On Sunday morning Lord Howard called a council of war on the deck of the Ark Royal. This was his last chance to stop the invasion.
A head-on attack now would be suicide. The armada had more ships and more guns, and the English would not even have their slight advantage of greater maneuverability. But at sea, on the move, the crescent shape of the Spanish force seemed invulnerable.
Was there anything they could do?
Several men spoke at once, suggesting fireships.
It was a course of desperation, Ned felt. Costly vessels had to be sacrificed, set on fire and driven toward the enemy. Capricious winds and random currents could easily send them off course, or the enemy ships might be nimble enough to get out of the way, so there was no certainty that fireships would reach their targets and achieve the objective of setting the enemy fleet alight.
But no one had a better idea.
Eight elderly vessels were selected to be forfeited, and they were moved to the middle of the English fleet in the hope of masking the preparations.
The holds of the ships were packed with pitch, rags, and old timber, while the masts were painted with tar.
Ned recalled talking to Carlos about the siege of Antwerp, at which a similar tactic had been used by the Dutch rebels, and he suggested to Howard that the fireships' cannons should be loaded. The heat of the fire would ignite the gunpowder and fire the weapons, with luck at the moment when the fireships were in among the enemy fleet. Howard liked the idea and gave the order.
Ned supervised the loading of the guns in the way Carlos had explained, giving each a double charge, a cannonball plus smaller ammunition.
A small boat was tied to the stern of each fireship, so that the daring skeleton crews sailing toward the enemy could escape at the last minute.
The attempt to hide this activity failed, to Ned's dismay. The Spanish were not stupid, and they figured out what was going on. Ned saw several Spanish pinnaces and boats being steered to form a screen between the two navies, and guessed that Medina Sidonia had a plan for protecting his armada. However, Ned could not quite figure out how it was going to work.
Night fell, the wind freshened, and the tide turned. At midnight wind and tide were perfect. The skeleton crews hoisted sails and steered the lightless fireships toward the glimmering lamps of the Spanish armada. Ned strained to see, but there was no moon yet, and the ships were dark blurs on a dark sea. The distance between the two fleets was only half a mile, but the wait seemed interminable. Ned's heart raced. Everything hung on this. He did not often pray, but now he sent a fervent request to heaven.
Suddenly light flared. One after another the eight ships burst into flame. Against the red conflagration Ned could see the sailors leaping to their escape boats. The eight separate blazes soon seemed to join together and become one inferno. And the wind blew the firebomb inexorably toward the enemy fleet.
Rollo watched with his heart thudding and his breath coming in gasps. The fireships approached the screen of small vessels that Medina Sidonia had deployed to hamper them. The smoke that filled Rollo's nostrils smelled of wood and tar. He could even feel the heat of the flames.
Two pinnaces now detached themselves from the screen and moved toward either end of the line of fireships. The crews, risking their lives, threw grappling irons onto the blazing vessels. As soon as they achieved a grip each crew began to tow a fireship away. Even as he trembled for his own life, Rollo was awestruck by the courage and seamanship of those Spanish sailors. They headed for the open sea, where the fireships could burn to ashes harmlessly.
Six fireships remained. Two more pinnaces, repeating the pattern, approached the outermost of the fireships. With luck, Rollo thought, all six might be detached in the same way, two by two, and rendered ineffectual. Medina Sidonia's tactic was working. Rollo's spirits rose.
Then he was shocked by a burst of cannon fire.
There was certainly no one alive on board the fireships, but their guns seemed to be going off by magic. Was Satan there, loading the cannons as the flames danced around him, helping the heretics? Then Rollo realized that the weapons had been preloaded, and had gone off when the heat ignited the gunpowder.
The result was carnage. Against the bright orange blaze of the fire he could see the black outlines of the men in the pinnaces jerk, like crazed devils cavorting in hell, as they were riddled with bullets. The cannons must have been loaded with shot or stones. The men appeared to be screaming, but nothing could be heard over the roar of the flames and the crash of the guns.
