by Neil Hanson
The English cannons fired in a relentless drum roll. A flash and a gout of red flame lit up each gunport in turn, and powder residue spattered into the sea and was swept away in the wake. Dense, acrid clouds of black gunsmoke clung to the water, whipped into wraiths and tendrils by the wind, but constantly renewed by the next salvo from the guns. The screaming whine of shot through the air and the splash and hiss as some fell harmlessly into the sea was almost drowned in the splintering crash of iron on wood and the rending sound as sails and rigging were ripped apart. The screens and waistcloths hid the Spanish soldiers massed at the rails from sight, but the agonized cries of wounded men told their own tale, and the barrage of roaring, concussive noise from the guns held its own terrors. Not a man on either side, not even the most seasoned seamen and soldiers, had ever experienced the like, and for the conscripts—pressed men and raw recruits used to no louder noise than the church bells or the lowing of the oxen around their home villages—the barrage must have sounded as if the gates of Hell had been opened; many were unmanned by fear.
The gundecks were a bedlam of noise and confusion. The blasting of the guns was so loud that even orders bellowed through cupped hands into a man’s ear remained unheard, and prolonged exposure to the detonations in that dark, confined space rendered every man of the sweat-soaked, near-naked guncrews temporarily, and often permanently, deaf. This deck of the deaf communicated as much by sign as speech. Crewmen ran to and from the shot-lockers carrying cannonballs and cartridges to the guns. They burned their hands and cursed as they hauled at their cannon, the barrels glowing a dull blood-red with the heat of repeated firing. As each gun was discharged, it was unroped, hauled in and swabbed out. The drenched sponges spat and hissed steam as they were rammed home to clean the powder residue from the bore, and the stink of scorching wool mingled with the sulphurous reek of powder smoke. In places the burned remnants of spent cartridges swabbed from the cannons littered the decks inches deep, and powder spills on the planking flared and ignited by stray sparks were frantically doused with water. The cannon was reloaded, run out and lashed back into place. The gunner adjusted his aim and then the deck shook beneath their feet as the great gun roared and the recoil tossed the three-ton monster back against the restraining ropes as if it were a toy.
Don Alonso de Leiva’s Rata Encoronada was the outermost ship in the formation and as the Ark crossed astern de Leiva altered course, aligning himself broadside to broadside with the English flagship. Behind him came the great carrack, Martin de Bertendona’s Regazona, the largest ship in the entire Armada, followed by the rest of the Levant squadron. Believing that the Rata was “the Admiral,” the flagship “wherein the Duke was supposed to be,” Howard exchanged fire “until she was rescued by several ships of the Spanish army.” The lack of manoeuvrability of the Spanish great ships had at once been exposed; whenever the Rata attempted to come up into the wind to face its attackers, she lost steerage way and was pushed back by wind and tide, drifting helpless, broadside on to the English fleet, and making no headway at all.
De Leiva’s wing had crumbled under the first assault of the English ships and “certain ships basely took to flight,” crowding and disrupting the remaining ships of the Armada as they fled downwind and even becoming entangled with Recalde’s Biscayans on the opposite wing, as much as two miles from their own designated position. In turn, many of the Biscayans fled before the cannonades from the other English ships, for at the same time as Howard’s group was attacking the Levant squadron, a group led by Drake in the Revenge and Frobisher in the Triumph—at 1,100 tons larger even than the Regazona—attacked the far wing of the Armada commanded by the Vice-Admiral Juan Martinez de Recalde. His flagship, San Juan de Portugal, the largest of the galleons, swung to face the attack alone. “The enemy assailed him with great discharging of ordnance, without closing, whereby his ship suffered much in her rigging, her forestay was cut and her foremast had two great shot within,” but Recalde “stood fast and abode the assault of the enemy, although he saw that he was being left unsupported, for the ships of the rearguard were shrouding themselves in the main body of the Armada.”9
The motives of Recalde and the other captains at that moment remain unclear. Medina-Sidonia inclined to the belief that Recalde had either become separated from them by accident or had been deliberately deserted by them, yet both seem implausible. The Portuguese ships were manned by battle-hardened seamen who fought with great resolve and courage throughout the rest of the campaign and, famed for his skill and bravery, Recalde was too experienced to have made such a potentially fatal mistake. He had already seen enough to know that the English tactics were to lay off at long range and use their greater speed and the power, rate of fire and accuracy of their armaments to knock the Armada to pieces. He must have known that the only hope of drawing them in to close range was by offering them the target of an isolated and vulnerable enemy.
