(1588)
Almost at that very instant intelligence had been brought from the
court to the Lord Admiral at Plymouth that the Armada, dispersed and
shattered by the gales of June, was not likely to make its appearance
that year; and orders had consequently been given to disarm the four
largest ships and send them into dock. Even Walsingham had
participated in this strange delusion.
[Footnote 23: From Chapter XIX of the "History of the United
Netherlands." Published by Harper & Brothers. See Hume's account of
the arrival of the Armada in Volume IV, page 113, of this collection.]
Before Howard[24] had time to act upon this ill-timed suggestion--even
had he been disposed to do so--he received authentic intelligence that
the great fleet was off the Lizard. Neither he nor Francis Drake were
the men to lose time in such an emergency; and before that Friday
night was spent, sixty of the best English ships had been warped out
of Plymouth harbor.
[Footnote 24: Lord Howard of Effingham, commander of the English
fleet.]
On Saturday, 30th July, the wind was very light at southwest, with a
mist and drizzling rain; but by three in the afternoon the two fleets
could descry and count each other through the haze.
By nine o'clock, 31st July, about two miles from Looe on the Cornish
coast, the fleets had their first meeting. There were one hundred and
thirty-six sail of the Spaniards, of which ninety were large ships;
and sixty-seven of the English. It was a solemn moment. The
long-expected Armada presented a pompous, almost a theatrical
appearance. The ships seemed arranged for a pageant, in honor of a
victory already won. Disposed in form of a crescent, the horns of
which were seven miles asunder, those gilded, towered, floating
castles, with their gaudy standards and their martial music, moved
slowly along the channel, with an air of indolent pomp. Their
captain-general, the golden duke, stood in his private shot-proof
fortress, on the deck of his great galleon the _St. Martin_,
surrounded by generals of infantry and colonels of cavalry, who knew
as little as he did himself of naval matters.
The English vessels, on the other hand--with a few exceptions light,
swift, and easily handled--could sail round and round those unwieldy
galleons, hulks, and galleys rowed by fettered slave gangs. The
superior seamanship of free Englishmen commanded by such experienced
captains as Drake, Frobisher,[25] and Hawkins[26]--from infancy at
home on blue water--was manifest in the very first encounter. They
obtained the weather-gage at once, and cannonaded the enemy at
intervals with considerable effect; easily escaping at will out of
range of the sluggish Armada, which was incapable of bearing sail in
pursuit, altho provided with an armament which could sink all its
enemies at close quarters. "We had some small fight with them that
Sunday afternoon," said Hawkins.
[Footnote 25: Sir Martin Frobisher, who in 1576 commanded an
expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, and discovered the bay
since called after him.]
[Footnote 26: Sir John Hawkins at this time was a rear-admiral. He was
knighted after the defeat of the Armada.]
Medina Sidonia[27] hoisted the royal standard at the fore; and the
whole fleet did its utmost, which was little, to offer general battle.
It was in vain. The English, following at the heels of the enemy,
refused all such invitations, and attacked only the rear-guard of the
Armada, where Recalde commanded. That admiral, steadily maintaining
his post, faced his nimble antagonists, who continued to tease, to
maltreat, and to elude him, while the rest of the fleet proceeded
slowly up the Channel closely followed by the enemy. And thus the
running fight continued along the coast, in full view of Plymouth,
whence boats with reenforcements and volunteers were perpetually
arriving to the English ships, until the battle had drifted quite out
of reach of the town.
[Footnote 27: The Duke of Medina Sidonia, who commanded the Armada.]
Already in this first "small fight" the Spaniards had learned a
lesson, and might even entertain a doubt of their invincibility. But
before the sun set there were more serious disasters. Much powder and
shot had been expended by the Spaniard to very little purpose, and so
a master-gunner on board Admiral Oquendo's flag-ship was reprimanded
for careless ball-practise. The gunner, who was a Fleming, enraged
with his captain, laid a train to the powder-magazine, fired it, and
threw himself into the sea. Two decks blew up. The great castle at the
stern rose into clouds, carrying with it the paymaster-general of the
fleet, a large portion of treasure, and nearly two hundred men. The
ship was a wreck, but it was possible to save the rest of the crew. So
Medina Sidonia sent light vessels to remove them, and wore with his
flag-ship to defend Oquendo, who had already been fastened upon by his
English pursuers. But the Spaniards, not being so light in hand as
their enemies, involved themselves in much embarrassment by their
maneuver, and there was much falling foul of each other, entanglement
of rigging, and carrying away of yards. Oquendo's men, however, were
ultimately saved and taken to other ships.
