Famous Sea Fights Part 9

In his sailing instructions Medina-Sidonia had been warned that he should take "great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland for fear of the harm that may happen to you on that coast," where, as a sixteenth-century sailor wrote, "the ocean sea raiseth such a billow as can hardly be endured by the greatest ships." There was heavy weather in the "ocean sea" that August and September, but even so the galleons that steered well to the westward before shaping their course for Spain, and kept plenty of sea-room by never sighting the "island of Ireland," succeeded in getting home, except where they were already so badly damaged and so leaky that they could not keep afloat. But along the coasts of Scotland and Ireland there was a succession of disasters for those who clung to, or were driven into, the landward waters.

The first mishap occurred when the Armada was rounding the north of Scotland. The "Gran Grifon," the flagship of Juan Lopez de Medina, admiral of the _urcas_ or storeships, drove on the rocks of Fair Isle, the solitary cliff-bound island in the channel between the Orkneys and Shetlands. Here such few as escaped the waves lived for some six weeks in "great hunger and cold." Then a fishing-boat took them to Anstruther in Fifeshire, where they surrendered to the bailies. Lopez de Medina was among this handful of survivors. Melville, the Presbyterian minister of Anstruther, describes him as "a very reverend man of big stature and grave and stout countenance, grey haired and very humble like," as he asked quarter for himself and his comrades in misfortune.[13]

[13] In some histories of the Armada and in more than one standard book of reference Lopez de Medina is confused with Medina-Sidonia, and it is stated that it was the flagship of the whole Armada that was lost on Fair Isle.

Other distressed ships fled from the Atlantic storms for shelter inside the Hebrides. Three entered the Sound of Mull, where one was wrecked near Lochaline, and a second off Salen. The third, the great gallea.s.s "Florencia," went down in Tobermory Bay. The local fishermen still tell the traditional story of her arrival and shipwreck. She lies in deep water, half-buried in the sand of the bottom, and enterprising divers are now busy with modern scientific appliances trying to recover the "pieces of eight"

in her war-chest, and the silver plate which, according to a dispatch of Walsingham's, was the dinner-service of the "Grandee of Spain" who commanded her.

But it was on the sh.o.r.es of the "island of Ireland" that the most tragic disasters of the Armada took place. Its wrecks strewed the north and west coasts. Fitzwilliam, the "Deputy" or the Viceroy, in Dublin, and Bingham, the Governor of Connaught, had taken precautions to prevent the Spaniards finding shelter, water, and food in the ports by reinforcing the western garrisons. Bingham feared the Irish might be friendly to the Spaniards, and industriously spread among the coast population tales that if they landed the foreigners would ma.s.sacre the old and carry the young away into slavery. The people of the ports, who had long traded with Spain, knew better, but some of the rude fisher-folk of the west coast perhaps believed the slander. Where shipwrecked crews fell into the hands of Bingham's men no mercy was shown them. He marched four hundred prisoners into Galway, and his troops ma.s.sacred them in cold blood, and then he reported that, "having made a clean despatch of them both within the town, and in the country abroad, he rested Sunday all day, giving praise and thanks to G.o.d for Her Majesty's most happy success in that action, and our deliverance from such dangerous enemies."

One of the _urcas_ came into Tralee Bay in an almost sinking condition, with her crew reduced to twenty-three men, ill and half starved and unable to work the ship. Sir Edward Denny, the Governor of Tralee Castle, was absent. The Spaniards surrendered to Lady Denny and her garrison. The men begged for their lives, and some said they had friends in Waterford who would pay ransom for them; but the lady had them all put to the sword, because "there was no safe keeping for them."

In all, some twenty-five galleons were dashed to pieces under the giant cliff walls of the Irish coast, or on outlying skerries and rocky headlands. In a few cases the Irish coast folk helped the survivors, but too often they were as cruel as the English, and killed and plundered them.

Sir George Carew wrote to the Queen, rejoicing that there was now "blood between the Irish and the King of Spain." The Government troops marched along the coasts hunting for Spaniards. The Lord-Deputy Fitzwilliam accompanied one of these parties, and told how in Sligo Bay he saw miles of wreckage, "timber enough to build five of the greatest ships that ever I saw, besides mighty great boats, cables, and other cordage, and some such masts for bigness and length, as I never saw any two could make the like."

