The next year, 1589, is famous for the unsuccessful Lisbon Expedition.
Drake had the usual troubles with Elizabeth, who wanted him to go about
picking leaves and breaking branches before laying the axe to the root
of the tree. Though there were in the Narrow Seas defensive squadrons
strong enough to ward off any possible blow, yet the nervous landsmen
wanted Corunna and other ports attacked and their shipping destroyed,
for fear England should be invaded before Drake could strike his blow
at Lisbon. Then there were troubles about stores and ammunition. The
English fleet had been reduced to the last pound of powder twice during
the ten-days' battle with the Armada. Yet Elizabeth was again alarmed
at the expense of munitions. She never quite rose to the idea of one
supreme and finishing blow, no matter what the cost might be.
This was a joint expedition, the first in which a really modern English
fleet and army had ever taken part, with Sir John Norreys in command of
the army. There was no trouble about recruits, for all men of spirit
flocked in to follow Drake and Norreys. The fleet was perfectly
organized into appropriate squadrons and flotillas, such as then
corresponded with the battleships, cruisers, and mosquito craft of
modern navies. The army was organized into battalions and brigades,
with a regular staff and all the proper branches of the service.
The fleet made for Corunna, where Norreys won a brilliant victory. A
curious little incident of exact punctilio is worth recording. After
the battle, and when the fleet was waiting for a fair wind to get out
of the harbor, the ships were much annoyed by a battery on the heights.
Norreys undertook to storm the works and sent in the usual summons by a
_parlementaire_ accompanied by a drummer. An angry Spaniard fired from
the walls and the drummer fell dead. The English had hostages on whom
to take reprisals. But the Spaniards were too quick for them. Within
ten minutes the guilty man was tried inside the fort by drum-head
court-martial, condemned to death, and swung out neatly from the walls,
while a polite Spanish officer came over to assure the English troops
that such a breach of discipline should not occur again.
Lisbon was a failure. The troops landed and marched over the ground
north of Lisbon where Wellington in a later day made works whose fame
has caused their memory to become an allusion in English literature for
any impregnable base—the Lines of Torres Vedras. The fleet and the army
now lost touch with each other; and that was the ruin of them all.
Norreys was persuaded by Don Antonio, pretender to the throne of
Portugal which Philip had seized, to march farther inland, where
Portuguese patriots were said to be ready to rise _en masse_. This
Antonio was a great talker and a first-rate fighter with his tongue.
But his Portuguese followers, also great talkers, wanted to see a
victory won by arms before they rose.
Before leaving Lisbon Drake had one stroke of good luck. A Spanish
convoy brought in a Hanseatic Dutch and German fleet of merchantmen
loaded down with contraband of war destined for Philip's new Armada.
Drake swooped on it immediately and took sixty well-found ships. Then
he went west to the Azores, looking for what he called 'some
comfortable little dew of Heaven,' that is, of course, more prizes of a
richer kind. But sickness broke out. The men died off like flies.
Storms completed the discomfiture. And the expedition got home with a
great deal less than half its strength in men and not enough in value
to pay for its expenses. It was held to have failed; and Drake lost
favor.
With the sun of Drake's glory in eclipse at court and with Spain and
England resting from warfare on the grander scale, there were no more
big battles the following year. But the year after that, 1591, is
rendered famous in the annals of the sea by Sir Richard Grenville's
fight in Drake's old flagship, the _Revenge_. This is the immortal
battle of 'the one and the fifty-three' from which Raleigh's prose and
Tennyson's verse have made a glory of the pen fit to match the glory of
the sword.
Grenville had sat, with Drake and Sir Philip Sidney, on the
Parliamentary committee which recommended the royal charter granted to
Sir Walter Raleigh for the founding of the first English colony in what
is now the United States. Grenville's grandfather, Marshal of Calais to
Henry VIII, had the faculty of rhyme, and, in a set of verses very
popular in their own day, showed what the Grenville family ambitions
were.
Who seeks the way to win renown,
Or flies with wings to high desire,
Who seeks to wear the laurel crown,
Or hath the mind that would aspire—
Let him his native soil eschew,
Let him go range and seek a new.
