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54
MUNSTER
can be traced easily. Kingsley
in Westward Ho!
has dealt, not overfaithfully, with the story of that
enterprise which ended in the wholesale butchery of
combatants who surrendered at discretion suggest-
ing, very unworthily, that the brutal deed was excused
by
its deterrent effect. We have never heard that
it stopped the landing at Kinsale not many years
later. There is ground to hope that Raleigh has
been wrongfully charged with the actual perpetration
of that black deed. But in truth the blackest chapter
in all Irish history is precisely
that which deals with
the Desmond wars under Elizabeth, which ended in
the complete devastation of this lovely province. Not
far from Tralee they show you the spot where the last
Earl of Desmond was captured and the rough mound
a little way from it that marks his : grave and still when
the moaning of wind and wave is heard over that
countryside, they
call it the Desmond's keene.
To escape from all this record of civilized bar-
barity, the mind gladly turns back to far older and
by far less barbarous days. Brandon keeps the name
of the most picturesque figure in the long
roll of Irish
saints St Brendan, the Navigator, who was born
a little west of Tralee, at Barra, close to the promontory
of Fenit, in or about the year 484. He was
baptized by a bishop named Ere, whose name still
lingers in Termon Eire, a townland three miles north