whose Description of the Western Isles was published the year after Sacheverell's book, gives the following acccount of this expedition:
"One of the ships of the Spanish Armada, called the Florida, perished in this Bay, having been blown up by one Smallet, of Dumbarton, in the year 1588. There was a great sum of gold and money on board, which disposed the Earl of Argyle and some Englishmen to attempt the recovery of it. Some pieces of gold and money and a golden chain was taken out of her. I have seen some fine brass cannon, some pieces of eight, teeth, beads and pins that had been taken out of that ship. Several of the inhabitants of Mull told me that they had conversed with their relations that were living at the harbour when the ship was blown up."[1]
"One Smallet" was an ancestor of the great novelist, who in his Humphry Clinker artfully brings old Matthew Bramble to Tobermory so that he may celebrate the great deed of his forefather.
COLVAY.
According to his account "the divers found the hull of the vessel still entire, but so covered with sand that they could not make their way between decks."[2] Mr. Froude mentions the loss of this great Spanish galleon, but did not know the name of the harbour.[3] Sir Walter Scott, who visited Tobermory a century and a quarter after Sacheverell, said that, "the richness of the round steep green knolls, clothed with copse and glancing with cascades, and a pleasant peep at a small fresh-water loch embosomed among them—the view of the bay surrounded and guarded by the island of Colvay—the gliding of two or three vessels in the more distant sound—and the row of the gigantic Ardnamurchan mountains closing the scene to the north, almost justify his eulogium who in 1688 declared the Bay of Tobermory might equal any prospect in Italy."[4] With one thing Sacheverell was not content, and that was the weather. "With the dog-days," he says, "the autumnal rains began, and for six weeks we had scarce a good day. The whole frame of nature seemed inhospitable, bleak, stormy, rainy, windy."