Never in the history of naval warfare had a single ship isolated by its enemies not been boarded. It was the only way to ensure that a valuable prize was captured intact and men like Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher had never been known to spurn the chance of a prize. Recalde’s own ship would be in great peril against superior English numbers, but if he could attach his grappling hooks to one or two of his enemies the rest of his squadron could then return to the fray, tip the battle the other way and perhaps provoke a general mêlée in which more and more of the English would be forced into hand-to-hand combat. Yet if Recalde had adopted such a strategy, it was in defiance of a direct order from his commander and it is unsurprising that Medina-Sidonia was left to draw his own conclusions.
A second galleon, Don Diego Pimentel’s San Mateo, “putting her head as close up to the wind as possible, did not reply to their fire but waited for them in the hope of bringing them to close quarters.” The English ships were not drawn into the trap. They closed to within 300 yards but remained at that range, bombarding the San Juan de Portugal and the San Mateo with their long guns for almost an hour. When Medina-Sidonia saw his vice-admiral’s ship surrounded he ordered his helm put hard over, “struck her fore-topsail and let fly the sheets.” The fleeing ships from the vanguard and rearguard were also “peremptorily ordered to luff and face the enemy.” They waited, sails hanging limp, as the fighting ships drifted slowly towards them on the wind, but as the range closed, the English fleet broke off the action and withdrew, leaving the Biscayan squadron to nurse the battered San Juan back into the midst of the Armada. Captain Vanegas, the gunnery officer on the San Martin, estimated that during this first battle the English fleet had fired 2,000 cannonballs, compared to 750 from the Armada. It was a fair reflection of the greater ease of handling of the English guns and of the greater skill of the English guncrews, and was to be repeated and even exceeded in all the subsequent battles.
Medina-Sidonia immediately re-formed his fleet from the purely defensive formation into attacking columns but, although they maintained a dogged pursuit for three hours, the English treated them with something bordering on contempt, closing or widening the range as they pleased, firing a salvo and then dancing out of range once more. Tiring of this profitless exercise, Medina-Sidonia eventually called off the chase and both fleets resumed their eastward progress, the Armada in the van, the English fleet a mile or two in trail. The official Spanish log reported that “the Duke collected the fleet, being unable to do anything more, because the enemy having recovered the wind, and their ships being very nimble and of such good steerage, they did with them whatsoever they desired.”10
If not wholly unexpected—the Spanish commanders all knew by repute if not experience how fast and weatherly the English ships were—it was still a harsh lesson for them to absorb. Tied to its rigid formation, the Armada could proceed only at the speed of its slowest vessel, and that was wearisomely slow, barely faster than a rowing boat with a single oarsman. The pinnace dispatched by Drake after the opening battle off Plymouth reached Seymour in the Straits of Dover in well und
er two days. In the same wind conditions, the Armada travelled no further than the Isle of Wight—half the distance—in more than twice the time. Its heavy, square-rigged ships were awkward to manoeuvre and could not sail close to the wind. Many were not designed for the sea conditions they faced—hulks and transport ships routinely hugged the coasts and fled for the nearest port at the approach of a storm—or were so grossly overloaded with fighting castles, men and supplies that they were at constant risk of foundering in a heavy swell. But even the elite Spanish galleons used to escort the flota from the New World were at a marked disadvantage against the lightly crewed, streamlined English ships that, as a Spanish officer ruefully admitted, could sail away from even the fastest Armada ship, the San Juan Bautista, “as if we were standing still.” The worst of the English fleet “without their maincourse or topsails, can beat the best sailers we have.” If the English fleet was becalmed, then the oar-driven galleasses might be able to close with them and use their rams, grappling irons and fighting troops to overwhelm them, but while the winds blew, it seemed that the English ships would always be able to find enough searoom to keep the Armada at bay.
