Walking on the battered remains of old ships––"wood sieved by
the shipworm" brilliantly captures the look of naval timbers
eaten by the Teredo mollusk—Stephen turns his thoughts from
the disaster of his own past to a national disaster. The
ruination of the great "Armada" in 1588 liberated England from
the threat of Spanish invasion and helped it 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 the
Triestine Il Picolo della Sera 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."