The attempt to capture and divert the fireships collapsed as the crews fell, dead or wounded, to their decks and into the sea. The fireships, carried by the tide, came on relentlessly.
At that point the Spanish had no choice but to flee.
Aboard the San Martin, Medina Sidonia fired a signal gun giving the order to weigh anchors and sail away; but it was superfluous. On every ship that Rollo could see in the orange light, the men were swarming up the masts and setting the sails. In their haste many did not raise their anchors but simply cut the arm-thick ropes with hatchets and left the anchors on the seabed.
At first the San Martin moved with agonizing slowness. Like all the ships it had been anchored head-on to the wind for stability; so first it had to be turned, a painstaking operation carried out with small sails. To Rollo it seemed inevitable that the galleon would catch fire before it could move away, and he got ready to jump into the water and try to swim to shore.
Medina Sidonia calmly sent a pinnace around the fleet with orders for all ships to sail north and regroup, but Rollo was not sure many would obey. The presence among them of blazing fireships was so terrifying that most sailors could think of nothing but getting away.
As they turned and the wind at last filled their sails they had to concentrate on escaping without crashing into one another. As soon as they got clear, most ships fled as fast as wind and tide would carry them, regardless of direction.
Then a fireship sailed dangerously close to the San Martin, and flying sparks set the foresails alight.
Rollo looked down into the black water and hesitated to jump.
But the ship was prepared to fight fires. On deck were barrels of seawater and stacks of buckets. A sailor seized a bucket and threw water up at the burning canvas. Rollo grabbed another bucket and did the same. Others joined them, and they quickly extinguished the flames.
Then at last the galleon caught the wind and moved away from danger.
It stopped after a mile. Rollo looked back over the stern. The English were doing nothing. Safely to windward of the flames, they could afford to watch. The armada was still in the grip of confusion and panic. Even though none of the Spanish ships had caught fire, the danger was so immediate that it was impossible for anyone to think of anything but saving himself.
For the moment the San Martin was alone--and vulnerable. It was dark now, and no more could be done. But the ships had been saved. In the morning Medina Sidonia would face the difficult task of re-forming the armada. But it could be done. And the invasion could still go ahead.
As dawn broke over Calais, Barney Willard, on the deck of the Alice, saw that the fireships had failed. Their smoldering remains littered the Calais foreshore, but no other vessels had been burned. Only one wreck was visible, the San Lorenzo, drifting helplessly toward the cliffs.
A mile or so to the north he could make out the silhouette of the Spanish flagship, the San Martin, and four other galleons. The rest of the stupendous fleet was out of sight. They had been scattered, and their formation lost, but they were intact. As Barney looked, the five galleons he could see swung east and picked up speed. Medina Sidonia was off to round up his strays. Once he had done that, he could return to Calais in strength and still make his rendezvous with the duke of Parma.
And yet Barney felt the English now had a slim chance. The armada was vulnerable while its discipline was shattered and its ships were dispersed. They might be picked off in ones and twos.
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If at the same time they could be driven toward the Netherlands sandbanks, so much the better. Barney had often negotiated those sandbanks as he sailed into Antwerp, and Drake was equally familiar with them, but to most Spanish navigators they were uncharted hazards. There was an opportunity here--though not for long.
To Barney's profound satisfaction, Lord Howard reached the same conclusion.
The Ark Royal fired a signal gun, and Drake's Revenge weighed anchor and raised sails. Barney shouted orders to his crew, who rubbed the sleep from their eyes and went into action all at once, like a well-trained choir commencing a madrigal.
The English navy set off in hot pursuit of the five galleons.
Barney stood on deck, effortlessly keeping his balance in the heavy seas. The August weather was blustery, the wind constantly changing strength and direction, with intermittent driving rain and patchy visibility, as happened often in the Channel. Barney relished the feeling of racing across the water, the salty air in his lungs, cold rain cooling his face, and the prospect of plunder at the end of the day.
