The first mishap occurred when the Armada was rounding the north of Scotland. The "Gran Grifon," the flagship of Juan Lopez de Medina, admiral of the _urcas_ or storeships, drove on the rocks of Fair Isle, the solitary cliff-bound island in the channel between the Orkneys and Shetlands. Here such few as escaped the waves lived for some six weeks in "great hunger and cold." Then a fishing-boat took them to Anstruther in Fifeshire, where they surrendered to the bailies. Lopez de Medina was among this handful of survivors. Melville, the Presbyterian minister of Anstruther, describes him as "a very reverend man of big stature and grave and stout countenance, grey haired and very humble like," as he asked quarter for himself and his comrades in misfortune.[13] [13] In some histories of the Armada and in more than one standard book of reference Lopez de Medina is confused with Medina-Sidonia, and it is stated that it was the flagship of the whole Armada that was lost on Fair Isle. Other distressed ships fled from the Atlantic storms for shelter inside the Hebrides. Three entered the Sound of Mull, where one was wrecked near Lochaline, and a second off Salen. The third, the great galleass "Florencia," went down in Tobermory Bay. The local fishermen still tell the traditional story of her arrival and shipwreck. She lies in deep water, half-buried in the sand of the bottom, and enterprising divers are now busy with modern scientific appliances trying to recover the "pieces of eight" in her war-chest, and the silver plate which, according to a dispatch of Walsingham's, was the dinner-service of the "Grandee of Spain" who commanded her. But it was on the shores of the "island of Ireland" that the most tragic disasters of the Armada took place. Its wrecks strewed the north and west coasts. Fitzwilliam, the "Deputy" or the Viceroy, in Dublin, and Bingham, the Governor of Connaught, had taken precautions to prevent the Spaniards finding shelter, water, and food in the ports by reinforcing the western garrisons. Bingham feared the Irish might be friendly to the Spaniards, and industriously spread among the coast population tales that if they landed the foreigners would massacre the old and carry the young away into slavery. The people of the ports, who had long traded with Spain, knew better, but some of the rude fisher-folk of the west coast perhaps believed the slander. Where shipwrecked crews fell into the hands of Bingham's men no mercy was shown them. He marched four hundred prisoners into Galway, and his troops massacred them in cold blood, and then he reported that, "having made a clean despatch of them both within the town, and in the country abroad, he rested Sunday all day, giving praise and thanks to God for Her Majesty's most happy success in that action, and our deliverance from such dangerous enemies."