Drake's own perfect plan was to take the whole fleet straight to Lisbon and beat the Armada as it tried to get out. This would have given him an enormous advantage; first, because he would have found the Armada at once, instead of having to search for it after it had sailed; secondly, because he could have crushed it ship by ship as it came out of the Tagus; and, thirdly, because this defeat of the Armada off the coast of Portugal would certainly prevent Parma from taking his army from Flanders into England. On the 30th of March, 1588, a day to be forever remembered in the history of sea-power, Drake wrote all this from Plymouth to the Queen and her Councillors. One civilian, Sir Francis Walsingham, saw at once that Drake was right. But the others shook their heads; while even those who thought Drake knew better than they did were afraid to let the fleet go so far away, because the people liked the comfort of seeing it close beside the coast. Drake's way was the way of Nelson, Jellicoe, Beatty, and all the greatest seamen. But he was not allowed to try it till the 7th of July, when the Armada had left Lisbon and was in the harbour of Corunna at the northwest corner of the Spanish coast. And even then the Queen kept him so short of stores that he could not have waited there to take the best chance.
When almost in sight of Spain a roaring sou'wester blew up; so, being unable to wait, he had to come back to Plymouth on the 12th. Then for a week the English fleet was taking in stores as hard as it could. Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral of England, was in command as the Great Officer of State who represented the Queen. But he was a very sensible man, who, knowing that Drake was the greatest seaman in the world, let him do the fighting in the proper way.
[Illustration: One of Drake's Men-of-War
that Fought the Great Armada in 1588.]
The southwest wind that blew Drake back brought the Armada out and up the English Channel. Howard and Drake, their desperate week of taking in stores at last quite done, were playing a game of bowls on the green when Captain Fleming, of the ever famous Golden Hind, rushed up to say the Spaniards were in sight of the Lizard, only sixty miles west. Drake, knowing perfectly well what time there was to spare, and how best to calm the people looking on, said, "There's time to finish the game first and the Spaniards after." But the fleet got its sailing orders on the spot; and all that fateful night the ships were working out of Plymouth Sound. The Queen and her politicians, though patriotic as any Sea-Dog, had, by keeping Drake so short of stores, very nearly got their own fleet caught in just the same way as Drake had wished to catch the Great Armada, that is, coming out of port, ship by ship, against a united fleet outside. But Philip's silly plan, the clumsiness of the Armada, and, above all, the supreme skill of the English Sea-Dogs, put everything to rights again.
Next morning Drake was safely out at sea in the Channel, with fifty-four ships, when he sighted a dim blur toward the west. This was the Great Invincible Armada. Rain killed the wind, and the English lay under bare poles, unseen by the Spaniards, who still left some of their idle sails swinging to and fro. The great day had come at last. Philip's Armada had drunk to Der Tag (the day) of England's overthrow just as the Germans did three centuries later; and nearly all the Spaniards thought that thirty thousand Spaniards on the water were more than a match for fifteen thousand English. But the Spaniards were six thousand short, through sickness and desertion, and of the remaining twenty-four thousand little more than a quarter were seamen. The rest were soldiers, with many camp-followers. The fifteen thousand English, on the other hand, were nearly all on board; and most of them had been trained to sea fighting from their youth up. The Spaniards were one-quarter seamen and three-quarters landsmen. The English were three-quarters seamen and one-quarter landsmen; and most of these landsmen were like the Marines of the present day, "soldier and sailor too." Nor was this the only difference that helped to seal the fate of the doomed Armada. For not only were the English seamen twice as many and twice as good as the Spanish seamen, but in the numbers of their trained seamen-gunners the English beat the Spaniards no less than ten to one: and guns were the weapons that decided the issue of the day, just as they did at Jutland in our recent war against the Germans.
A little before sunset the mist lifted, and the Spaniards, to their intense surprise, saw the whole English fleet together. Every big ship in the Armada sent boats hurrying off to know what orders Sidonia had to give them. But Sidonia had none. That the Sea-Dogs had worked out of Plymouth so quickly and were all together in a single fleet was something he had not reckoned on, and something Philip's silly plan had not provided for. Still, the Armada had one advantage left, the weather-gage; for the southwest wind was piping up again, blowing from the Armada to the English. Yet even this advantage was soon lost, not by any change of wind, but by English seamanship. For while eight English vessels held the attention of the Armada, by working about between it and the shore, the rest of Drake's fleet stole off to sea, got safely out of sight, tacked to windward with splendid skill, edged in toward the Armada when sea-room west of it was gained, and then, next morning, to the still more intense surprise of the Armada, came down to attack it, having won the weather-gage by sailing round behind it in the night.
This was the decisive stroke. The fight itself was simply the slaughter of a floating army by a fleet. The Spaniards fought like heroes, day after slaughterous day. But their light guns, badly served by ill-trained crews, fired much too high to hull the English ships "'twixt wind and water," that is, to smash holes in their sides along the water-line. On the other hand, the English had more and better guns, far more and far better seaman-gunners, and vessels managed by the sea's own "handy men." They ran in with the wind, just near enough to make their well-aimed cannon-balls most deadly on the Spanish water-line, but never so near that the Spaniards could catch them with grappling hooks and hold them fast while the Spanish soldiers boarded. Another way the skilful English had was to turn their broadside against the enemy's end-on. This, whether for a single ship or for a fleet, is called "crossing the T"; and if you will look at a T you will see that guns firing inward from the whole length of the cross-stroke have a great advantage over guns firing back from the front of the up-stroke. In other words, the broad front converges on the narrow front and smashes it.
The crowded Spaniards sailed on, the whole week long, before the pursuing English in the "eagle formation," with the big ships forming the body and the lighter ones the wings: good enough for ancient battles like Lepanto, but of no use against a modern fleet like Drake's. Most of them could hardly have been more nearly useless if they had been just so many elephants fighting killer whales at sea. Do what they could, they could not catch the nimble Sea-Dogs who were biting them to death. But they still fought on. Their crowded soldiers were simply targets for the English cannon-balls. Sometimes the Spanish vessels were seen to drip a horrid red, as if the very decks were bleeding. But when, at the end of the week, Sidonia asked Oquendo, "What are we to do now?", Oquendo, a dauntless warrior, at once replied: "Order up more powder!"