The fast English ships gained relentlessly on the galleons, but the Spanish flight was not fruitless, for as they passed through the straits into the North Sea they picked up more of their scattered armada. Nevertheless they remained outnumbered by the English, who drew ever closer.
It was nine o'clock in the morning, and by Barney's calculation they were about seven miles off the Netherlands town of Gravelines, when Medina Sidonia decided that further flight was pointless, and turned to face his enemy.
Barney went down to the gun deck. His master gunner was a dark-skinned North African called Bill Coory. Barney had taught Bill everything he knew and now Bill was as good as Barney had ever been, perhaps better. Now Barney ordered Bill to prepare the gun crew of the Alice for a fight.
He watched Drake's Revenge bear down on the San Martin. The two ships were headed for a broadside pass like hundreds that had taken place in the last nine days with little effect. But this one was different. Barney became increasingly apprehensive as the Revenge took a course to bring it dangerously close to the Spanish ship. Drake had scented blood, or perhaps gold, and Barney feared for the life of England's hero as he came within a hundred yards of his target. If Drake were killed in the first clash of the battle it could demoralize the English totally.
Both vessels fired their bow guns, small nuisance weapons that might disconcert and panic the enemy crew but could not cripple a ship. Then, as the two mighty vessels drew level, the advantage of the wind became apparent. The Spanish ship, downwind, heeled over so that its cannons, even at their lowest elevation, pointed up into the air. The English vessel, upwind, leaned toward its enemy, and at this close range its guns aimed at the deck and the exposed underbelly.
They began to fire. The guns of the two ships made different noises. The Revenge shot in a measured tattoo, like a drumbeat, each cannon on the deck firing as it reached the optimum position with a discipline that gladdened the artilleryman's heart in Barney. The San Martin's sound was deeper but irregular, as if its gunners were saving ammunition.
Both ships rose and fell on the waves like corks, but they were so close now that even in heavy seas their guns could hardly miss.
The Revenge was struck by several huge balls. Because of the angle, the shots hit the rigging, but even that might cripple a ship if the masts were broken. The San Martin suffered a different kind of damage: some of Drake's guns were firing a variety of unconventional ammunition--packets of small iron cubes called dice shot that shredded the flesh; pairs of cannonballs chained together that whirled through the rigging and brought down the yardarms; even lethal shards of scrap metal that could destroy sails.
Then the scene was obscured by the fog of gun smoke. Barney could hear the screams of maimed men between the bangs, and the taste of gunpowder was in his nose and mouth.
The ships drew apart, firing their stern guns as they did so. As they emerged from the smoke Barney saw that Drake was not going to slow his pace by turning around to attack the San Martin again, but was making a beeline for the next nearest Spanish ship. Barney deduced with relief that the Revenge was not badly damaged.
The second ship in the English line, the Nonpareil, pounced on the San Martin. Following Drake's example, its commander drew breathtakingly close to the enemy vessel, though not close enough to permit the Spanish to grapple and board; and the guns thundered again. This time Barney thought the Spanish fired fewer balls, and he suspected their artillerymen were slow to reload.
Barney had watched long enough: it was time to join in. It was important for the Alice to be seen attacking Spanish ships, for that entitled Barney and his crew to a share of the spoils.
The San Felipe was the next galleon in the Spanish line, and it was already surrounded by English ships that were pounding it mercilessly. Barney was reminded of a pack of hounds attacking a bear in the English people's favorite entertainment. The ships were approaching so close that Barney saw one crazed Englishman jump across the gap to the deck of the San Felipe and immediately get cut to pieces by Spanish swords. He realized it was the only time in the past nine days that anyone had boarded an enemy ship--a measure of how the English had succeeded in preventing the Spanish from using their preferred tactics.
As the Alice swept into the attack, following in the wake of a warship called the Antelope, Barney glanced to the horizon and saw, to his consternation, a new group of Spanish vessels appearing over the horizon and racing to join the battle. To come to the rescue of an outnumbered fleet took courage, but it seemed the Spaniards had plenty of that.
Gritting his teeth, Barney yelled at his helmsman to approach within a hundred yards of the San Felipe.
