The Enterprise of England

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘You are looking very cheerful, Kit.’ Andrew leaned on the rail beside me, watching the dip and thrust of the oars. We were making good time, though the wind was not in our favour at the moment.

  ‘It’s good to be going home,’ I said simply.

  ‘Aye. I’ve had my fill of Amsterdam.’

  ‘I liked the Hollanders.’ I wanted to be fair. ‘Apart from van Leyden and Parker. They are not so different from the English.’

  ‘Perhaps. But you cannot say you liked that gaggle of lawyers, picking over the evidence like crows over a dead cow.’

  I laughed. ‘I suspect lawyers are the same the world over. The longer time they can take over their business, the higher the fees they can charge! At least Norreys outwitted them in the matter of the muskets.’

  ‘Aye.’ Andrew grinned. Norreys had firmly taken possession of all the muskets, gunpowder and shot, carrying everything off with him as he returned to England, well ahead of us.

  ‘If we have to row all the way,’ Andrew said, with a jerk of his head toward the sailors, ‘we won’t be home for a week.’

  ‘I expect they’ll hoist sail once we reach the sea. It’s so narrow here that there’s no room to tack. They can move faster under oars.’

  ‘You sound very knowledgeable in the ways of ships.’

  ‘I made a long voyage by sea from Portugal to England. I came to understand a little then.’

  ‘Why do you never speak of Portugal, Kit?’

  He asked without any intention of probing unkindly, I was sure, but I stiffened.

  ‘Because I do not choose to. That part of my life is over. I choose to forget it.’

  I knew that I sounded rude and ungracious, but what else could I be? It was impossible for me to say to him, truthfully, ‘I was the daughter of a distinguished professor, and lived a privileged life amongst the Portuguese aristocracy and intelligentsia. My grandfather is one of the greatest landowners in the country. I did not even dress myself or brush my hair in those days – my every need was met by servants. Despite being a girl, I was taught by some of the great scholars of our country. Until it all ended in blood, fire and horror.’

  No, I could say none of these things, but I was sorry that Andrew looked offended, for he had been a good and trustworthy ally on more than one occasion now, and I did not want to lose his friendship. Let him think of me only as a young man like himself, an assistant physician and a code-breaker for Walsingham, and forget my Portuguese past. I began to talk of the Good Venture, its sleek lines and manoeuvrability., and the difficult moment passed.

  We had been unable to set out from Amsterdam until late afternoon, but Captain Faulconer was confident we would reach the coast in time to catch the tide, though it would mean night sailing in order to reach Dover. Before we left, a message had reached him that the Spanish fleet was now anchored off Gravelines, not far from the French border and the nearest point in the Spanish Netherlands to the English coast. Thanks to Admiral Justin’s squadron of vlieboten, the fleet could not – for the moment, at least – move further along the coast of Flanders to rendezvous with Parma and his barge-borne troops, for these were the shallow waters where the great warships could not venture, unless the shoals were clearly indicated, and the Dutch sailors (who knew the waters intimately) had removed all the sea marks.

  As we drew nearer the coast, the wind began to rise, blowing strongly from the southwest. Clouds were building up and the sky grew dark. It would be a rough crossing to Dover and as we met the first waves offshore, several of the soldiers turned pale and one began to puke. A sailor took him roughly by the shoulders with a curse and thrust his head over the starboard gunwale of the ship, so that the wind carried the vomit away into the sea. The ship began to dance and pitch, but the sails were soon raised and she heeled over and began to cut through the waves like a dagger through silk. I drew a deep breath of the salt-laden air. It was wonderful to be moving swiftly at last, and the Good Venture stood out into the open sea with her starboard side low in the water. I saw that Andrew, solidly confident on shore, wore a look of some alarm.

  ‘We shall need to give the shoals off Flanders a wide berth,’ Captain Faulconer said in my ear. He had come to stand in the stern beside the helmsman, keeping a sharp eye on the course he was steering. ‘The Hollanders may know those waters without marks, but I am not so confident. They shift constantly. They may not be quite as much of a death-trap as our Goodwin Sands, but I should not like to find myself amongst them with the dark coming up as fast as it is.’

