by Neil Hanson
The second-in-command of the San Lorenzo, “a proper gentleman of Salamanca,” had been captured as he tried to flee the stricken galleass and his interrogation seemed to confirm Howard’s belief that the Armada was not yet fatally damaged by the fighting. “As terrible as it was in appearance, there were few men hurt with any shot, nor any vessel sunk. For, as this man reports, they shoot very far off and for boarding, our men have not any reason.” However, the Spaniard was speaking from his experience of the previous days’ fighting, not of the battle off Gravelines which he had not seen, being trapped aboard the grounded San Lorenzo and then held belowdecks on Howard’s flagship.
The gentleman adventurer Sir Horatio Palavicino, and Richard Tomson on the Margaret and John, formed a more accurate impression of the outcome of the great battle. “They lost in that fight, beside the galleass, five or six great ships, and were pursued ten or twelve leagues beyond Dunkirk, being sorely beaten by our ordnance.” “Her Majesty by God’s help, may little fear any invasion by these ships; their power being, by battle, mortality and other accidents so decayed, and those that are left alive so weak and hurtless that they could be well content to lose all charges to be at home, both rich and poor.” Thomas Fenner confirmed that view, but, like Drake and Howard, he also bewailed the lack of supplies that had prevented the fleet from completing the destruction of the Armada. “Many of their ships wonderfully spoiled and beaten, to the utter ruin of three of the greatest sort, beside the cutting off of the galleass, the enemy thereby greatly weakened. A thing greatly to be regarded is that the Almighty has stricken them with a wonderful fear; in that I hardly have seen any of their companies succoured of their extremities which befell them after their fights, but left at utter ruin . . . The want of powder and shot, and victual, has hindered much service which might otherwise have been performed in continuance with them, to their utter subversion in keeping them from water. There were many ships in our fleet not possessed with three days’ victuals.”2
As Palavicino, Tomson and Fenner had claimed, the Armada was indeed now in desperate condition. The squall might have saved them from annihilation but they were “very much weakened and dispersed, so that of the 124 sail that they were in Calais Road, we cannot now find above 86 ships and pinnaces.” All the front-line ships were holed and leaking, and broken spars, torn sails and rigging littered their blood-spattered decks. “The admiral [Medina-Sidonia’s flagship] was many times shot through, and [was] shot in the mast and their deck at the prow spoiled . . . the admiral’s mast is so weak by reason of the shot in it, as they dare not abide any storm, nor to bear such sail as otherwise he might do.” Every single sail on the San Juan de Sicilia was so rent and torn by gunfire that it had to be replaced and the Maria Juan of the Biscayan squadron was beyond help. The sails on her broken mizzen-mast and yard trailed in the water like a sea anchor, the rudder had been shattered by a cannonball and the hull pierced again and again by great shot. As water poured into the ship, she settled so low in the water that the waves lapped at the rails and flooded the decks, and men climbed the rigging and clung to the yardarms screaming for help. Only one boatload of survivors had been taken off before the Maria Juan foundered and went to the bottom, taking the remainder of her crew of 275 with her, “to the great sorrow of everyone.”
Casualties were very high among the soldiers and crews of the other fighting ships. The Spaniards admitted to 600 dead and 800 “wounded,” but the latter figure included only those completely disabled or maimed and the true total must have been much higher. Using the standard battlefield estimate of ten wounded for every fatality would put the casualty figures close to 6,000. The Armada was well provided with medical help: 85 surgeons and assistant-surgeons had sailed with the fleet, concentrated on two hospital ships, but they were overwhelmed, working by candle- and lantern-light far into the night, staunching wounds, setting fractured bones using nothing more than their physical strength, and amputating limbs without anaesthetic. They did what they could, drenched from head to foot in other men’s blood, hacking and sawing at severed flesh and shattered bone, but in the press and chaos of the fighting many wounded men were left where they fell until the heat of battle was over, and by then many had bled to death. Many more would succumb to their wounds, blood loss, shock and sepsis over the following days and weeks.3
The English casualties were much lighter, but the fleet was far less well served by physicians and surgeons. In theory doctors were required by their charter to serve their sovereign on request, but in practice they either paid a bribe to avoid doing so or sent some semi-skilled or unskilled deputy in their place. Although the Frenchman Ambroise Paré and the English Surgeon of the Fleet, William Clowes, sailing aboard the Ark with Lord Howard, had pioneered more humane and effective treatments for shot and bullet wounds, many surgeons remained semi-trained and wedded to the old beliefs that bullet wounds were poisoned with gunpowder and had to be cauterized with boiling oil or a red-hot iron. For every seaman who was saved by their efforts, another dozen died.