The soldiers on the galleon fired their muskets and arquebuses, and were near enough to score several hits among the men crowded on the deck of the Alice. Barney dropped to his knees and escaped unscathed, but half a dozen of his crew fell, bleeding onto the deck. Then Bill Coory started firing, and the guns of the Alice thundered. Small shot raked the deck of the galleon, mowing down sailors and soldiers, while larger cannonballs smashed into the timbers of the hull.
The galleon replied with one large ball for the Alice's eight smaller shots, and as it crashed into the stern Barney felt the thud in the pit of his stomach. The ship's carpenter, waiting on deck for exactly this moment, rushed below to try to repair the damage.
Barney had been in battle before. He was not fearless--men without fear did not live long at sea--but he found that once the fighting started there was so much to do that he did not think about the danger until afterward. He was possessed by high-energy excitement, yelling instructions at his crew, dashing from one side of the ship to the other for a better view, dropping down to the gun deck every few minutes to shout orders and encouragement to the sweating artillerymen. He coughed on gun smoke, slipped on spilled blood, and stumbled over the bodies of the dead and wounded.
He looped the Alice around behind the Antelope and followed the larger ship on its second pass, firing the port guns this time. He cursed as a shot from the galleon struck his rear mast. A fraction of a second later he felt a sharp stinging pain in his scalp. He reached up and pulled a splinter of wood from his hair. He felt the warm wetness of blood, but it was only a trickle, and he realized he had escaped with a scratch.
The mast did not fall and the carpenter hurried to brace it with reinforcing struts.
When the Alice was clear of the sulfurous smoke, Barney noticed that the armada was slowly moving into its crescent formation. He was amazed that the commanders and crews could summon up such discipline as they took a hellish pounding. The Spanish ships were proving worryingly hard to sink, and now reinforcements were about to arrive.
Barney looped the Alice around for another attacking run.
The battle raged all day, and by midafternoon Rollo was in despair.
The San Martin had been hit hundreds of times. Three of the ship's big guns had been dis
lodged from their mountings and rendered useless, but it had plenty more. The holed ship was being kept afloat by the divers, the bravest of the brave, who went into the sea with lead plates and hemp caulking to patch the hull while the gunfire raged. All around Rollo men lay dead or wounded, many calling on God or their favorite saint to release them from their agony. The air he breathed tasted of blood and gun smoke.
The Maria Juan had been so terribly damaged that it could not stay afloat, and Rollo had watched in despair as the magnificent ship sank, slowly but hopelessly, into the gray waves of the cold North Sea and disappeared from sight forever. The San Mateo was close to the end. In the effort to keep her afloat the crew were throwing everything movable overboard: guns, gratings, broken timbers, and even the bodies of their dead comrades. The San Felipe was so badly damaged that it could not be steered, and it was drifting helplessly away from the battle and toward the sandbanks.
It was not just that the Spanish were outnumbered. They were brave soldiers and skilled sailors, but they won their battles by ramming and boarding, and the English had figured out how to prevent them from doing that. Instead they had been forced into a shooting battle, in which they were at a disadvantage. The English had developed a rapid-fire technique that the Spanish could not match. The larger Spanish guns were difficult to reload, sometimes requiring the gunners to hang from ropes outside the hull to insert the shot, and in the thick of a battle that was almost impossible.
The result was disaster.
As if to make defeat more certain, the wind had veered to the north, so there was no escape in that direction. To the east and south were only sandbanks, and the English were pressing them from the west. The Spanish were trapped. They were holding out bravely, but in time they would either sink under the English guns or run aground on the sandbanks.
There was no hope.
At four o'clock in the afternoon the weather changed.
An unexpected squall blew up from the southwest. On the deck of Lord Howard's Ark Royal, Ned Willard was buffeted by strong winds and soaked by rain. He could have put up with that cheerfully, but what bothered him was that the Spanish armada was now hidden behind a curtain of rain. The English fleet moved tentatively to the place where the Spanish ought to have been, but they had gone.