Meantime Don Pedro de Valdez, commander of the Andalusian squadron,
having got his galleon into collision with two or three Spanish ships
successively, had at last carried away his foremast close to the deck,
and the wreck had fallen against his main-mast. He lay crippled and
helpless, the Armada was slowly deserting him, night was coming on,
the sea was running high, and the English, ever hovering near, were
ready to grapple with him. In vain did Don Pedro fire signals of
distress. The captain-general--even as tho the unlucky galleon had not
been connected with the Catholic fleet--calmly fired a gun to collect
his scattered ships, and abandoned Valdez to his fate. "He left me
comfortless in sight of the whole fleet," said poor Pedro; "and
greater inhumanity and unthankfulness I think was never heard of among
men."
Yet the Spaniard comported himself most gallantly. Frobisher, in the
largest ship of the English fleet, the _Triumph_, of eleven hundred
tons, and Hawkins in the _Victory_, of eight hundred, cannonaded him
at a distance, but night coming on, he was able to resist; and it was
not till the following morning that he surrendered to the _Revenge_.
Drake then received the gallant prisoner on board his flag-ship--much
to the disgust and indignation of Frobisher and Hawkins, thus
disappointed of their prize and ransom money--treated him with much
courtesy, and gave his word of honor that he and his men should be
treated fairly like good prisoners of war. This pledge was redeemed;
for it was not the English, as it was the Spanish custom, to convert
captives into slaves, but only to hold them for ransom. Valdez
responded to Drake's politeness by kissing his hand, embracing him,
and overpowering him with magnificent compliments. He was then sent on
board the Lord Admiral, who received him with similar urbanity, and
exprest his regret that so distinguished a personage should have been
so coolly deserted by the Duke of Medina. Don Pedro then returned to
the _Revenge_, where, as the guest of Drake, he was a witness to all
subsequent events up to the 10th of August; on which day he was sent
to London with some other officers, Sir Francis claiming his ransom as
his lawful due.
Here certainly was no very triumphant beginning for the Invincible Armada.
On the very first day of their being in presence of the English fleet--then
but sixty-seven in number, and vastly their inferior in size and weight of
metal--they had lost the flagships of the Guipuzcoan and of the Andalusian
squadrons, with a general-admiral, four hundred and fifty officers and men,
and some one hundred thousand ducats of treasure. They had been
outmaneuvered, outsailed, and thoroughly maltreated by their antagonists,
and they had been unable to inflict a single blow in return. Thus the
"small fight" had been a cheerful one for the opponents of the Inquisition,
and the English were proportionally encouraged....
Never, since England was England, had such a sight been seen as now
revealed itself in those narrow straits between Dover and Calais.
Along that long, low, sandy shore, and quite within the range of the
Calais fortifications, one hundred and thirty Spanish ships--the
greater number of them the largest and most heavily armed in the
world--lay face to face, and scarcely out of cannon-shot, with one
hundred and fifty English sloops and frigates, the strongest and
swiftest that the island could furnish, and commanded by men whose
exploits had rung through the world.
Farther along the coast, invisible, but known to be performing a most
perilous and vital service, was a squadron of Dutch vessels of all
sizes, lining both the inner and outer edges of the sandbanks off the
Flemish coasts, and swarming in all the estuaries and inlets of that
intricate and dangerous cruising-ground between Dunkirk and
Walcheren. Those fleets of Holland and Zeeland, numbering some one
hundred and fifty galleons, sloops, and fly-boats, under Warmond,
Nassau, Van der Does, De Moor, and Rosendael, lay patiently blockading
every possible egress from Newport, or Gravelines, or Sluys, or
Flushing, or Dunkirk; and longing to grapple with the Duke of Parma,
so soon as his fleet of gunboats and hoys, packed with his Spanish and
Italian veterans, should venture to set forth upon the sea for their
long-prepared exploit.
It was a pompous spectacle that midsummer night upon those narrow
seas. The moon, which was at the full, was rising calmly upon a scene
of anxious expectation. Would she not be looking, by the morrow's
night, upon a subjugated England, a reenslaved Holland--upon the
downfall of civil and religious liberty? Those ships of Spain, which
lay there with their banners waving in the moonlight, discharging
salvos of anticipated triumph and filling the air with strains of
insolent music--would they not, by daybreak, be moving straight to
their purpose, bearing the conquerors of the world to the scene of
their cherished hopes?
That English fleet, too, which rode there at anchor, so anxiously on
the watch--would that swarm of nimble, lightly handled, but slender
vessels, which had held their own hitherto in hurried and desultory
skirmishes, be able to cope with their great antagonist, now that the
moment had arrived for the death grapple? Would not Howard, Drake,
Frobisher, Seymour, Winter, and Hawkins be swept out of the straits at
last, yielding an open passage to Medina, Oquendo, Recalde, and
Farnese? Would those Hollanders and Zeelanders cruising so vigilantly
among their treacherous shallows dare to maintain their post now that
the terrible "Holoferness," with his invincible legions, was resolved
to come forth?