  It was indeed growing dark. We must have taken longer to navigate the canal than I had realised. We were more than a month past the summer solstice now, and it must be nearly ten of the clock. In our haste to make the crossing before the Spanish fleet moved nearer, we had not taken a meal sitting in the captain’s cabin, but had eaten, like the sailors, on the wing, helping ourselves to rough chunks of bread and some sort of meat pasty, brought out on deck in buckets. For a moment, a chill finger of fear touched me, so that I shivered. I should not like to navigate these waters in the dark, between an armed enemy fleet and the dead hand of the Goodwins.

  We had been sailing, I suppose, a couple of hours south along Flanders, but standing off from the coast, when I noticed a flickering light ahead of us. Although we seemed to be moving fast, the wind was almost head-on, so that the sails were close hauled. And although we had caught the last of the ebb tide as we left the Low Countries, the tide had turned now and was against us. So that, though we appeared to be moving rapidly through the sea, we were probably not making nearly as much headway relative to the land.

  The captain, who had gone forward for a time to see to the close adjusting of the sails, was coming back to the stern, where I had found myself a seat on a water barrel. I had not seen Andrew for some time and wondered whether he too was feeling the effects of sea sickness.

  ‘Captain,’ I said, pointing ahead and slightly to port, ‘what is that bright glow over there? It looks like the lights of a great city, but I thought there were only small towns along this coast.’

  He came to stand beside me and raised his hand above his eyes to cut out the small amount of moonlight breaking through the racing clouds. For a long moment he said nothing.

  ‘Fire. It is fire.’

  ‘Fire? Would the Spanish have set fire to a town? I thought they were well within their own territory.’

  ‘No. I think not. It looks like fireships to me.’

  Fireships! I knew what that meant. Floating infernos that could wreak terrible destruction. Loaded with gunpowder, they would be set alight, their sails trimmed to carry them down on an enemy fleet, while their emergency crews leapt into boats and escaped. Only a few years before, the Dutch had used fireships in an attempt to break the siege of Antwerp by the Spanish, but they had failed and the city, one of the great cities of Europe, had been lost. Leicester had made an ill-judged attempt to send fireships down on to the Spanish besiegers off Sluys – his one effort to aid the garrison – only to have them turned back against him. Were the Spanish now using fireships against our English fleet?

  ‘Ours or theirs?’ I asked.

  ‘No way to tell, from this distance. We must go nearer.’

  ‘Nearer to the Spanish fleet?’ My voice shook with alarm.

  ‘We must.’ He was brusque. ‘If the Spaniards are sending fireships into our fleet, there will be men in the water. We cannot sail past and leave them to drown.’

  ‘They may be English fireships, sent against the Spaniards.’

  ‘They may.’

  He turned away, shouting for his second in command.

  ‘This ship was commandeered by Sir Francis Walsingham,’ I said, ashamed of my fear even as I spoke. ‘Your orders were to sail directly to Dover.’

  He barely glanced at me.

  ‘You are the only civilian on board this ship, Dr Alvarez. I have a crew trained in gunnery. Captain Joplyn has a squadron of men who can handle muskets or engage in hand-to-
hand fighting, if it should come to that. Our duty now is to investigate and, if necessary, join our fleet to rescue survivors or engage the enemy.’

  ‘Well,’ I said with resignation, ‘at least I can patch up the wounded.’ I tried to appear calm, but the thought of sailing straight into battle made my stomach clench with fear.

  ‘Aye. That you can do.’ Faulconer turned away.

  The fireships, if that was what they were, must have been farther away than I realised. With the wind and the tide largely against us as we headed even more south-westwards, dawn had broken by the time we came within sight of Gravelines, where the Spanish fleet had been anchored. Even before we could see anything clearly, we could hear the boom of cannon. The pall of black smoke cast by the fireships had been augmented by clouds of paler smoke from the ships’ guns. We could see the flashes as the cannon fired, followed by the ear-splitting crack of the explosions, like lightning in a storm, followed moments later by the crack of thunder.

