The Spanish had been bloodied and were frustrated, but not seriously hurt. If this was all Howard and ‘‘El Draque’’ could do, they would soon join Parma’s army and escort it to English shores, and the invasion would succeed. The English ships were hardly hurt at all, but the English captains were deeply alarmed. They had scored hundreds of hits with their big guns, yet the Armada still moved in unbroken order toward its rendezvous with Parma, and England’s bane. The first real losses came not from English gunning but when two Spanish capital ships fell to accident: one lost to a collision that forced her into a French port, the other blown up by ignition of its magazine. With the English closing, the burning wreck was left behind. So close were the English, in fact, that Howard was startled to discover on the second night that he was following the poop lantern of Sidonia’s flagship, not one of his own galleons in line ahead as he thought. Finding himself deep inside the curve of Sidonia’s crescent, Howard silently tacked away. The English pursuit lines broke up overnight in the foggy dew and had to reform in the morning. On the third day Drake, ever the pirate, broke away to take a 46-gun Spanish straggler and prize into port, for his personal profit. And so it went for a week, the Spanish crawling north hugging their vulnerable hulks; English ships following to pick off the wounded and stragglers, but not slowing the herd. There was also one skirmish in which a Spanish galleon dropped its topsails in the classic invitation to a boarding action, only to have English galleons race in to fire pointblank broadsides as they passed her in a tight battle line.
A second big fight took place off Portland Bill, 170 miles south of Calais. It went much the same as the fight on the first day: men died and ships were damaged, but somehow struggled on. The English were learning that only close-in broadsides did real harm to the thick beams of Spanish galleons. And there was something else: both fleets were out of shot, or nearly so. Howard restocked with cannonballs brought out to the fleet by fishing boats from nearby English ports. More ammunition was rushed to the coast from all over England. Soon, even this supply would run low. The Spanish were in worse shape: many ships were almost out of shot; others discovered they still had the wrong sizes, rendering their guns useless. Deep into hostile waters against a fleet that showed itself equal or better than their own in seamanship and fire power, all Spanish thoughts turned to Calais. For all the dash and daring of experienced English captains, however, nothing they did stopped the slow progress of the Armada. When it hove to at the safe harbor of Calais on August 6 it looked like the ‘‘Enterprise of England’’ might well succeed despite English skill. Fortunately for England, Sidonia was still 30 miles from Dunkirk where the invasion army and its 200 barges were blockaded by small but deadly warships of the Sea Beggars, then allied to England. Parma refused to load men on the barges without Sidonia dealing with the Dutch ships. He might have walked his men to Calais but he could not get the barges there, unescorted through the Dutch blockade. This was a major flaw in Philip’s grand design all along. As so often, Philip had trusted to God to find a way that he could not see yet. Now it was God’s favor the Spanish could not find.
As matters turned out Parma’s dilemma did not matter: Howard sent eight fireships two-by-two into Calais harbor that night, riding brilliantly toward more than 100 tightly packed Spanish vessels. These were not the usual ship’s boats or burning rafts: they were ‘‘Hellburners,’’ copies of explosive fireships the Dutch used to blow up 800 of Parma’s men on a fortified bridge over the Scheldt three years earlier. Tall ships culled from the weaklings of the fleet, soaked in tar, loaded down with faggots of oil-soaked wood, with barrels of black powder on their decks and in holds, they floated in with the wind and on a rising tide. Their iron cannon were loaded with double or triple shot, each a time bomb waiting for flames to lick its barrel and explode the gun into deadly shrapnel. These were fireships that might blow up the harbor. Beyond them, waiting in line along the horizon, curved the English battle fleet readying to blast away at all who sought escape. To his credit, when the little lights appeared over the distant water Sidonia did not panic. He sent out pinnaces with grapples to tow the fireships ashore shy of the harbor. Brave Spaniards got the first two, but then white-hot cannons on the second pair went off and all hell broke loose. Panic swept through the suddenly vulnerable ships of the Armada. Captains slipped or even cut their cables and scattered in utter disorder as the four remaining Hellburners floated into the harbor, doubleshotted guns exploding at random, burning rigging and spars falling onto the wooden decks and rolled canvas of trapped ships and men desperate to live another day.
When dawn came, the Spanish were completely disordered. Some captains ran before the wind and the English battle line; others had floundered onto rocks in the night. Regardless, they were set upon by English sail and guns. This was the ‘‘Battle of Gravelines.’’ Through collisions at sea, shot off rudders and random groundings in night fog and unknown waters, the Spanish lost several capital ships. The fighting was ship-to-ship rather than fleet-to-fleet as all order was lost in a tangled, swirling fight in which all were carried by heavy winds farther up the Channel toward the North Sea. The Spanish fought bravely, desperately trying to close and board—the only fight left in their ships. The English fought ferociously, standing off and blasting men and ships into surrender or the sea. The English ships came in close, to 50 yards or less, not to board but to make every shot and broadside count. English crews and captains were proving fast learners of this new way of war at sea. At Gravelines they sank one Spanish ship-of-the-line and forced two Portuguese galleons to run aground, losing no ships themselves in any engagement beyond the eight small suicides they had expended the night before. The key was superior gunnery: the Spanish lacked heavy naval artillery and had much inferior gun carriages, which made even their smaller guns cumbersome to reload and fire. And they carried a motley crew of calibers. That may well have befitted the convoy escort assignment for which Philip intended the Armada, but it ill-served a battle fleet engaged with the well-trained and better-armed Elizabethan navy, commanding large caliber weapons and enjoying possibly a 3:1 greater rate of fire. Nor did any of the 20,000 soldiers the Spanish ships carried in order to close and board the enemy actually manage to do so: not a single English ship was boarded, and while Spanish marines killed English sailors with volley musket fire the English killed far more with grapeshot and snipers.
