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A LITTLE GOLD: Florenica, a Spanish Galleon

I’m looking to go to Mull later this year to scuba dive for 10 days, and wondered if anyone had heard any buzzes about a Galleon called the Florenica, it’s been searched for, for long enough. It went down in the Sound of Mull about a year after the battle between Elizabeth I, and King Philip of Spain in 1588, sunk so history tells us by the MacLean clan, the crew caught and imprisoned in Duart Castle where they eventually starved to death.

The Spanish were the most powerful nation on earth at that time, and by far the best organised and equipped army in the whole of Europe. The Spanish Army of Flanders had crushed the Dutch revolt in the northern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands, and their commander, the Duke of Parma, was ready to embark with his troops to cross the narrow North Sea to teach the heathen English a lesson, and to almost certain execution if captured and classed Elizabeth as a heretic,.

Many contemporary recorders at the time gave little chance of the English surviving the coming Spanish. British troops were quickly recruited to counter the threat, but England’s land defences were poor. The fortification undertaken at the time of Henry the VIII was fifty years old and in poor condition. His coastal castles were already vulnerable to modern guns, and posed little threat to the pernicious Spanish Army.

It was a foregone conclusion that the battle hardened Spanish troops, with their state of the art artillery, would have little difficulty in sweeping through Kent and quickly overwhelm all opposition and capture London within a week of the Armada landing.

We know the history, but now to the crux: one prestigious Galleon, the Florenica, fled the carnage and executed its escape by going around Scotland, and ended up in the Sound of Mull.

The crew were captured and taken to Duart Castle, where it is believed they were either executed, or left in the dungeon to starve to death, by the MacLeans who then occupied the fortified castle.

This galleon, many believed, was filled with treasure. Some are of the opinion all valuables were taken off it by the MacLeans before they blew it up, and the only thing that went to the bottom in Mull was a blown up ship. Others think the contrary, and believe the ship’s crew fought off the MacLeans, and in the battle the ship was lost, treasure included, and only the survivors taken to Duart Castle and incarcerated.

My own opinion when I researched the history of that period for my novel, “The Tour,” which is based in Mull, about a group of divers going up from Wales to dive Mull, and finding the Galleon Florenica, is that, somewhere around the Sound of Mull that Galleon is still there, gold included, just waiting to be found.

If the gold was taken off the galleon, where has it gone? Surely, some snippet of information about the gold would have become known. The reports at the time stated it was a Man of Warship, and full of gold, which went down with the Galleon. Even without the treasure, finding the Galleon would still be a coup d’état for anyone.

Henry VIII’s battleship was discovered not that many years ago, and brought to the surface, and that went down years before the Florenica met its fate in the Sound of Mull.

Check out my novel, leave a message on my blogsite http://roytomkinson.blogspot.com, or tweet me on Twitter, <@RoyTomkinson> alternatively, contact my publisher and they will pass on the message.

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