Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

All Sunday the two fleets lay within sight of each other; anxious councils of war were held on both sides, and so night fell without a shot being fired or anything done. By midnight the tide was swirling strong and swift from the English to the Spanish ships, and Drake was busy preparing his crowning piece of devilry for the edification of the Dons.

At about one o’clock on that calm, moonless morning, patches of flickering, leaping flame began to show among the twinkling English lights, and these grew swiftly higher and broader, and a few minutes later the terrified Dons saw eight fire-ships crowned mast-high with leaping flames, come reeling and roaring into their midst.

Then there was cutting of cables and slipping of moorings, and labouring with frantic haste to get the ships under sail. Galleon crashed into galleasse, and galleasse into cruiser in the wild haste and fatal confusion.

Marvellous to say, not a single Spanish ship took fire, but behind the fire-craft there was something more terrible and deadly still—El Draque and his guns. At the supreme moment Lord Howard weakly and foolishly turned aside to capture or sink a disabled galleasse. If the rest of the fleet had followed him there might have been no Battle of Gravelines, and the Trafalgar of the Sixteenth Century might never have been fought. But, as has been well said, it was the hour for which Francis Drake had been born. He set the Revenge on the wind, and, followed by the rest of the squadron, bore down in grim and ominous silence on the huddled, entangled Dons. Within pistol range of the great San Martin the Revenge burst into sudden thunder and flame, and drove on enwreathed in smoke. In her wake ship after ship came on in perfect order, each raining her iron storm into the rent and splintering sides of the Dons as they passed.

Then from Dover way came the roar of guns telling that Wynter and Seymour had got to work, and so for three hours they went at it, the Little Pirate ever first, and revelling in the work that he loved to do for his dear England. He had forgotten all his mistress’s slights and fickleness, all the harm that Court traitors had done him, all his suffering and privation on the windless seas and burning lands of the West. It was the hour of England’s fate and his own, and there he was in the thick of it, and he was happy.

After three hours Howard and his laggards came up, and the fight roared on flank and front and rear. Although the school-books say but little about it, there had never been such a sea-fight in the world before, nor one on whose end such great issues hung. The Spaniards, caught between El Draque and the sands of Dunkirk—which to them was something worse than being between the devil and the deep sea—fought with all their ancient valour, but ship after ship, as the battle roared on through the day, went down riddled with shot or took fire and blew up, till at length out of the forty battleships and cruisers which Sidonia had somehow got together to protect his rear, only sixteen were left, and they were little better than shot-shattered, fire-blackened hulks.

The powder on both sides was nearly done, but so too was the work of Drake and his ships. Fathom by fathom the north-west wind was driving the Dons on to the mud-banks of the Netherland shore, and the Little Pirate in his well-named Revenge was hanging on their weather quarter watching—and I doubt not praying—for the moment of their final ruin.

And yet he was not to see it, for when there was but five fathoms of water between the Spanish keels and the Dutch mud the north-wester dropped to a calm, a fresh south-wester sprang up in its place, and for the fourth time in seven days the Armada was saved from utter destruction by those fickle winds to which a pious sentiment has ascribed its ruin.

Down went the Spanish helms, and round came the dripping, labouring, Spanish prows, and ere long all that was left of King Philip’s fleet was staggering away to the northward to begin that awful voyage round the north of Scotland and past the wild Irish coast from which so few were to return. Meanwhile the Little Pirate hung on to the heels of the flying Armada for two days and nights, until at length a tempest came rolling up over the Dogger Bank, and he ran in for safety under the Scottish shore, cheerfully leaving the Dons to the winds of heaven, and the rocks that were waiting to finish what his own guns had begun.

With the victory of Gravelines, Drake’s work as an Empire-maker comes to an end. The expedition to Portugal, for all its booty, was a failure and did nothing to enhance his fame. If his advice had been taken Spain might have been crushed and humbled for ever, but such was the hopeless weakness and vacillation at Court that, even after the Armada had shown her the true designs of Philip, Gloriana got into negotiations with him again. Over and over again her Little Pirate besought her to give him the means of striking the blow that should crush Spain and make England undisputed mistress of the seas, but it was not to be, and so at length, sick and sore at heart, he sailed away again to his beloved West, never to return.