The priests with the Armada were wholly occupied in comforting the dying and administering the last rites, and bodies were put over the side with minimal ceremony. Among them were many of the English exiles. “The prisoners do hold it for a miracle that amongst the slain . . . the English ordnance . . . has always struck down the principal traitors and amongst others, has slain the banished English lords.” There were too many dead for the full funeral rites to be observed and none of the survivors could be long spared from the tasks of patching sails, repairing torn rigging, staunching leaks and manning the pumps that worked night and day, wheezing and coughing like consumptives as they struggled to hold back the relentless tide of seawater gushing into the bilges and holds.
On some ships, men already weak from wounds, fever, thirst and hunger laboured until they collapsed where they stood, for there were none fit to take their places. In others the galley fires had been extinguished by the leaks and the firewood soaked beyond use. Men settled miserably to their meagre cold rations, the darkness echoing to the groans of the maimed and dying, and the low threatening roar of breakers on the shoals to the south and east. “Hardly a man slept that night. We went along, all wondering when we should strike one of those banks.” Some of those awake had no intention of passively awaiting their fate. Fourteen Dutchmen, pressed to the service of the Armada in Lisbon, chose to desert within sight of their native shores. “Having made sails for their cockboat with their shirts, they are now fled away from the Spanish fleet.” Many more of the Armada’s polyglot ships’ complements followed their example, stealing away in the ships’ boats, swimming and wading ashore or, in the case of a number of Portuguese deserters, swimming or rowing to the English fleet during the hours of darkness.4
Early the following morning another ship, an armed merchantman from Diego Flores de Valdes’ squadron that was already trailing the Armada by some distance, sank “between Ostend and Blankenberg” as its captain was attempting to negotiate the terms of his surrender to Captain Robert Crosse of the Hope. Out of sight of the Armada, the two ships abandoned during the previous day’s fighting also met their ends. The crippled San Mateo and the San Felipe both grounded on sandbanks off the Dutch coast, the San Felipe off “Flushing and the other athwart of Rammekens.” Prince Justin of Nassau’s flyboats quickly surrounded them. The San Mateo “fought with us two hours and hurt divers of our men but at the last yielded . . . The best sort [those nobles and gentlemen who could command a ransom fee] were saved, the rest were cast overboard and slain.” It was a common practice for captured enemies to be treated in this way and was even specified in the orders issued to captains in the English fleet. “Take the captain with certain of the best men with him, the rest, commit them to the bottom of the sea, for else they will turn upon you to your confusion.” Among the dead were two English traitors, one of whom, Lord Montagu, had paraded with 200 retainers before Queen Elizabeth as a demonstration of his loyalty only a few months before.
The Dutch claimed the two ships as prizes and carried off the banner of the San Mateo and hung it in the choir of St. Peter’s church at Leiden. (It now hangs in the Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden.) They also “received great spoil” from the ships—to Seymour’s disgust, for his ships had disabled the vessels and had hopes of claiming them for themselves—as well as taking a number of prisoners including the commander of the San Mateo, Don Diego de Pimentel. A Dutch commander also claimed that he had set fire to a third Armada ship that had stranded near Blankenberg.5
Sir William Russell, the English Governor of Flushing, sent his own ships and men out to the wreck and they returned with 100 Spanish prisoners. The chance to give Parma a forceful reminder of the fate of the Armada was not to be missed, and many of the prisoners were “so mangled that presently the Governor sent 60 of them over into Flanders, to carry news to the Prince of Parma what was become of the rest.” The Dutch seamen bearing them along the coast had to be bribed with “a great charge” not to toss them overboard like their comrades before them. Parma was already having troubles enough in maintaining discipline among the mass of disaffected and still unpaid troops and mariners he had assembled for the invasion. “The mariners, which he had got together to be employed at sea, refuse the service and are grown into a mutiny. The Duke has thereupon ordered to be slain ten or twelve of them, but the rest, notwithstanding, are retired and dispersed and refuse to serve.”
