Walking on the battered and rotted remains of old ships and
boats—"wood sieved by the shipworm"—Stephen turns his thoughts
from the disaster of his own past to a national disaster: the
ruination of Spain's great "Armada," which helped England to
become an imperial power, the
ruler of the waves.
Catholic Spain was the great European power of the 16th
century. Harassed during the reign of the Protestant Queen
Elizabeth by small English privateers in the Atlantic and by
English armies in the Low Countries, the Spanish assembled a
huge fleet (130 vessels) to crush England's military power and
topple its government. The fleet rendezvoused off the coast of
England in August 1588 but was driven into disarray by an
attack of English fire-ships and withdrew to the north, with
English ships in pursuit. Attempting to return to Spain by
sailing around Scotland and Ireland, the fleet encountered
fierce storms and lost about four dozen ships. More than two
dozen washed up along Ireland's western shore. Stephen
entertains the logical possibility that some of the countless
bits of driftwood in Dublin Bay may be from those lost ships.
Irish national history preserves the memory of other
catastrophic failures of continental naval powers to dislodge
the English colonizers. In Telemachus, Mulligan
mentions that the tower at Sandycove was built "when the French were on the sea,"
during the nationwide rebellion of 1796-98 when French fleets
attepted to land armies on Irish soil. One failed to land in
bad weather; a second landed troops who were quickly defeated
in battle; a third was defeated at sea by the Royal Navy. In Aeolus,
professor MacHugh remarks proudy that "We are liege subjects
of the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar" in 1805, invoking
still another memory of French and Spanish fleets crushed by
the Royal Navy.
[2015] In 1912 Joyce published a rambling essay in Il
Picolo della Sera of Trieste which is translated in The
Critical Writings as "The Mirage of the Fisherman of
Aran. England's Safety Valve in Case of War." From the vantage
of a boat leaving Galway harbor, it observes that "Beneath the
waters of this bay and along its coast lie the wrecks of a
squadron of the unfortunate Spanish Armada. After their defeat
in the English Channel, the ships set sail for the North,
where the storms and waves scattered them. The citizens of
Galway, remembering the long friendship between Spain and
Ireland, hid the fugitives from the vengeance of the English
garrison and gave the shipwrecked a decent burial, wrapping
their bodies in white linen cloth."