Grenville himself was a wild and roving blade, no great commander, but
an adventurer of the most daring kind by land or sea. He rather enjoyed
the consternation he caused by aping the airs of a pirate king. He had
a rough way with him at all times; and Ralph Lane was much set against
his being the commander of the 'Virginia Voyage' of which Lane himself
was the governor on land. But in action he always was, beyond a doubt,
the very _beau idéal_ of a 'first-class fighting man.' A striking
instance of his methods was afforded on his return from Virginia, when
he found an armed Spanish treasure ship ahead of him at sea. He had no
boat to board her with. But he knocked some sort of one together out of
the ship's chests and sprang up the Spaniard's side with his boarding
party just as this makeshift boat was sinking under them.
The last fight of the _Revenge_ is almost incredible from the odds
engaged—fifty-three vessels to one. But it is true; and neither
Raleigh's glowing prose nor Tennyson's glowing verse exaggerates it.
Lord Thomas Howard, 'almost famished for want of prey,' had been
cruising in search of treasure ships when Captain Middleton, one of the
gentlemen-adventurers who followed the gallant Earl of Cumberland, came
in to warn him that Don Alonzo de Bazan was following with fifty-three
sail. The English crews were partly ashore at the Azores; and Howard
had barely time to bring them off, cut his cables, and work to windward
of the overwhelming Spaniards.
Grenville's men were last. The _Revenge_ had only 'her hundred fighters
on deck and her ninety sick below' when the Spanish fleet closed round
him. Yet, just as he had sworn to cut down the first man who touched a
sail when the master thought there was still a chance to slip through,
so now he refused to surrender on any terms at all. Then, running down
close-hauled on the starboard tack, decks cleared for action and crew
at battle quarters, he steered right between two divisions of the
Spanish fleet till 'the mountain-like _San Felipe_, of fifteen hundred
tons,' ranging up on his weather side, blanketed his canvas and left
him almost becalmed. Immediately the vessels which the _Revenge_ had
weathered hauled their wind and came up on her from to-leeward. Then,
at three o'clock in the afternoon of the 1st of September, 1591, that
immortal fight began.
The first broadside from the _Revenge_ took the _San Felipe_ on the
water-line and forced her to give way and stop her leaks. Then two
Spaniards ranged up in her place, while two more kept station on the
other side. And so the desperate fight went on all through that
afternoon and evening and far on into the night. Meanwhile Howard,
still keeping the weather gage, attacked the Spaniards from the rear
and thought of trying to cut through them. But his sailing master swore
it would be the end of all Her Majesty's ships engaged, as it probably
would; so he bore away, wisely or not as critics may judge for
themselves. One vessel, the little _George Noble_ of London, a
victualler, stood by the _Revenge_, offering help before the fight
began. But Grenville, thanking her gallant skipper, ordered him to save
his vessel by following Howard.
With never less than one enemy on each side of her, the _Revenge_
fought furiously on. _Boarders away!_ shouted the Spanish colonels as
the vessels closed. _Repel boarders!_ shouted Grenville in reply. And
they did repel them, time and again, till the English pikes dripped red
with Spanish blood. A few Spaniards gained the deck, only to be shot,
stabbed, or slashed to death. Towards midnight Grenville was hit in the
body by a musket-shot fired from the tops—the same sort of shot that
killed Nelson. The surgeon was killed while dressing the wound, and
Grenville was hit in the head. But still the fight went on. The
_Revenge_ had already sunk two Spaniards, a third sank afterwards, and
a fourth was beached to save her. But Grenville would not hear of
surrender. When day broke not ten unwounded Englishmen remained. The
pikes were broken. The powder was spent. The whole deck was a wild
entanglement of masts, spars, sails, and rigging. The undaunted
survivors stood dumb as their silent cannon. But every Spanish hull in
the whole encircling ring of death bore marks of the _Revenge's_ rage.
Four hundred Spaniards, by their own admission, had been killed, and
quite six hundred wounded. One hundred Englishmen had thus accounted
for a thousand Spaniards besides all those that sank!
Grenville now gave his last order: 'Sink me the ship, Master-Gunner!'
