They drifted to leeward day by day till they had dropped down to Cape St. Vincent. Infinite pains had been taken with the spiritual state of everyone on board. The carelessness or roguery of contractors and purveyors had not been thought of. The water had been taken in three months before. It was found foul and stinking. The salt beef, the salt pork, and fish were putrid, the bread full of maggots and cockroaches. Cask was opened after cask. It was the same story everywhere. They had to be all thrown overboard. In the whole fleet there was not a sound morsel of food but biscuit and dried fruit. The men went down in hundreds with dysentery. The Duke bewailed his fate as innocently as Sancho Panza. He hoped God would help. He had wished no harm to anybody. He had left his home and his family to please the King, and he trusted the King would remember it. He wrote piteously for fresh stores, if the King would not have them all perish. The admirals said they could go no further without fresh water. All was dismay and confusion. The wind at last fell round south, and they made Finisterre. It then came on to blow, and they were scattered. The Duke with half the fleet crawled into Corunna, the crews scarce able to man the yards and trying to desert in shoals.
The missing ships dropped in one by one, but a week passed and a third of them were still absent. Another despairing letter went off from the Duke to his master. He said that he concluded from their misfortunes that God disapproved of the expedition, and that it had better be abandoned. Diego Florez was of the same opinion. The stores were worthless, he said. The men were sick and out of heart. Nothing could be done that season.
It was not by flinching at the first sight of difficulty that the Spaniards had become masters of half the world. The old comrades of Santa Cruz saw nothing in what had befallen them beyond a common accident of sea life. To abandon at the first check an enterprise undertaken with so much pretence, they said, would be cowardly and dishonourable. Ships were not lost because they were out of sight. Fresh meat and bread could be taken on board from Corunna. They could set up a shore hospital for the sick. The sickness was not dangerous. There had been no deaths. A little energy and all would be well again. Pedro de Valdez despatched a courier to Philip to entreat him not to listen to the Duke's croakings. Philip returned a speedy answer telling the Duke not to be frightened at shadows.
There was nothing, in fact, really to be alarmed at. Fresh water took away the dysentery. Fresh food was brought in from the country. Galician seamen filled the gaps made by the deserters. The ships were laid on shore and scraped and tallowed. Tents were pitched on an island in the harbour, with altars and priests, and everyone confessed again and received the Sacrament. 'This,' wrote the Duke, 'is great riches and a precious jewel, and all now are well content and cheerful.' The scattered flock had reassembled. Damages were all repaired, and the only harm had been loss of time. Once more, on the 23rd of July, the Armada in full numbers was under way for England and streaming across the Bay of Biscay with a fair wind for the mouth of the Channel.
Leaving the Duke for the moment, we must now glance at the preparations made in England to receive him. It might almost be said that there were none at all. The winter months had been wild and changeable, but not so wild and not so fluctuating as the mind of England's mistress. In December her fleet had been paid off at Chatham. The danger of leaving the country without any regular defence was pressed on her so vehemently that she consented to allow part of the ships to be recommissioned. The Revenge was given to Drake. He and Howard, the Lord Admiral, were to have gone with a mixed squadron from the Royal Navy and the adventurers down to the Spanish coast. In every loyal subject there had long been but one opinion, that a good open war was the only road to an honourable peace. The open war, they now trusted, was come at last. But the hope was raised only to be disappointed. With the news of Santa Cruz's death came a report which Elizabeth greedily believed, that the Armada was dissolving and was not coming at all. Sir James Crofts sang the usual song that Drake and Howard wanted war, because war was their trade. She recalled her orders. She said that she was assured of peace in six weeks, and that beyond that time the services of the fleet would not be required. Half the men engaged were to be dismissed at once to save their pay. Drake and Lord Henry Seymour might cruise with four or five of the Queen's ships between Plymouth and the Solent. Lord Howard was to remain in the Thames with the rest. I know not whether swearing was interdicted in the English navy as well as in the Spanish, but I will answer for it that Howard did not spare his language when this missive reached him. 'Never,' he said, 'since England was England was such a stratagem made to deceive us as this treaty. We have not hands left to carry the ships back to Chatham. We are like bears tied to a stake; the Spaniards may come to worry us like dogs, and we cannot hurt them.'
It was well for England that she had other defenders than the wildly managed navy of the Queen. Historians tell us how the gentlemen of the coast came out in their own vessels to meet the invaders. Come they did, but who were they? Ships that could fight the Spanish galleons were not made in a day or a week. They were built already. They were manned by loyal subjects, the business of whose lives had been to meet the enemies of their land and faith on the wide ocean—not by those who had been watching with divided hearts for a Catholic revolution.
