I have been at sea since I was fourteen, which is eleven years, and in that time I have been in two battles and three storms of the kind that rearrange your understanding of what the sea is capable of. Nothing in those eleven years prepared me for the week of August 1588, when England held its breath and we — four thousand men on a hundred ships — were the thing standing between Philip of Spain and an island that had no other defenders worth naming.
Let me tell you about the fireships.
Gravelines, August 7
The Armada had anchored off Calais in a tight defensive formation — the famous crescent, horns forward, the most powerful ships at the edges where they could protect the transports and supply vessels in the center. It was a sound formation. Against a conventional attack it would have been very difficult to break. The crescent's strength was that our ships could not easily get at the vulnerable center without exposing themselves to those fighting galleons on the wings.
Captain Drake — I sailed under Sir Francis Drake, which is a thing I have said with pride every day of the thirty years since — sent for volunteers. Eight ships, he said. Old ships, expendable ships. We would fill them with pitch and tar and combustibles and load their cannon and chain their tillers so they would sail straight, and we would light them and send them downwind into the anchored Armada at midnight.
The genius of it was not the fire. It was the fear. Three years before, at Antwerp, the Dutch had used explosive ships — "hellburners," packed with gunpowder and stones — against a Spanish bridge, killing eight hundred men in a single detonation. The Armada's commanders knew about the hellburners. When they saw eight ships on fire bearing down on them in the dark, they did not wait to discover whether these were ordinary fireships or something worse.
They cut their anchor cables.
This was the moment. Not the burning ships — the cutting of the cables. An anchored ship is in command of itself. A ship that has cut its cable and is running before the wind in the dark among a hundred other ships that have also cut their cables is something else entirely. Formation, which the crescent required, became impossible in minutes. By morning the Armada was scattered across fifteen miles of Channel.
The Battle of Gravelines
We engaged them at dawn on August 8. Without their formation, without the mutual protection of the crescent, the Spanish ships were vulnerable in ways they had not been for the previous week. We had more maneuverable vessels, longer-range culverins, English gunners who had drilled for this. We came at them in squadrons and poured fire into ships that could not maneuver into their defensive positions because there were no defensive positions anymore.
I was below decks at the Revenge's great guns for most of the battle. What a man knows below decks is a world of smoke and noise and the physical impact of other ships' shot striking the hull — a sound like a giant's fist on a door — and the work of loading and running out and firing, loading and running out and firing, in a rhythm that the body knows without the mind directing it because the mind is not usable in that noise.
We fired five hundred rounds before noon.
The Spanish fought back. I want to say that plainly, because it is true and it cost us. The Revenge took shot in her hull twice that morning and lost three men to splinters — the wood of a ship's side, hit by a cannonball, does not stay wood but becomes something else: a spray of oak shards at the velocity of the ball that made them. Three men I knew. A boy of sixteen named Pasco, who had been at sea for two years and was very good at cards and owed me a shilling.
But we held the weather gauge — the windward position — and the Spanish could not close with us to use their boarding tactics, which were their preferred method, and which their soldiers had trained for. We kept our distance and fired. This was Drake's method, developed over years of raiding the Spanish Main: stay out of reach and let the guns do what guns do.
The Wind Changed
By afternoon the Armada was in grave disorder, driven toward the Zeeland sandbanks in shallow water. Several ships had struck. Others were taking on water. The wind, which had been pushing them toward the shoals all day, shifted just enough — just enough — to allow them to clear the banks and run north.
We followed as far as we could. But we were short of powder, short of shot, short of provisions. We could not follow them into Scottish waters. We turned back.
The Armada went north. Around Scotland, around Ireland, into Atlantic gales that Drake himself could not have contrived. At least a dozen ships wrecked on the Irish coast alone. Men who had survived our cannon swam for beaches in a foreign country and were killed there by the local people, or by English soldiers, or by the rocks, or by the cold. Of the 130 ships that had left Lisbon in May, fewer than 60 returned to Spain.
What We Knew
We did not know, on August 9th, that we had won. We knew the Armada had run north. We knew it had not rendez-vous'd with Parma's army. We knew England was not invaded that week. What we did not know was the weather to come, the wrecks off Sligo and Donegal, the thousands of drowned men who would make the numbers of August 8th a secondary accounting.
The Queen came to Tilbury later that month to address the troops who had been assembled to defend against Parma's landing — which never came. She made a speech which men who were there spoke of for the rest of their lives. I was not at Tilbury. I was on the Revenge, anchored off the Downs, eating salt pork and wondering whether Pasco's family in Cornwall had been told yet about the splinter.
England was saved. I do not know if it understood what it had been saved from, or how close it had been. Probably it did not. Countries rarely do.
Narrator's note: Will Treloar is fictional. The tactical details — the crescent formation, the fireship attack, the cutting of anchor cables, the weather gauge, the Zeeland shoals — are drawn from Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker's The Spanish Armada (revised 1999) and N.A.M. Rodger's The Safeguard of the Sea (1997).