by Neil Hanson
It was unclear to the watchers on the Bill whether Frobisher had been unable to manoeuvre and had dropped anchor to wait for the westward drift of the battle to again give him the weather gauge and the leeway to escape, or whether the master mariner was trying to lure the Spaniards into a trap. Frobisher had haunted these waters for ten years, often basing himself on the Isle of Wight and preying on shipping sailing between the Baltic and North Sea ports and Spain and the Mediterranean, though he was not above seizing merchantmen inbound for Southampton as well. The goods and cargoes he stole were unloaded and sold at Mead Holes before his victims had disappeared over the horizon. He knew every inch of the coast, every cove and headland, every rock and shoal, and every quirk of the tides and currents.
Portland Bill divides two large bays and the configuration of the coast creates strong eddies on both the flood and ebb tides. The steep slopes of the Bill continue beneath the sea, but just to the east the Shambles, a long bank of sand and broken shell, creates a dangerous shallows. A tidal rip, the Portland Race, the fiercest on the South Coast, runs from the tip of the Bill towards this bank, reaching as much as seven knots at peak tide, while the eddy moves at one knot in the opposite direction. The division between these opposing flows is abrupt; one minute the current pulls one way, the next the opposite, and the surface water gives little sign of the turbulence immediately below it. The force of the current alone was dangerously destabilizing to low-waisted craft like the galleasses, but they faced the additional peril of the vortexes arising in the water where the energies generated by the clashing currents of the Race and its eddy are dissipated. The proximity of the cliffs also suggests the dangers of shallow waters and submerged rocks. In fact, there is deep water just offshore, as Frobisher well knew, and it is possible to navigate the Race, but it would be a very brave or foolhardy commander who would attempt it without that knowledge.
Frobisher was able to position himself in the eddy and remain virtually motionless in apparently still water, but, in order to attack, the Spanish galleasses were forced to cross the ferocious current of the Race. Even modern ships with powerful diesel engines can make little or no headway against the Race at full flood, and the oar-driven galleasses were powerless to cross it. Each time they entered that churning water, they were thrown around, pitching and tossing until they were half swamped, and were swept away from their target. As the galleasses approached, Frobisher’s guns unleashed a hail of fire, cutting swathes through the troops massed on deck and the slaves chained at the oars, while the cannon of the galleasses did little damage in reply. Deprived of much of the propulsive power of their oars and faced with that ferocious current, the galleasses made no further attempts to attack, but held off, just within gun range, fighting against the current. From the safe distance of the San Martin it appeared to Medina-Sidonia (and to many later historians) that Don Hugo de Moncada was simply refusing to engage the enemy. “A fine day this has been,” Medina-Sidonia wrote to Moncada that night. “If the galleasses had come up as I expected, the enemy would have had his fill.” But in fact Moncada simply could not attack Frobisher without putting his craft at risk of being swamped.
