CO. ANTRIM - There was a time, in the late 16th century, when there were upwards of 3000 Spaniards in the old province of Ulster, the majority of them making for the castle of Dunluce on Antrim's north coast. They were the survivors of many thousands more shipwrecked when the pride of the invincible Armada of Philip II of Spain foundered off Ireland's western shores. Philip, married to Mary Tudor and having endured enough harrying from the ships of Mary's half sister Elizabeth I of England, made it his mission to destroy England's fleet once and for all, thus bringing victory to the cause of Catholic Counter-Reformation. So on the 30th of May 1588, his fleet of 141 ships of the Spanish Armada set sail out of the port of Lisbon under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and turned north into the Atlantic with 7666 seamen and 18,529 soldiers. The English will tell you that it was the commando tactics of the English privateers, operating at long range among and behind the enemy lines under the daring command of naval captains such as Francis Drake, which defeated the Armada, while the Spanish maintain that it was the unusually strong equinoxal gales off the Shetland Isles, north of Scotland, which brought the Armada to its knees. In truth, it was a combination of the two. By the time the great ships took shelter off Ireland's windswept western shores they were undersupplied and overloaded, crammed with the soldiery from other ships already sunk. One of the last ships to go down was the three-masted galleon, "Girona," which struck a reef off Lacada Point east of Dunluce Castle, near midnight in late October of 1588. She was carrying 1300 men, just nine of whom survived. It is said that in the darkness their panic-stricken captain mistook the Chimneys in the Giant's Causeway for the real chimneys of Dunluce, whose ruthless commander, Sorley Boye MacDonnell, was known to be fiercely anti-English. The wreck left a trail of stone arquebus balls across the ocean floor as well as chestfuls of golden trinkets, much of which MacDonnell would later use to finance the repair of his favored stronghold. (Interestingly, a beautiful golden salamander, encrusted with rubies, was one of the artifacts salvaged from the "Girona" by a team of marine archaeologists 400 years after the ill-fated Spanish galleon sank off the coast of Antrim. This salvage operation was also responsible for one of the most poignant of all recoveries from Spanish wrecks, a slim gold ring depicting a hand holding a heart and inscribed with the immortal words: "No tengo mas que darte" - "I have nothing more to give you.") In 1588, other Spanish galleons foundered off the west coast, and many thousands of men perished, including many from Spain's richest families, broken-limbed on the golden beaches. Others fell to the sword, pikes and gallows of the Irish. Hundreds, naked, starving, fevered and sick from a diet of wet biscuit and putrefied meat, were ridden down by the English cavalry. MacDonnell took his forenames, Sorley Boye, from the Gaelic "Somhaile Buidhe," the "summer-soldier, yellow-haired," for the Viking who traditionally raided from the north each summer. He had both Viking and Scots blood in his veins, was Lord of the Western Isles and was among the most astute of the Celtic politicians opposed to Elizabeth I's territorial claims. His family having been driven out of Scotland by the Campbells, Sorley Boye established power in Antrim and made treaties with the O'Neills, the then kings of "the Great Irishry," so called by the English more out of fear than respect. In July of 1575, Sorley Boye had watched helpless from the mainland as the English put 500 of his clanswomen and their children to the sword, including his own wife and children, on Rathlin Island off the coast of Antrim where they had been sent for safety. Maddened with sorrow, he took his revenge years later at Bonamargy east of Ballycastle, by burning the Abbey at night and slaughtering until the grass ran red with blood. The English offered a discussion to resolve differences, but Sorley Boye and his Redshanks - named thus after their custom of fighting bare-legged even in the winter's frosts - then set out to snatch Dunluce, craftily and bloodily from the England hands. The castle's weakness lay in its constable's taste for his young Scots mistress who was in fact playing Mata Hari for Sorley Boye. On the night of All Hallows she let down a rope and man-sized basket to enable the waiting Redshanks to scale the cliffs and hang the constable. So Sorley had the castle, but the English had his son's head - they had found him hiding in a freshly-dug grave and cut his throat. At the subsequent peace and conciliation talks he was shown his son's head on a pike. "My son," he observed chillingly, "hath many heads." In the end, he owned most of the county of Antrim. When the clouds darken the sky, it is too easy to look across the water and imagine Sorley Boye MacDonnell's great anguish as he stood on the mainland, watching his people slaughtered at the place they now call "Crook Ascreidlin" - the hill of the screaming. Excerpts - "Irish Counties," J. J. Lee