Fitzwilliam fairly revelled in the destruction of the Spaniards. He wrote to Secretary Walsingham: "Since it hath pleased G.o.d by His hand upon the rocks to drown the greater and better sort of them, I will, with His favour, be His soldier for the despatching of those rags which yet remain." At last he got tired of this miserable kind of "soldiering," and proclaimed mercy for all Spaniards in Ireland who surrendered before 15 January, 1589. Numbers of ragged and starving men surrendered. Others had already been smuggled over to Scotland, still an independent country, where they were well treated and given transport to Spain.

The gallant Alonso de Leyva, after escaping from the wreck of his good ship the "Rata Coronada" in Blacksod Bay, was steering for Scotland in one of the gallea.s.ses that had rescued him and his comrades, when the ship was driven by a storm against the wild cliffs of Dunluce Castle, near the Giant's Causeway. The gallea.s.s was shattered to matchwood, and Leyva perished with all on board save five who swam ash.o.r.e.

In the last days of September the surviving ships of the Armada came straggling into the northern ports of Spain with starving, fever-stricken crews. Medina-Sidonia had kept some fifty sail together till 18 September.

He had resigned all active duties of command to his lieutenants, Flores and Bobadilla, for he was ill and broken in spirit. His hair had whitened, and he looked like an old man, as he sat all day in the "great cabin" of the "San Martin," with his head in his hands. A Biscay gale scattered the remnant of the Armada, and on 21 September the "San Martin" appeared alone off Santander. The wind had fallen; her sails hung loose from the yards, and the long swell that followed the gale was driving the ship towards the rocks outside the port. Some boats went out and towed her in. Most of the crew were sick. Nearly two hundred had been buried at sea.

Recalde and Oquendo brought their ships home, but landed broken with the hardships of the terrible voyage, and only survived it a few weeks. Every ship that arrived told of the many buried at sea, and landed scores of dying and fever and scurvy-stricken men, so that all the northern ports were like great hospitals. When the last galleon had struggled into harbour, fifty-five great ships were still missing. The best of the leaders were dead. Not more than a third of the sailors and soldiers survived. It was a disaster from which Spain as a naval power never really recovered.

For fifty years to come the Spanish infantry still upheld their claim to be invincible on the battlefield, but the tall galleon had ceased to be the mistress of the seas.

The campaign of the Armada is remarkable not only for inaugurating the modern period of naval war, the era of the sail and the gun, but also because, though it ended in disaster for one side and success for the other, there was from first to last in the long series of engagements in the narrow seas no battle "fought to a finish." In all the fighting the English showed that they had grasped the essential ideas of the new warfare, and proved themselves better sailors and better gunners, but the number of the ships they took or destroyed was insignificant. Howard was so crippled by parsimonious mismanagement on the part of his Government that he had to be content with "half-doings," instead of decisive results. But there was worse mismanagement on the Spanish side, and this led first to failure, then to disaster.

The story of the Armada is full of useful lessons, but for England its message for all time is that her true defence against invasion lies not in armies, but upon the sea. The Elizabethan captains knew well that if once Parma's veterans landed in Kent or Ess.e.x, the half-trained levies gathered by the beacon fires could do little to stop their onward march. So they took care to make the narrow seas an impa.s.sable barrier to the enemy by harrying the covering fleet and making it hopeless for Parma even to think of sending his transports to sea. The lesson is worth remembering even now.

CHAPTER VII

THE BATTLE OFF THE GUNFLEET

1666

The decline of Spain as a great power was largely due to the unsuccessful attempt to coerce the Dutch people. Out of the struggle arose the Republic of the United Provinces, and Holland, won from the sea, and almost an amphibious state, became in a few years a great naval power. A hardy race of sailors was trained in the fisheries of the North Sea. Settlements were established in the Far East, and fleets of Dutch East Indiamen broke the Spanish monopoly of Asiatic trade. It was to obtain a depot and watering-place for their East Indiamen that the Dutch founded Cape Town, with far-reaching results on the future development of South Africa.

A Dutch fleet had a.s.sisted in defeating the Armada, but the rise of this naval power on the eastern sh.o.r.es of the narrow seas made rivalry with England on the waters inevitable. In the seventeenth century there was a series of hard-fought naval wars between England and the United Provinces.

Under the two first Stuart Kings of England there were quarrels with the Dutch that nearly led to war. The Dutch colonists and traders in the Far Eastern seas had used high-handed measures to prevent English compet.i.tion.

Nearer home there were disputes as to the right claimed by the King's ships to make any foreign ship lower her flag and salute the English ensign. But it was not till the days of the Commonwealth that the first war broke out.