The galleasses had been “well entertained by the [English] ships for the space of an hour and a half,” but the wind was still backing and as the tide began to ebb Lord Howard led a line of the Queen’s galleons and fighting merchantmen back into the fray, ordering them “to set freshly upon the Spaniards and to go within musket-shot of the enemy before they should discharge any one piece of ordnance, thereby to succour the Triumph.” The help was indirect, for they were once more attacking the Spanish great ships of the rearguard rather than making directly for the galleasses threatening the Triumph, and in fact such assistance was probably neither needed nor wanted by Frobisher, who had been able to hold them at bay with some ease, but, seeing the move, Medina-Sidonia began to lead his own group of sixteen ships to intercept. Once more Recalde found himself surrounded by a dozen enemy ships, fighting alone with “no assistance from any other ship in the fleet.” The changing wind had left Medina-Sidonia’s group as the only Spanish ships to windward of the San Juan, and he signalled the rest of his squadron to put about and go to her aid, before sailing on alone to confront the Ark.12
As the courses of the two flagships converged, the San Martin “turned towards her and lowered her topsails.” Lying broadside to Howard’s ship, Medina-Sidonia was issuing an unmistakable invitation to grapple, board and come to hand-to-hand combat, but those were the tactics of the old era of naval warfare and this was a newer, less chivalrous age. Howard once more spurned the invitation and poured in a broadside for good measure as he passed by “within two or three score [paces].” Each English ship, in line astern, did the same. Then the whole line came about and riddled the San Martin with a second and then a third broadside, while Medina-Sidonia’s gunners made what reply they could. The English gunfire was a continuous drumroll; the San Martin’s reply came in brief staccato bursts. As the Spanish great ships began to reinforce the San Juan, the English galleons surrounding her pulled away and switched their attacks to the San Martin. Beset from all sides, the flagship fought alone for what was claimed to be at least an hour, so shrouded by enemy gunsmoke that she was almost invisible to the rest of the Armada, and the target of “at least 500 cannon balls, some of which struck his hull and others his rigging, carrying away his flagstaff and one of the stays of his mainmast.” The sacred standard was shredded by gunfire, the masts damaged, the yards splintered and the torn rigging hanging in shrouds over the dead soldiers and crew littering its deck.
Previously obscured by the fogs of gunsmoke, Drake’s group now reappeared from out to sea, using the sea breeze that had arisen as the heat of the day increased to launch a sudden and savage downwind attack on the Armada’s seaward wing. “A troop of Her Majesty’s ships and sundry merchants [ships] assailed the Spanish fleet so sharply to the westward that they were all forced to give way and bear room.” As it had done off Plymouth, the wing buckled under the onslaught, adding to the chaos and confusion at the heart of the Armada. “They all seemed to want to take refuge one behind the others, so that they fled from the action and collided together. It is a disgrace to mention it.” Even while the battle raged, men still had to scramble aloft as the wind shifted, scaling the rigging and spreadeagling themselves over the yardarm to furl the sails. It was a perilous task at the best of times, the height above deck level magnifying the ship’s movement, the masts flexing, whipping and swinging through every point of the compass as the ship pitched and tossed in the swell, the timbers groaning and the canvas cracking like gunshots as wind filled the sails. In the heat of battle, with chain-, bar- and dice-shot slicing through the rigging, and musket and arquebus shot filling the air, there can have been no more terrifying experience. 13
The wind had now swung firmly into the south-west, pushing the fleets further and further from Portland Bill and across Lyme Bay, but allowing Oquendo to lead a line of galleons to the rescue of the San Martin. As they approached, the English fleet was rejoined by Frobisher, who had used the outgoing flow of the Portland Race to pull effortlessly clear of his Spanish assailants. As he did so, the fleet drew back from the battle and stood out to sea, moving with such speed that it seemed to the despairing Spaniards as if “they were anchored and the English had wings to fly as and where they wished.” The battle had raged for five hours, “from five of the clock until ten,” but Howard and his commanders had achieved their objective, using their knowledge of the local winds and the pattern of tides and currents to drive the Armada past another potential landing site and safe haven.
There was nothing fortuitous or mystical about the English success, and no recourse was necessary to Drake’s legendary “crystal ball.” The summer winds off the South Coast form a repetitive and predictable pattern. On nine days out of ten, a land breeze will be blowing from the north-east at first light, fading to a brief calm as the rising sun begins to warm the land. The
wind will then swing round through 180 degrees, until the prevailing south-westerlies are blowing from sea to land. Those winds will continue until towards evening, when the sea breeze will again give way, after a brief calm, to the land breeze that prevails during the night. All that the English commanders had done was to use their knowledge of those winds to maximum effect.