  As we had run south, the sailors not occupied in handling the ship prepared our own six cannon, and I found myself playing the part of one of those young boys, such as Captain Thoms had been, carrying gunpowder and shot up from the hold to place in readiness for the gunners on the gundeck. Andrew’s men had primed their muskets and stood watching expectantly as we drew nearer the battle. Even those who had been prone with sea sickness were on their feet, alert, looking eagerly ahead.

  As I passed Andrew amidships, I said accusingly, ‘You and your men look as though you are enjoying this.’

  He laughed. There was a gleam of wild delight in his eye. ‘This is what we are trained for, Kit.’

  ‘Well, I am not,’ I said dourly. ‘I am trained to save lives, not to take them.’

  When we were at last close enough to make out something of what had happened, we could see the burnt-out hulks of eight ships and even to my untrained eyes it was clear that the fireships had been launched downwind from the English fleet on to the anchored Spanish ships as they lay, apparently securely, at anchor in the night. Now the Armada fleet was scattered across a wide expanse of ocean in disarray.

  ‘Our fireships have caused them to panic,’ one of the ship’s officers said in satisfaction. ‘By the looks of things they have cut loose from their anchors and fled in all directions. Medina Sidonia will have a fine time of it, trying to call them to order now.’

  I thought with a shudder how terrifying it must have been to be roused from sleep to see a monster of fire bearing down on you, with nowhere to escape except by a leap into the midnight sea. And I knew that most sailors, superstitiously, refused to learn to swim, for they believed that, if you fell or were cast overboard, it was better to drown quickly than to struggle against death, only to drown in the end.

  I saw the captain coming toward me and caught him by the sleeve.

  ‘The fireships were certainly ours, then?’

  ‘Aye.’ He grinned mercilessly, rubbing his hands together in glee. I had not seen him so animated before. But I thought of those men, leaping into the Channel, their clothes perhaps on fire, weighed down by their breastplates and helmets.

  ‘Will any still be alive, the men from the ships? You said you would come to try to save them.’ I knew it was a poor chance, after the time it had taken us to arrive, but a few might still be struggling to stay alive, or stranded on sandbanks amid the rising tide.

  ‘Save them? I came to save Englishmen.’

  ‘What will happen to them?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’ He stared at me blankly.

  ‘The men in the water.’

  ‘They will drown, of course. Do you expect us to rescue them? Spaniards?’ He laughed incredulously and I was silenced.

  Yes, they were Spaniards. But. . . the stench of burning flesh, the breastplate pressed to the chest like a branding iron, the drag down, down into the green depths of the sea. Fire and water. Lungs struggling for air. No kindly landfall now, only the dark hell of the ocean bed.

  ‘There are English galley slaves on some of those ships,’ I protested.

  He shrugged. ‘If a ship goes down, the galley slaves go with it. They are chained to their rowing benches.’

  He turned his back on me and hurried away. English galley slaves or Spanish sailors, he had no mercy for them.

  Never caught up in a battle before, on land or sea, I found it difficult to understand what was happening. It was clear that the enemy ships were no longer in the formidable crescent formation which had sailed inexorably up the lower reaches of the Channel. Our fireships, if they had done nothing else, had cut a swathe through Sidonia’s careful formation and even I could see that the Spanish ships were randomly scattered across the sea in front of us. Already it was clear that one or two had sailed too near the shoals and were stranded there. Our English navy, bearing down on the Armada with all the strength of a following wind, were keeping their distance, so that the enemy could not execute their favourite tactic of grappling and boarding. Instead, the English ships kept up a regular bombardment from their guns from windward, so that, as the Spanish turned broadside to them, in an attempt to level their own cannon, they heeled over, exposing their lower hulls. The English gunners were taking careful aim, intent on holing them below the waterline, which would inevitably sink them.

  Our own Good Venture had swept away to starboard, and was now aiming to swing round and join the English fleet. As one of the sailors ran past, I called out to him, ‘Why aren’t the Spanish ships firing back?’

  He paused only for a moment, grasping the rigging he was about to climb.

