GRACE O’MALLEY. THE PIRATE QUEEN may not last long on Broadway, but I am glad to see Grace O’Malley receiving attention. This Wikipedia article says that “Grace O’Malley (c. 1530 -c.1603) [was] an important figure in Irish legend but was in fact a larger than life figure from 16th century Irish history.” My father used to tell us about her at the dinner table. His mother was an O’Malley and he claimed we were descended from Grace O’Malley. My father referred to her as Granya Wales (or so he pronounced it). (The Wikipedia article spells it Gráinne Nà Mháille). His favorite story about her was about the Spanish Armada. The remnants of the Armada made their way back to Spain along the west coast of Ireland. My father said that when Granya Wales met Queen Elizabeth, Elizabeth asked her what had happened to the Spanish sailors. Granya Wales assured her that the Spaniards had tried to land but that her men had waded into the surf and “slain them to the last man.” My father laughed at this. He said that there were still many descendants of the Spanish sailors in the west of Ireland: they were the Black Irish. The Black Irish, according to this Wikipedia article, are people of Irish descent with very dark brown or black hair. My father was not the only one to believe that the Black Irish descended from the Armada sailors.
Wikipedia, however, accepts what Granya Wales told Queen Elizabeth: “Although the term Black Irish is sometimes accompanied by a claim suggesting the physical traits to be the result of Iberian admixture originating with survivors of the Spanish Armada, the genetic contributions of the latter were likely to have been insignificant, as most Armada survivors were killed on the beaches, and much of the remainder eventually escaped from Ireland. Wikipedia describes another theory which I touched on here here. “In recently published books (Blood of the Isles by Bryan Sykes and Origins of Britons by Stephen Oppenheimer), the authors (both acclaimed geneticists) argue that ancient inhabitants of Ireland can be traced back to the Iberian Peninsula, as a result of a series of migrations that took place during the Mesolithic and Neolithic Age. These movements theoretically laid the foundations for present-day populations in the British Isles.”