minutes. The moaning winds, often carrying flurries of jagged hail, create a wind-chill that leaves you shivering with cold.

In order to fade into the background, we will wear the clothes of a common English soldier – a cassock, a doublet, leather shoes, and the trousers of Kentish cloth known as ‘Venetians’. This is basic gear, but we are among the lucky few who have kept it intact. According to Fynes Moryson, many of the impoverished soldiers swap their coats for extra money. ‘In a hard winter siege, as at Kinsale … they died for cold in great numbers … upon a small cold taken, or a prick of the finger.’

First, let’s walk through Blount’s main camp. To enter it from any direction, you will have to slip and slither through a muck-filled trench. These are twice as deep as a standing man, so you must negotiate a rickety wooden ladder. When you reach the bottom, you exclaim in disgust as you splash into cold, stinking floodwater right up to your knees – at least, let’s hope it is nothing but water. The relentless rain makes it impossible to drain the dugouts, so they are ‘continually filled’.

You flounder to the next inward-facing ladder, nodding a greeting to the sentries who stand on elevated mounts, their heads protruding over earthen banks. Each man’s face glows eerily from the dull light of his gun’s match, a coiled cord of fuse whose end will smoulder slowly until the musketeer is ready to touch it to the powder.

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