  ‘Poor gunners, the Spanish,’ he said. ‘They fire once, then get ready to board and fight hand-to-hand. Can’t reload fast enough, see? No match for our lads.’

  With that he began to swarm up the mainmast as easily as if it had been a ladder on dry land, though we were heeling over so far that he was half laid over on his back as he climbed. It made me dizzy to watch him. I dragged my eyes away and saw that we were approaching very near one of the outlying Spanish ships, a large carrack at least twice our size, probably one of the merchant ships commandeered for the Spanish fleet. I realised that Captain Faulconer did not mean to sail tamely round to join the fleet. He meant to attack now.

  Almost as soon as I grasped what was happening, I heard the gunports on our port side flip open. The gun crews were standing ready and as the captain dropped his hand, holding, absurdly, a red silk handkerchief, another officer, standing at the bottom of the steps leading down to the gundeck, dropped his hand. Below us, the gunners lit the powder in the pans and the three guns fired simultaneously. The ship bucked like a frightened horse and for a moment I thought we had been hit, before I realised it was the recoil of the cannon. Already the men were reloading and they seemed to be cheering, but the sound came muffled to my ears, which were deafened by the noise.

  They had scored a hit. I could see timbers falling from the superstructure of the Spanish ship, caught up in a tangle of ropes and canvas. Then, before our crew could let fly a second volley, I watched a single Spanish gun run out, pointing directly at us. So they did not always abandon their guns. Everything seemed to move in slow motion, in a silent world – the Spanish cannon lifting its muzzle like a pointing hound, the captain raising his hand to signal the next firing from our ship, while all around a tangle of ships lumbered though the smoke and flashes of the gun battle.

  Then somebody hit me hard on the back so that I fell to my hands and knees on the deck. Even deaf as I was, I sensed something fly over my head and crash into the rigging where moments ago the sailor had been climbing. Dust and fragments of rope fell around me, and there was a heavy thump that I could feel through the planks of the deck. For a few minutes I was dazed and confused, then I managed to get to my feet. Apart from a few bruises I was unhurt.

  I looked around, still unsure what had happened. Then I realised an enemy cannon ball must have hit the rigging of the mainmast close to where I had been standing. Whoever had pushed me
over had almost certainly saved my life. The thump I had felt on the deck was the sailor falling from the mast. Still weak in the knees, I staggered over to him. There was no blood that I could see, but his eyes were closed and he was not moving. I knelt down beside him and felt for the pulse in his neck.

  ‘Is he dead?’ It was one of the other sailors, leaning over me.

  I shook my head. ‘Stunned. And he may have broken some bones. Did you see how far he fell?’

  ‘About half the height of the mast. Lucky bugger! Any higher and he’d have gone into the sea. Lower and the bastards would have got him with their shot.’

  ‘Was it you pushed me over?’

  ‘Aye.’ He grinned, showing a set of broken and missing teeth. ‘Near thing, that was. Want to keep your head down when there’s shot flying.’

  ‘I’m grateful. You saved my life.’

  He shrugged. ‘Any time. Watch yourself.’ And he went away whistling, as if he was enjoying a day of leisure, instead of leaping along a deck that shuddered as another round blasted out from our cannon.

  I spared a glance at the Spanish ship. Somehow we had manoeuvred round to their windward side and had already broken two great holes through the ship’s port side, one below the waterline and one above. They could not keep her heeling over like that for long. As soon as she was on an even keel the sea would rush in through that lower hole and the ship would soon founder. Through my muffled ears I could hear faint cries from the bowels of the ship, from the trapped galley slaves or the doomed sailors. There was nothing I could do for them. Our own fallen sailor, however, I could help.

  Captain Faulconer soon abandoned the maimed ship to her fate and brought the Good Venture round to head toward the rest of the English fleet. The mainsail drooped, for the damage to the rigging meant it could not be properly trimmed, but the strong wind on our port bow bore us along on staysail and foresail. The heavy Spanish ships were wallowing about, scattered across the sea and seemingly unable to make such good use of the wind as our small, nimble English ships could. They were being blown inexorably up the channel towards the German Ocean.