Parma forwarded the news of the loss of the ships in Calais and on the Zeeland Banks to Philip, “in order that Your Majesty may adopt such measures as you consider advisable in Spain and elsewhere to prevent this misfortune and the presence intact of the enemy fleet from leading to further evils.” He could give no more news of the rest of the Armada than that it had last been seen fleeing northwards pursued by the English fleet, but offered a few words of consolation. “This must come from the hand of the Lord, who knows well what He does and can redress it all, rewarding Your Majesty with many victories and the full fruition of your desires, in His own good time . . . This great army moreover, which Your Majesty has intact should with God’s blessing banish all cause for fear, especially as it may be hoped that . . . the mass of the Armada may not have suffered any further loss.” But he again warned Philip that without funds the “great army” might soon disintegrate into desertion and mutiny. “The soldiers who have so willingly and quietly put up with trouble and misery in the hope of this enterprise, might change their tone and lose respect, especially if we cannot provide them with the ordinary pay and their ration of bread.”6
Still tracked by the English fleet, the remainder of the Armada had continued to run before the strengthening wind during the night, but soon after dawn on Tuesday 9 August the wind again began to back into the north-west, putting it once more in mortal peril from the shoals and sandbanks. “Although our flagship was brought up as close into the wind as possible, she began to fall off to leeward towards the Zeeland coast.” Howard’s men reacted with their customary ease and alacrity, manoeuvring to keep the weather gauge and trap the Armada between their guns and the Zeeland shore. The increasingly choppy sea, the white crests of breakers in the distance and the changing colour of the waters stained with sand and mud showed Medina-Sidonia the peril that once more confronted him. The San Martin and the rest of the rearguard lay to and Medina-Sidonia ordered an anchor lowered to try to hold his position, then sent out pinnaces carrying the message that those ships able to beat upwind towards him should do so, while the rest were to drop anchor and lie to. Scores of ships either ignored or did not receive the order, or had left their anchors in the escape from Calais, and they continued to sail on, as close to the wind as they were able. In the first light of dawn they must have crossed the Wielingen, the channel leading into the Scheldt, but they had no maps of that coast and there was only one Flemish pilot in the entire fleet. In such circumstances it would have been madness even to attempt the narrow entry, surrounded not only by shoals and sandbanks but also by whirlpools caused by “the violent meeting of sundry currents and tides.”
The expected onslaught from the English fleet did not materialize. As Medina-Sidonia soon realized, Howard, Drake and the rest saw no reason to risk the Spanish guns and expend the remainder of their own shot and gunpowder—if they had any—when the wind and weather would do their work for them. The Armada was “very near to the banks of Zeeland, for which cause the enemy remained aloof, seeing that our Armada must be lost, for the pilots . . . men of experience of that coast, told the Duke at this time that it was not possible to save a single ship of the Armada, for that with the wind as it was in the north-west, they must all needs go on the banks of Zeeland; that God alone could prevent it.” The anchors of those Spanish ships that still had them could not hold for long in the shifting sands of the Zeeland banks and the wind and sea were now pushing them relentlessly downwind, increasing their peril with every passing moment. Whether the ships lay to or kept under way was of no real consequence. The only course they could make led onto the sandbanks.7
Some of Medina-Sidonia’s officers urged him to flee in a pinnace for Dunkirk with the Armada’s sacred banner; it was later claimed that Diego Flores de Valdes had suggested he should surrender and that Miguel de Oquendo had responded by threatening to throw de Valdes overboard for his cowardice. Another version had de Oquendo responding to Medina-Sidonia’s pleas for advice with “Ask Diego Flores. As for me, I am going to fight and die like a man.” Captain Alonso Vanegas, who was on the poop deck of the San Martin, claimed that “people appealed to his [Medina-Sidonia’s] conscience not to allow so many souls to be lost by shipwreck, but he would not listen to such advice and told them to speak no more of the matter.” No signal was given and the Armada continued to drift with the wind and current. The leadsman in the bows of the San Martin plumbed the depths and counted down the intervals to their doom: eight fathoms, seven, then six and a half. The draught of the San Martin was five fathoms. Denied even a glorious death in battle, Medina-Sidonia and his officers and men sank to their knees in prayer, made their confessions and were shriven by the priests, or simply waited with dumb fatalism for the grinding crash as they ran aground. Barely a handful in any ship could swim and, encumbered by armour, clothing and the gold coins sewn into it, few even of those would survive the surf. Any who did manage to stagger ashore would be confronted by Dutch rebels, seeking vengeance for the slaughter of their countrymen by the brutal Army of Flanders.