During this first battle the thunder of the guns had been clearly audible in Plymouth and for forty miles around. Anxious watchers crowding the shore opposite the Eddystone rocks, after sleeping out under the stars on the beaches and clifftops, had been able to catch glimpses of the fleets in action as they drifted eastwards with the wind and tide, but at such a distance, among the fogs of gunsmoke and the confusion of battle, they were unable to tell which side had gained an advantage. The participants in the fighting were little more certain. Pedro de Valdes dismissed the fighting as of small consequence. “Our ordnance played a long while on both sides, without coming to hand stroke [hand-to-hand fighting]. There was little harm done, because the fight was far off.” Even Recalde’s ship had not suffered irreparable damage. “His galleon had been sore beaten,” the foremast damaged, some of the stays and rigging shot away and there were a number of casualties; one soldier cited fifteen dead and an unknown number of wounded—by the standard battlefield equation of ten wounded men for every fatality, around a further 150 of the ship’s complement of 543 crew and soldiers would have been casualties—but the ship’s hull was intact.11
In fact, the most serious damage to the Armada occurred around four o’clock in the afternoon, after the day’s fighting was over. Having previously manoeuvred with such impressive cohesion in the face of the enemy, Pedro de Valdes’ flagship of the Andalusians, the Nuestra Señora del Rosario, had collided with another of the ships of his squadron, the Catalina, as he went to the aid of Recalde, and “brake her spritsail and crossyard.” Unable to maintain steerage way—such heavy vessels relied as much on the foresails as the rudder to maintain their course—the Rosario was helpless as “another ship fell foul with her likewise in the selfsame manner, and brake her bowsprit, halyards and forecourse.”
A few minutes later there was a massive explosion from one of the Guipuzcoan ships, the San Salvador, clearly audible to the English ships following over a mile upwind. The stern powder store had been blown apart. Whatever the cause, a stray spark, a careless gunner trailing a length of smouldering match, or even sabotage—survivors spread a story that a Flemish or German gunner had deliberately “cast fire into the powder barrels” after being flogged by the captain—the effect was instantaneous. The iron-hard oak hull contained most of the force of the blast and channelled it upwards, sending it ripping through the afterdecks. The poop deck and two decks of the sterncastle were blasted apart, blowing blazing timbers as high as the mast tops and raining down debris on the surrounding ships. At least 120 men were killed instantly, though another witness who helped to take off the survivors put the total of dead at “more than 200,” and the remnants of the decking were littered with burned and broken bodies and severed limbs. Blood-red flames and clouds of foul black smoke belched from the shattered decks and the smell of brimstone hung heavy in the air. Within moments the ship was ablaze from stem to stern, burning with such ferocity that many of the crewmen who had survived the initial blast threw themselves into the sea to escape the searing heat and were drowned.
Medina-Sidonia at once “discharged a piece of ordnance” signalling the Armada to halt, and steered back towards the San Salvador, “in which was the Paymaster General of this Armada, with part of the King’s treasure.” Smaller vessels secured lines to the burning ship and towed her round to face the wind so that the fire would not be driven towards the forecastle, where another huge store of powder was kept. Some of the burned and wounded were transferred to one of the two hospital ships in the Armada, and as the fires were brought under control, two galleasses began to tow the San Salvador back into the formation. Just as this was happening, the Rosario, almost impossible to steer without her headsails and pitching and tossing in the rising swell, was hit by a sudden squall. Most of the stays securing the foremast had snapped in the earlier collision and the unbraced foremast now “brake close by the hatches [at deck level] and fell upon the mainmast, so as it was impossible to repair that hurt but in some good space of time.” Even with 422 men aboard to wield axes, saws and knives, the sheer mass of shattered masts, yards and spars, tangled rigging and torn sails obstructed any attempt to effect swift repairs, and Pedro de Valdes “discharged three or four great pieces, to the end all the fleet might know what distress I was in.” One witness claimed that “there were none came to succour her for that the wind did blow much, the sea was grown and the English did follow us,” but although the sea was growing increasingly choppy and the wind still freshening, Medina-Sidonia’s official diary claimed that the San Martin had then approached the crippled ship and succeeded in passing a tow line to it. “Though great diligence was used, neither weather nor sea permitted of it,” and no sooner had it been secured than it parted with a crack like a cannon shot. The strengthening wind and rising sea made it impossible to get another line to the ship, “and so she was left without sails” as night was coming on.12
At that point Diego Flores de Valdes, cousin of Pedro but still harbouring his long-standing grievance against him, appeared on the poop deck of the San Martin. His advice, backed by the full authority of his position as the King’s official representative and Medina-Sidonia’s Chief of Staff and principal adviser on all naval matters, was that Medina-Sidonia must at once retake his station at the head of the Armada and continue his eastward course. To heave to in such a sea and rising wind might lead to further accidents among the fleet and would certainly see it scattered. “Although Don Pedro de Valdes is of my blood and a friend,” Flores de Valdes said, a statement that was at least half-correct, “without doubt, by the morning more than half the fleet would be missing . . . the enemy’s fleet being so near, all the Armada should not be imperilled,” he went on, “esteeming it certain that by shortening sail, the expedition would be ruined” for the sake of a single ship.