And the impatience of the soldiers and sailors on board the fleet was
equal to that of their commanders. There was London almost before
their eyes--a huge mass of treasure, richer and more accessible than
those mines beyond the Atlantic which had so often rewarded Spanish
chivalry with fabulous wealth. And there were men in those galleons
who remembered the sack of Antwerp eleven years before; men who could
tell, from personal experience, how helpless was a great commercial
city when once in the clutch of disciplined brigands; men who in that
dread "fury of Antwerp" had enriched themselves in an hour with the
accumulations of a merchant's lifetime, and who had slain fathers and
mothers, sons and daughters, brides and bridegrooms, before each
other's eyes, until the number of inhabitants butchered in the blazing
streets rose to many thousands, and the plunder from palaces and
warehouses was counted by millions, before the sun had set on the
"great fury." Those Spaniards, and Italians, and Walloons were now
thirsting for more gold, for more blood; and as the capital of England
was even more wealthy and far more defenseless than the commercial
metropolis of the Netherlands had been, so it was resolved that the
London "fury" should be more thorough and more productive than the
"fury of Antwerp," at the memory of which the world still shuddered.
And these professional soldiers had been taught to consider the
English as a pacific, delicate, effeminate race; dependent on good
living, without experience of war, quickly fatigued and discouraged,
and even more easily to be plundered and butchered than were the
excellent burghers of Antwerp.
And so these southern conquerors looked down from their great galleons
and galeasses upon the English vessels. More than three-quarters of
them were merchantmen. There was no comparison whatever between the
relative strength of the fleets. In number they were about equal,
being each from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty
strong; but the Spaniards had twice the tonnage of the English, four
times the artillery, and nearly three times the number of men....
As the twilight deepened, the moon became totally obscured, dark cloud
masses spread over the heavens, the sea grew black, distant thunder
rolled, and the sob of an approaching tempest became distinctly
audible. Such indications of a westerly gale were not encouraging to
those cumbrous vessels, with the treacherous quicksands of Flanders
under their lee.
At an hour past midnight it was so dark that it was difficult for the
most practised eye to pierce far into the gloom. But a faint drip of
oars now struck the ears of the Spaniards as they watched from the
decks. A few moments afterward the sea became suddenly luminous; and
six flaming vessels appeared at a slight distance, bearing steadily
down upon them before the wind and tide.
There were men in the Armada who had been at the siege of Antwerp
only three years before. They remembered with horror the devil-ships
of Gianibelli--those floating volcanoes which had seemed to rend earth
and ocean, whose explosion had laid so many thousands of soldiers dead
at a blow, and which had shattered the bridge and floating forts of
Farnese as tho they had been toys of glass. They knew too that the
famous engineer was at that moment in England.
In a moment one of those horrible panics which spread with such
contagious rapidity among large bodies of men, seized upon the
Spaniards. There was a yell throughout the fleet--"The fire-ships of
Antwerp! the fire-ships of Antwerp!" and in an instant every cable was
cut, and frantic attempts were made by each galleon and galeasse to
escape what seemed imminent destruction. The confusion was beyond
description. Four or five of the largest ships became entangled with
each other. Two others were set on fire by the flaming vessels and
were consumed. Medina Sidonia, who had been warned, even before his
departure from Spain, that some such artifice would probably be
attempted, and who had even, early that morning, sent out a party of
sailors in a pinnace to search for indications of the scheme, was not
surprized or dismayed. He gave orders--as well as might be--that every
ship, after the danger should be passed, was to return to its post and
await his further orders. But it was useless in that moment of
unreasonable panic to issue commands. The despised Mantuan, who had
met with so many rebuffs at Philip's court, and who--owing to official
incredulity--had been but partially successful in his magnificent
enterprise at Antwerp, had now, by the mere terror of his name,
inflicted more damage on Philip's Armada than had hitherto been
accomplished by Howard and Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher combined.
So long as night and darkness lasted, the confusion and uproar
continued. When the Monday morning dawned, several of the Spanish
vessels lay disabled, while the rest of the fleet was seen at a
distance of two leagues from Calais, driving toward the Flemish coast.
The threatened gale had not yet begun to blow; but there were fresh
squalls from the W. S. W., which, to such awkward sailors as the
Spanish vessels, were difficult to contend with. On the other hand,
the English fleet were all astir, and ready to pursue the Spaniards,
now rapidly drifting into the North Sea.