Yet at around eleven that morning, as the sandbanks loomed, “being in this peril, without any sort of remedy and in six and a half fathoms of water, God was pleased to change the wind.” The sudden, fierce shift in the wind from northerly to south-westerly gave them just leeway enough to break free from the deadly trap. They hauled up their dragging anchors as the wind filled their sails, and “the fleet stood towards the north without hurt to any ship,” clearing the shoals and sandbanks and finding deep water again. Even those less devout than the Duke of Medina-Sidonia could only hail their deliverance as a miraculous sign of God’s grace, a Catholic wind to save them from their Protestant enemies, though prosaic meteorologists explain it by “the eastward passage of a very sharp ridge of high pressure” between two lows. Cheated once more of their victory, the English “set on a brag countenance and gave them chase,” resuming their grim pursuit. 8
The paintwork of the ships of both fleets was now blackened by powder burns and smoke stains, the flags and pennants were split and faded, the sails carried patches over the shot-holes and the once precise lines of rigging were frayed and disarrayed. The stress on the men of both sides of the weeks and months at sea, the short rations and foul food and water, and the brutal ten-day running battle is impossible to overestimate. Many, particularly the pressed men taken aboard in whatever they happened to be wearing, and endlessly whipped by the wind, burned by the sun and soaked by salt spray and water, were now dressed in no more than rags. When they lay down to rest it was on the bare boards or on bedding that, lik
e their clothes, was mildewed and black with damp, and they were pestered by rats, starving like the seamen and grown ever bolder in their search for food. The men’s wounds were dressed with filthy, bloodstained bandages, and their bodies were black with dirt and pitted with powder burns. Poorly clad, ill fed and watered, they laboured on through days and nights of grinding toil and unremitting tension, and bouts of savage warfare, snatching at most a few hours’ rest from the back-breaking labour aloft, at the pumps or on the gundecks. They endured the thunder of cannonades louder and more prolonged than any that human ears had ever heard, the crash of explosions, the whistle of shot and the screams of maimed and dying men, with the smell of blood and brimstone always in their nostrils, and knowing that at any moment might come the crash of the fatal shot, a glowing, smoking cannonball shattering the ship’s planking, smashing through anything in its path and sending a blizzard of knife-sharp splinters through the air, lacerating any within range.
About four that Tuesday afternoon, with the wind now blowing strongly out of the west, Howard fired a signal gun and raised the flag summoning a further council of war. English casualties had been light and the ships were largely undamaged, but they were desperately short of food and water, powder and shot. Given their previous difficulties in obtaining supplies, the official “Relation of Proceedings” uses something suspiciously like sarcasm in referring to the absence of “our supply which Her Majesty had most carefully provided and caused to be in readiness.” They maintained their pursuit of the Armada partly in the hope that fresh supplies could be brought to them and partly because of the fear that the Spaniards might yet try to make landfall in northern England or Scotland. John Hawkins aboard the Victory still saw the Armada as “very forcible and must be waited upon with all our force, which is little enough.” He also made yet another plea that munitions should be supplied and wages paid. “There should be an infinite quantity of powder and shot provided and continually sent abroad, without the which great hazard may grow to our country, for this is the greatest and strongest combination to my understanding that ever was gathered in Christendom.”