STYLE OF SHIPS IN THE TIME OF THE ARMADA.
But these captains knew what they were about. In those days, as now, in fighting with sailing-vessels the advantage is usually with the one who attacks from the windward side; for then he can manœuver his vessel, whereas his enemy, heading toward the wind, can do so only with difficulty if at all, and hence cannot easily take a good position or escape from a bad one. Howard, therefore, waited until the closely crowded squadrons of Spain had passed beyond him up the Channel, when he issued from Plymouth harbor, bore down upon their rear from the windward, and proceeded, as one of the reports expressed it, to “pluck their feathers.”
Then began some wonderful days of sea history and naval schooling. The Spanish vessels were floating castles armed with heavy guns and crowded with soldiers armed with muskets and “harquebuses of crock,”—that is, great blunderbusses supported upon a portable rest. They kept in a close crowd, like a phalanx of old Swiss infantry, and supposed that the English would move against them in another dense raft, and that they would fight from deck to deck of grappled ships as if they were on land.
But the English knew better. They had few ships as large—the Triumph, 1100 tons, was the biggest—or guns as heavy as the Spaniards’. Instead of attacking in a solid mass, therefore, they spread out, hovered on the flanks, darted a ship here and there, fired as they saw opportunity, and kept their own vessels out of danger as much as possible. In the light and variable winds that prevailed, the great galleons of the Armada were almost immovable, while the English for the most part had smaller, lighter vessels, whose nimbleness and ready obedience to the helm astonished the Spanish. Standing low in the water, these would drive their shot right through the enemy’s hulls, and make off before the Spaniard could depress his guns enough to do any damage in return; while the army of musketeers upon whom he had relied so strongly had little chance to do anything at all.
Thus for a week the English frigates and armed fishing-boats harassed the Armada on its way up the Channel, capturing and sinking many of the ships, while losing some of its own, of course, until at last the worried and baffled squadron managed to gain the roadstead of Calais, where the army of the Duke of Parma lay. To carry this army across and begin a campaign against London seemed now not only out of the question, but the safety of the fleet itself was a question; for a few days later, when a favorable wind arose, several fire-ships came sailing down upon them from the blockading Englishmen outside. These fire-ships—an important part of every fleet for two or three centuries—were old vessels intended to set fire to an enemy’s ships. Their yard-arms were set with great iron hooks, their hulls and riggings were saturated with oil, their decks loaded with tar-barrels, and their old guns overloaded, so as to spread destruction in every direction by bursting. Then bold crews sailed these grappling monsters as near the enemy as they dared,—and it must have been a service dear to the heart of the daring,—set fire to them, lashed their helms, and got away in their boats as best they could.
To escape these dreadful things the Spaniards were obliged to up-anchor and put to sea, losing many ships and lives by fire or the wildly flying cannon-balls, or by going ashore in the effort; and then the Englishmen followed them again, like wolves after a herd of buffalo in winter. The Spaniards dared not go back down the Channel, and nothing remained to them but the hazardous voyage around the north of Scotland—a venture for which the towering, unwieldy galleons were ill-fitted. Storms overtook them in the North Sea and on the Atlantic, and so many were cast away on the Irish coast, where those who reached the shore were slain, that hardly half of the proud Armada crept back to Lisbon and Cadiz.
A SEA-FIGHT OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
This incident was one of the most notable in European history for two reasons: First, historically, it no doubt saved England and her colonies from the Inquisition, and all the other depressing and horrible burdens that long afterward weighted the papal countries of southern Europe and their American possessions; and, second, it reformed naval warfare not only by confirming the value of a regularly organized national navy, but by showing that the old-fashioned, dense fleet formation, carrying soldiers to fight as they would do on land, was wrong and ineffective.
But though Spain had been humbled she was by no means crushed, and sea-fighting went on a long time before either she, the French, or the Dutch—and the last were the hardest foes—would fully admit England’s claim to be sovereign of all the seas around Britain, and strike their flags whenever they met one of her “king’s ships” in acknowledgment of it. England asserted that the domain of her crown covered not only the lands of England (and much of France), but also “the narrow seas”; and she defined this domain to include all the Channel waters north of Cape Finisterre and thence in a square area westward to the middle of the Atlantic. This was not an assertion: “I can beat the world in sea-fighting,” but was a legal claim to rule—a declaration that her laws extended over that much sea in the same manner that it is now agreed that the laws of all nations extend to a distance of three miles from their coasts.