Medina-Sidonia claimed to have resisted at first, but then gave way, after ensuring that Ojeda’s small galleon, four pinnaces, a galleass and the vice-flagship of the Andalusians, the San Francisco, were detached to go to the aid of the stranded ship “so as to take her in tow and remove her people, but neither the one nor the other was found possible, owing to the heavy seas, the darkness and the weather.” By then the San Martin had already fired a signal gun, shaken out her sails and led the Armada on up the Channel, leaving Pedro de Valdes “comfortless in the sight of the whole fleet.” As the Rosario dropped further and further astern and finally disappeared from sight, Medina-Sidonia remained on the deck of the San Martin, where he had been all day, eating nothing but a frugal supper of bread and cheese to the sporadic accompaniment of the sound of gunfire; “three or four shots were heard” in the gathering darkness behind him.13
It was the first of several crucial turning points in the campaign. Given that the chosen strategy was to engage the English fleet in hand-to-hand combat, the crippled Rosario coul
d have been turned to the Armada’s advantage, by using the ship as bait. If one of the English ships had been drawn in by greed for a fat prize or even a false promise of surrender, it could have been grappled and held for boarding, forcing the other English commanders either to relinquish one of their own great ships or to fight the close-quarter battle that the Spaniards were seeking. Instead, Medina-Sidonia’s decision to abandon the Rosario dealt a body blow to morale within the whole Armada, by suggesting that any ship in difficulties or surrounded by the enemy might also be left to its fate. At least one officer of the Armada laid the blame for the subsequent defeat on this decision. “These misfortunes presaged our failure. The vile omen depressed the whole Armada.”
It must also have been apparent that Medina-Sidonia’s lumbering hybrid—neither a battle fleet nor a self-contained invasion force— would struggle to achieve its aims. Had he not been burdened with the requirement to meet the bulk of the invasion force off the coast of Flanders before proceeding to a predetermined landing place, he would have been free to choose the time and place of an invasion with a greater expectation of success. By the same token, had he not had the responsibility of keeping to the pace of the slowest hulk and protecting his vulnerable ships at all times from attack, he might have been able to pursue more aggressive tactics to force the English fleet to engage in a general mêlée that might have brought a Spanish victory. As it was, he could only sail on to the east, hoping that a change of wind or the miracle on which so many confident hopes had been predicated might bring a change of fortune.
Earlier that evening, Lord Howard had given orders for a blue flag to be raised, summoning his vice-admirals and commanders to a council of war, to pool and assess what had been learned from the day’s encounters. They met in the Admiral’s sumptuously appointed cabin, upholstered with green hides and green and yellow hangings, and were able to exult in “our swiftness in outsailing them, our nimbleness in getting into the weather of them, our little draught of water in comparison to theirs, our stout bearing up of our sides in all huge winds when theirs must stoop, to their great disadvantage many ways, our yawness in staying well and casting about twice for their once and so discharging our broadsides of ordnance double for their single, we carrying as good and great artillery as they do and to better proof, and having far better gunners.” But his commanders also had some cause for alarm, not only at the size of the Armada and the skill and discipline that its captains and crews had shown in manoeuvres, but also at the lack of damage to the Spanish ships.
