XXXIIA. D. 1587THE FOUR ARMADAS
Herelet us call a halt. We have come to the climax of the great century, the age of the Renaissance, when Europe was born again; of the Reformation, when the Protestants of the Baltic fought the Catholics of the Mediterranean for the right to worship in freedom; and of the sea kings who laid the foundations of our modern world.
Islam had reached her fullest flood of glory with the fleets of Barbarossa, the armies of the Sultan Suleiman, and all the splendors of Akbar the Magnificent, before her ebb set downward into ruin.
Portugal and Spain, under one crown, shared the plunder of the Indies and the mastery of the sea.
Then, as the century waned, a third-class power, the island state of England, claimed the command of the sea, and planted the seeds of an empire destined to overshadow the ruins of Spain, as well as the wreck of Islam.
Here opened broad fields of adventure. There were German and English envoys at the court of Russia; English merchants seeking trade in India, Dutch gunners in the service of eastern princes, French fishermen finding the way into Canada, seamen of all these nations as slaves in Turkish galleysor in Spanish mines; everywhere sea fights, shipwrecks, trails of lost men wandering in unknown lands, matters of desert islands, and wrecked treasures with all the usual routine of plague, pestilence and famine, of battle, of murder and of sudden death.
In all this tangle we must take one thread, with most to learn, I think, from a Hollander, Mynheer, J. H. van Linschoten, who was clerk to the Portuguese archbishop of the Indies and afterward in business at Terceira in the Azores, where he wrote a famous book on pilotage. He tells us about the seamanship of Portuguese and Spaniards in terms of withering contempt as a mixture of incompetence and cowardice, enough to explain the downfall and ruin of their empires.
The worst ships, he says, which cleared from Cochin were worth, with their cargo, one million, eight hundred thousand pounds of our modern money. Not content with that, the swindlers in charge removed the ballast to make room for more cinnamon, whereby theArreliquiascapsized and sank.
TheSan Iago, having her bottom ripped out by a coral reef, her admiral, pilot, master and a dozen others entered into a boat, keeping it with naked rapiers until they got clear, and deserted. Left without any officers, the people on the wreck were addressed by an Italian seaman who cried, “Why are we thus abashed?” So ninety valiant mariners took the longboat and cleared, hacking off the fingers, hands and arms of the drowning women who held on to her gunwale.
As to the pilot who caused this little accident, he afterward had charge of theSan Thomas“full ofpeople, and most of the gentility of India,” and lost with all hands.
But if the seamanship of the Portuguese made it a miracle if they escaped destruction, that of the Spaniards was on a much larger scale. Where Portugal lost a ship Spain bungled away a fleet, and never was incompetence more frightfully punished than in the doom of the four armadas.
Philip II was busy converting Protestant Holland, and in 1587 he resolved to send a Catholic mission to England also, but while he was preparing the first armada Drake came and burned his hundred ships under the guns of Cadiz.
A year later the second, the great armada, was ready, one hundred thirty ships in line of battle, which was to embark the army in Holland, and invade England with a field force of fifty-three thousand men, the finest troops in Europe.
Were the British fleet of to-day to attack the Dutch the situation would be much the same. It was a comfort to the English that they had given most ample provocation and to spare, but still they felt it was very awkward. They had five million people, only the ninth part of their present strength; no battle-ships, and only thirty cruisers. The merchant service rallied a hundred vessels, the size of the fishing smacks, the Flemings lent forty, and nobody in England dared to hope.
To do Spain justice she made plenty of noise, giving ample warning. Her fleet was made invincible by the pope’s blessing, the sacred banners and the holy relics, while for England’s spiritual comfort there was a vicar of the inquisition with his racks and thumbscrews.Only the minor details were overlooked: that the cordage was rotten, the powder damp, the wine sour, the water putrid, the biscuits and the beef a mass of maggots, while the ship’s drainage into the ballast turned every galleon into a floating pest-house. The admiral was a fool, the captains were landlubbers, the ships would not steer, and the guns could not be fought. The soldiers, navigators, boatswains and quartermasters were alike too proud to help the short-handed, overworked seamen, while two thousand of the people were galley slaves waiting to turn on their masters. Worst of all, this sacred, fantastic, doomed armada was to attack from Holland, without pilotage to turn our terrific fortifications of shoals and quicksands.