But the sailing master and flag-captain, both wounded, protesting that
all lives should be saved to avenge the dead, manned the only remaining
boat and made good terms with the Spanish admiral. Then Grenville was
taken very carefully aboard Don Bazan's flagship, where he was received
with every possible mark of admiration and respect. Don Bazan gave him
his own cabin. The staff surgeon dressed his many wounds. The Spanish
captains and military officers stood hat in hand, 'wondering at his
courage and stout heart, for that he showed not any signs of faintness
nor changing of his colour.' Grenville spoke Spanish very well and
handsomely acknowledged the compliments they paid him. Then, gathering
his ebbing strength for one last effort, he addressed them in words
they have religiously recorded: '"Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a
joyful and quiet mind; for that I have ended my life as a true soldier
ought to do, that hath fought for his country, queen, religion, and
honour. Wherefore my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body."
... And when he had said these and other suchlike words he gave up the
ghost with a great and stout courage.'
Grenville's latest wish was that the _Revenge_ and he should die
together; and, though he knew it not, he had this wish fulfilled. For,
two weeks later, when Don Bazan had collected nearly a hundred more
sail around him for the last stage home from the West Indies, a cyclone
such as no living man remembered burst full on the crowded fleet. Not
even the Great Armada lost more vessels than Don Bazan did in that
wreck-engulfing week. No less than seventy went down. And with them
sank the shattered _Revenge_, beside her own heroic dead.
Drake might be out of favor at court. The Queen might grumble at the
sad extravagance of fleets. Diplomats might talk of untying Gordian
knots that the sword was made to cut. Courtiers and politicians might
wonder with which side to curry favor when it was an issue between two
parties—peace or war. The great mass of ordinary landsmen might wonder
why the 'sea-affair' was a thing they could not understand. But all
this was only the mint and cummin of imperial things compared with the
exalting deeds that Drake had done. For, once the English sea-dogs had
shown the way to all America by breaking down the barriers of Spain,
England had ceased to be merely an island in a northern sea and had
become the mother country of such an empire and republic as neither
record nor tradition can show the like of elsewhere.
And England felt the triumph. She thrilled with pregnant joy. Poet and
proseman both gave voice to her delight. Hear this new note of
exultation born of England's victory on the sea:
As God hath combined the sea and land into one globe, so their mutual
assistance is necessary to secular happiness and glory. The sea
covereth one-half of this patrimony of man. Thus should man at once
lose the half of his inheritance if the art of navigation did not
enable him to manage this untamed beast; and with the bridle of the
winds and the saddle of his shipping make him serviceable. Now for the
services of the sea, they are innumerable: it is the great purveyor of
the world's commodities; the conveyor of the excess of rivers; uniter,
by traffique, of all nations; it presents the eye with divers colors
and motions, and is, as it were with rich brooches, adorned with many
islands. It is an open field for merchandise in peace; a pitched field
for the most dreadful fights in war; yields diversity of fish and fowl
for diet, material for wealth; medicine for sickness; pearls and
jewels for adornment; the wonders of the Lord in the deep for all
instruction; multiplicity of nature for contemplation; to the thirsty
Earth fertile moisture; to distant friends pleasant meeting; to weary
persons delightful refreshing; to studious minds a map of knowledge, a
school of prayer, meditation, devotion, and sobriety; refuge to the
distressed, portage to the merchant, customs to the prince, passage to
the traveller; springs, lakes, and rivers to the Earth. It hath
tempests and calms to chastise sinners and exercise the faith of
seamen; manifold affections to stupefy the subtlest philosopher,
maintaineth (as in Our Island) a wall of defence and watery garrison
to guard the state. It entertains the Sun with vapors, the Stars with
a natural looking-glass, the sky with clouds, the air with
temperateness, the soil with suppleness, the rivers with tides, the
hills with moisture, the valleys with fertility. But why should I
longer detain you? The Sea yields action to the body, meditation to
the mind, and the World to the World, by this art of arts—Navigation.
Well might this pious Englishman, the Reverend Samuel Purchas, exclaim
with David: _Thy ways are in the Sea, and Thy paths in the great
waters, and Thy footsteps are not known_.
The poets sang of Drake and England, too. Could his 'Encompassment of
All the Worlde' be more happily admired than in these four short lines:
The Stars of Heaven would thee proclaim
If men here silent were.
The Sun himself could not forget
His fellow traveller.
What wonder that after Nombre de Dios and the Pacific, the West Indies
and the Spanish Main, Cadiz and the Armada, what wonder, after this,
that Shakespeare, English to the core, rings out:—
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world;
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happy lands:
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to herself do rest but true.