March went by, and sure intelligence came that the Armada was not dissolving. Again Drake prayed the Queen to let him take the Revenge and the Western adventurers down to Lisbon; but the commissioners wrote full of hope from Ostend, and Elizabeth was afraid 'the King of Spain might take it ill.' She found fault with Drake's expenses. She charged him with wasting her ammunition in target practice. She had it doled out to him in driblets, and allowed no more than would serve for a day and a half's service. She kept a sharp hand on the victualling houses. April went, and her four finest ships—the Triumph, the Victory, the Elizabeth Jonas, and the Bear—were still with sails unbent, 'keeping Chatham church.' She said they would not be wanted and it would be waste of money to refit them. Again she was forced to yield at last, and the four ships were got to sea in time, the workmen in the yards making up for the delay; but she had few enough when her whole fleet was out upon the Channel, and but for the privateers there would have been an ill reckoning when the trial came. The Armada was coming now. There was no longer a doubt of it. Lord Henry Seymour was left with five Queen's ships and thirty London adventurers to watch Parma and the Narrow Seas. Howard, carrying his own flag in the Ark Raleigh, joined Drake at Plymouth with seventeen others.
Still the numbing hand of his mistress pursued him. Food supplies had been issued to the middle of June, and no more was to be allowed. The weather was desperate—wildest summer ever known. The south-west gales brought the Atlantic rollers into the Sound. Drake lay inside, perhaps behind the island which bears his name. Howard rode out the gales under Mount Edgecumbe, the days going by and the provisions wasting. The rations were cut down to make the stores last longer. Owing to the many changes the crews had been hastily raised. They were ill-clothed, ill-provided every way, but they complained of nothing, caught fish to mend their mess dinners, and prayed only for the speedy coming of the enemy. Even Howard's heart failed him now. English sailors would do what could be done by man, but they could not fight with famine. 'Awake, Madam,' he wrote to the Queen, 'awake, for the love of Christ, and see the villainous treasons round about you.' He goaded her into ordering supplies for one more month, but this was to be positively the last. The victuallers inquired if they should make further preparations. She answered peremptorily, 'No'; and again the weeks ran on. The contractors, it seemed, had caught her spirit, for the beer which had been furnished for the fleet turned sour, and those who drank it sickened. The officers, on their own responsibility, ordered wine and arrowroot for the sick out of Plymouth, to be called to a sharp account when all was over. Again the rations were reduced. Four weeks' allowance was stretched to serve for six, and still the Spaniards did not come. So England's forlorn hope was treated at the crisis of her destiny. The preparations on land were scarcely better. The militia had been called out. A hundred thousand men had given their names, and the stations had been arranged where they were to assemble if the enemy attempted a landing. But there were no reserves, no magazines of arms, no stores or tents, no requisites for an army save the men themselves and what local resources could furnish. For a general the Queen had chosen the Earl of Leicester, who might have the merit of fidelity to herself, but otherwise was the worst fitted that she could have found in her whole dominions; and the Prince of Parma was coming, if he came at all, at the head of the best-provided and best-disciplined troops in Europe. The hope of England at that moment was in her patient suffering sailors at Plymouth. Each morning they looked out passionately for the Spanish sails. Time was a worse enemy than the galleons. The six weeks would be soon gone, and the Queen's ships must then leave the seas if the crews were not to starve. Drake had certain news that the Armada had sailed. Where was it? Once he dashed out as far as Ushant, but turned back, lest it should pass him in the night and find Plymouth undefended; and smaller grew the messes and leaner and paler the seamen's faces. Still not a man murmured or gave in. They had no leisure to be sick.
The last week of July had now come. There were half-rations for one week more, and powder for two days' fighting. That was all. On so light a thread such mighty issues were now depending. On Friday, the 23rd, the Armada had started for the second time, the numbers undiminished; religious fervour burning again, and heart and hope high as ever. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday they sailed on with a smooth sea and soft south winds, and on Monday night the Duke found himself at the Channel mouth with all his flock about him. Tuesday morning the wind shifted to the north, then backed to the west, and blew hard. The sea got up, broke into the stern galleries of the galleons, and sent the galleys looking for shelter in French harbours. The fleet hove to for a couple of days, till the weather mended. On Friday afternoon they sighted the Lizard and formed into fighting order; the Duke in the centre, Alonzo de Leyva leading in a vessel of his own called the Rata Coronada, Don Martin de Recalde covering the rear. The entire line stretched to about seven miles.
The sacred banner was run up to the masthead of the San Martin. Each ship saluted with all her guns, and every man—officer, noble, seaman, or slave—knelt on the decks at a given signal to commend themselves to Mary and her Son. We shall miss the meaning of this high epic story if we do not realise that both sides had the most profound conviction that they were fighting the battle of the Almighty. Two principles, freedom and authority, were contending for the guidance of mankind. In the evening the Duke sent off two fast fly-boats to Parma to announce his arrival in the Channel, with another reporting progress to Philip, and saying that till he heard from the Prince he meant to stop at the Isle of Wight. It is commonly said that his officers advised him to go in and take Plymouth. There is no evidence for this. The island would have been a far more useful position for them.