Small were our ships and woefully short of powder, but they served the wicked valiant queen who pawned her soul for England. Her admiral was Lord Howard the Catholic, whose squadron leaders were Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher. The leaders were practical seamen who led, not drove, the English. The Spanish line of battle was seven miles across, but when the armada was sighted, Drake on Plymouth Hoe had time to finish his game of bowls before he put to sea.
From hill to hill through England the beacon fires roused the men, the church bells called them to prayer, and all along the southern coast fort echoed fort while guns and trumpets announced the armada’s coming. The English fleet, too weak to attack, but fearfully swift to eat up stragglers, snapped like a wolf-pack at the heels of Spain. Four days and nights on end the armada was goaded and torn insleepless misery, no longer in line of battle, but huddled and flying. At the Straits they turned at bay with thirty-five hundred guns, but eight ships bore down on fire, stampeding the broken fleet to be slaughtered, foundered, burned or cast away, strewing the coast with wreckage from Dover to Cape Wrath and down the Western Isles. Fifty-three ruined ships got back to Spain with a tale of storms and the English which Europe has never forgotten, insuring the peace of English homes for three whole centuries.
A year passed, and the largest of all the armadas ventured to sea, this time from the West Indies, a treasure fleet for Spain. Of two hundred twenty ships clearing not more than fifteen arrived, the rest being “drowned, burst, or taken.” Storms and the English destroyed that third armada.
The fourth year passed, marked by a hurricane in the Western Isles, and a great increase of England’s reckoning, but the climax of Spain’s undoing was still to come in 1591, the year of the fourth armada.
To meet and convoy her treasure fleet of one hundred ten sail from the Indies, Spain sent out thirty battle-ships to the Azores. There lay an English squadron of sixteen vessels, also in waiting for the treasure fleet, whose policy was not to attack the escort, which carried no plunder worth taking. Lord Howard’s vice-admiral was Sir Richard Grenville, commanding Drake’s old flagship, theRevenge, of seven hundred tons. This Grenville, says Linschoten, was a wealthy man, a little eccentric also, for dining once with some Spanish officers he must needs play the trick of crunching wine-glasses, and making believe to swallow the glass while blood ran from his lips. Hewas “very unquiet in his mind, and greatly affected to war,” dreaded by the Spaniards, detested by his men. On sighting the Spanish squadron of escort, Howard put to sea but Grenville had a hundred sick men to bring on board theRevenge; his hale men were skylarking ashore. He stayed behind, when he attempted to rejoin the squadron the Spanish fleet of escort was in his way.
On board theRevengethe master gave orders to alter course for flight until Grenville threatened to hang him. It was Grenville’s sole fault that he was presently beset by eight ships, each of them double the size of theRevenge. So one small cruiser for the rest of the day and all night fought a whole fleet, engaging from first to last thirteen ships of the line. She sank two ships and well-nigh wrecked five more, the Spaniards losing four hundred men in a fight with seventy. Only when their admiral lay shot through the head, and their last gun was silenced, their last boarding pike broken, the sixty wounded men who were left alive, made terms with the Spaniards and laid down their arms.
Grenville was carried on board theFlagship, where the officers of the Spanish fleet assembled to do him honor, and in their own language he spoke that night his last words: “Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, queen, religion and honor; whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body; and shall leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.”
Sir Richard Grenville
Sir Richard Grenville
With that he died, and his body was committed to the sea. As to those who survived of his ship’s company, the Spaniards treated them with honor; sending them as free men home to England. But they believed that the body of Grenville being in the sea raised that appalling cyclone that presently destroyed the treasure fleet and its escort, in all one hundred seven ships, including theRevenge.
So perished the fourth armada, making within five years a total loss of four hundred eighty-nine capital ships, in all the greatest sea calamity that ever befell a nation. Hear then the comment of Linschoten the Dutchman. The Spaniards thought that “Fortune, or rather God, was wholly against them. Which is a sufficient cause to make the Spaniards out of heart; and on the contrary to give the Englishmen more courage, and to make them bolder. For they are victorious, stout and valiant; and all their enterprises do take so good an effect that they are, hereby, become the lords and masters of the sea.”
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The Portuguese were by no means the first seamen to round the Cape of Good Hope. About six hundred years B. C. the Pharaoh of Egypt, Niko, sent a Phœnician squadron from the Red Sea, to find their way round Africa and through Gibraltar Strait, back to the Nile. “When autumn came they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited till the grain was fit to eat. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not until the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyagehome. On their return, they declared—for my part, do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing round Lybia (Africa), they had the sun on their right hand” (i. e. in the northern sky).Herodotus.