Plymouth, Torbay and Portland now lay astern, beyond the Spaniards’ reach in the prevailing south-westerlies, but the most obvious and vulnerable targets, the Isle of Wight and the Solent, still lay ahead as the battle-scarred Armada resumed its formation and its steady eastward course. The carpenters on the San Martin, San Juan and San Mateo worked with frantic haste to repair the worst of the damage. The English ships, once more holding the weather gauge on their enemy, maintained their relentless pursuit and carried out further harrying, sniping raids on the trailing arms of the formation.
At the councils of war that afternoon both sides had more hard lessons to absorb. The Spaniards now had plain evidence that even with the wind at their backs they were unable to close with and board the English ships. Once more their attempts to do so had been “all to little effect, because the enemy seeing that we endeavoured to come to hand-stroke with them, bare room [pulled away], avoiding our attack by reason of the lightness of their vessels.” As Medina-Sidonia complained in yet another dispatch to Parma, “Some of our vessels have been in the very midst of the enemy’s fleet, to induce one of his ships to grapple and begin the fight, but all to no purpose.” He must now have been painfully aware that there was no possibility of engaging and destroying or driving off the English fleet before he effected his rendezvous with Parma. The enemy would be there, that maddening mile or two in trail of the Armada, every inch of the way, and even if the wind swung through 180 degrees in the blink of an eye, they had shown that they were perfectly capable of outflanking the Armada and reclaiming the weather gauge whenever they chose.
The Spanish commanders had also had two forcible reminders of the greater range, power, accuracy and firing rate of the English guns— three times as fast in the opinion of men on both sides of the battle. Even that underestimates the difference: English rates of fire averaged one and a half rounds per gun per hour, while the heavy gunners of the Spanish ships achieved no more than that in an entire day. The Spaniards had also suffered heavy casualties, some of which were selfinflicted. During the day’s battle, two gunners on the vice-flagship of the hulks, the San Salvador (a different ship from the one crippled by explosion and captured by the English on 1 August), inserted a powder cartridge into a cannon that still contained a residue of red-hot particles from its previous firing. The resulting explosion killed both of them. A similar incident on another of the hulks during the same battle left two more gunners badly burned.
Yet Lord Howard and his commanders also had no great reason for self-congratulation. If the battle so far had shown that, barring the miracle for which they had so confidently hoped, the Spaniards could not achieve victory over the English fleet, there was as yet no evidence that the English ships could do more than harass and worry the Spanish rearguard. Despite two prolonged and furious battles, only two Spanish ships had been claimed and neither of those prizes could be attributed to English gunfire. At the ranges from which they were firing, for all the pounding given to the San Juan and San Martin and the carnage on their upper decks, the English gunners had still been unable to inflict sufficient damage to prevent either ship from continuing with the Armada on its slow progress up the Channel. The decisive battle had yet to be fought and meanwhile each passing day was bringing the Armada’s rendezvous with the Duke of Parma a little nearer.
That evening, Medina-Sidonia sent a further message ahead by fast pinnace, urging Parma to have his troops embarked and ready to sail. He held to the same course, sailing “with the direct Trade,” in a straight line between Portland Bill and Dunnose Head (now St. Catherine’s Point) on the Isle of Wight. The fossil-laden grey cliffs of Dorset were steep and rocky, and the chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight, shining like bleached bone in the moonlight, were equally sheer. There was only one potential landing site in the forty miles between these points: the Hurst Narrows, the western entrance to the Solent, guarded by the Needles, but it was then thought by many to be too rocky, narrow and dangerous to afford safe passage to great ships. Philip himself had told Medina-Sidonia “you should enter by the east side which is wider than the west.” In fact the size of the navigable channels was not significantly different, but the eastern approaches, St. Helen’s Roads (Spithead), offered a secure anchorage for the largest fleet, sheltered against all weathers and with scores of potential landing sites where men might forage for food and water or establish a defensible bridgehead and base. An attacking French fleet had sailed into St. Helen’s Roads in 1545, and Philip’s peaceful armada had brought him there in 1554 for his marriage to Mary Tudor. Within forty-eight hours, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia would have to attempt to emulate them. His crews used the quiet hours of the evening to clear the debris of battle, sweeping the decks clear of blood, splintered wood and shards of shrapnel, mending torn sails and rigging, patching broken planking and rails, then all settled to their vigils and their brief hours of rest.14
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Terrible Value of Great Shot
At dawn on the following morning, Wednesday, 3 August, the English topmen spotted another Spanish straggler. The Gran Grifon, the flagship of the fleet of hulks, had been moved to strengthen the seaward wing of the Armada but, although armed with thirty-eight guns, the lumbering merchantman, with blunt bows and a beam that appeared almost as great as her length, was too slow to maintain the speed of the fighting ships and during the night she had dropped further and further behind. In the darkness her commander, Juan Gomez de Medina, had been unaware of the peril he faced. With the first light he realized his danger and made desperate efforts to rejoin the formation, but an English ship, probably the Revenge, was already bearing down. Drake passed along the Grifon’s flank, firing a broadside at much closer range than before and taking some shots in return, turned about and gave another broadside, and then riddled the stern with a third. The range was so close, “half-musket shot,” that lead shot from muskets and arquebuses, flattened by impact, was embedded in the Grifon’s hull. More and more English ships joined the action, keeping up the bombardment and almost using the Grifon for target practice, until the whole of the Spanish starboard wing became embroiled in the battle.
Medina-Sidonia sent one of his galleasses to the rescue of the Grifon, by now so badly damaged that she was unable to steer or make way. Her rudder head was broken, several guns dismantled and she had sustained severe damage to her masts and rigging, and suffered heavy casualties, more than the entire fleet had lost in the previous day’s fighting. In the thick of the battle, the galleass managed to get a rope aboard and began to tow the crippled Gran Grifon back into the formation, as the remaining Spanish warships exchanged gunfire with the Revenge. The galleasses and some of the galleons “discharged their sternpieces . . . without quitting their station, and so the enemy retired without any other success, the galleasses having spoiled their admiral’s [Drake’s] rigging and shot away his mainyard.” Medina-Sidonia and the rest of the vanguard made their way back through the Armada and struck their sails to signal a general engagement, but again the English ships spurned the invitation and drew away, still keeping up a harassing fire from long range with their cannons and culverins. Ignoring these assaults as no more than a delaying tactic, Medina-Sidonia once more re-formed the Armada and sailed on. There was no more fighting that day and the Armada “had good opportunity to look to their leaks, whereof they had no doubt a great number, for they had carried away many shrewd stripes from their enemies.”
Smudges of smoke rose into the still air from a score of beacons burning on the Isle of Wight to summon the local militia and some of the Hampshire levies to the defence of the island, and Spithead was alive with small boats fe
rrying troops across the water from the mainland. The wind had now abated to a faint westerly breeze, and if the lack of wind to fill the sails rendered the Armada’s progress even more wearisome—so slow that a man strolling along the cliffs could easily have kept pace with it—it also deprived the English fleet of much of its advantage in speed and manoeuvrability. By afternoon, a few miles to the south-west of the Needles, the wind had dropped altogether and the two fleets drifted helpless, barely a mile apart. The only movement was the steady procession of smaller craft, coasters and pinnaces warping or rowing out from every English harbour within range of the fleets. Some were loaded with supplies of powder and shot, some were full of gentlemen volunteers—the Earls of Cumberland, Oxford and Northumberland, Robert and Thomas Cecil and Sir Walter Ralegh were among many nobles and gentlemen joining the fleet as it sailed up the Channel, but the enthusiasm of some for action overrode their common sense. Lord Howard’s young brother-in-law, Robert Cary, was in such haste to join the English fleet that, having searched all night and discovered a great company of ships just before dawn, he was almost in their midst before he realized that he was about to join the Armada. With some good fortune, his frigate put about and made its escape.1