It was a conflict between two republics. Its immediate cause was Cromwell's Navigation Act, which deprived the Dutch of a considerable part of their carrying trade. The first fight took place before the formal declaration of war, and was the result of a Dutch captain refusing the customary salute to a Commonwealth ship.

In this, as in the later conflicts with Holland, while England was still able to live on its own products, the Dutch were in the position in which we are now, for the command of the sea was vital to their daily life. Their whole wealth depended on their great fishing fleets in the North Sea; their Indiamen which brought the produce of the East to Northern Europe through the Straits of Dover; and the carrying trade, in which they were the carriers of the goods of all Central Europe, which the Rhine and their ca.n.a.ls brought into their ports. The mere prolongation of a naval war meant endless loss to the merchants and shipowners of Holland.

The development of ocean-borne commerce had led to great improvements in shipbuilding in the three-quarters of a century since the days of the Armada, and the fleets that met in the Channel and the North Sea during Cromwell's Dutch war were far more powerful than those of Medina-Sidonia and Howard. The nucleus of the English fleet had been formed by the permanent establishment created by Charles I, but the ships for which he had levied the "Ship Money" were used against him in the Civil War, for the seafaring population and the people of the ports mostly sided with the Parliament. The operations against Rupert in the Mediterranean, the war with the Algerines, and the expeditions to the West Indies had helped to form for the Commonwealth a body of experienced officers and seamen, and in Blake, Cromwell had at least one admiral of the first rank. The fleets on both sides sometimes numbered as many as a hundred sail. The guns mounted in broadside tiers had come to be recognized as the weapons that must decide a sea-fight, and in this first Dutch war we see on both sides attempts to use tactical formations that would give the best scope to gun power.

Though a battle was always likely to develop into an irregular melee, in which the boldest exchanged broadsides and the shirkers hung back, there were attempts to fight in regular lines, the ships giving each other mutual support. Want of traditional experience, marked differences in the speed and manoeuvring power of ships, and the rudimentary character of the signalling, made it difficult to keep the line, but it was early recognized as an ideal to be aimed at.

The old oar-driven galleys, with their heavy batteries in the bows and all the guns pointing ahead, went into battle, as at Lepanto, in line abreast.

The broadside battleship would thus have her guns pointed at her consorts.

The line abreast was used only to bear down on the enemy. The fighting formation was the line ahead. This was adopted at first as a fleet running down from windward closed upon its enemy. Unless they were actually running away, the other side would be sailing in line ahead with the wind abeam. It was soon realized that in this formation an admiral had his fleet under better control, and gradually the normal formation for fleets became line ahead, and hostile fleets either fought running on parallel courses on the same tack, or pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed each other on opposite tacks. But this was the result of a long evolution, and the typically formal battles fought out by rule in the "close-hauled line ahead" belong to the eighteenth century.

The first Dutch war ended with Blake's victory off the Kentish Knock. The second war, in the days of Charles II, is best remembered in England in connection with a national disgrace, the Dutch raid on Chatham and the blockade of the Thames. This disaster was the result of a piece of almost incomprehensible folly on the part of the King and his advisers. But it came shortly after a great naval victory, the story of which is by most forgotten. It is worth telling again, if only to show that the disaster in the Thames was not the fault of the British navy, and that even under Charles II there were glorious days for our fleet. It is also interesting as a typical naval battle of the seventeenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "SOVEREIGN OF THE SEAS," LAUNCHED 1637.

A TYPICAL WARSHIP OF THE 17TH CENTURY _After the painting by Vandervelde_]

Hostilities began in 1664 without a formal declaration of war, the conflict opening with aggressions and reprisals in the colonial sphere of action.

English fleets seized Dutch trading ships on the African coast and Dutch islands in the West Indies. In North America the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Hudson, was occupied, annexed, and renamed New York in honour of His Highness the Duke of York, the brother of the King. England drifted into the war as the result of conflicts in the colonies, and was in a state of dangerous unreadiness for the struggle on the sea. "G.o.d knows how little fit we are for it," wrote Pepys, who as Secretary of the Navy knew the whole position. There was the utmost difficulty in obtaining men for the ships that were being got ready for sea. The pressgangs brought in poor creatures whom the captains described as a useless rabble. There were hundreds of desertions. Happily the Dutch preparations were also backward, and England had thus some breathing time.

In June the two fleets, under the Duke of York and the Dutch Admiral Opdam, each numbering nearly a hundred sail, were in the North Sea, and on the 3rd they met in battle, some thirty-five miles south-east of Lowestoft. Opdam was driven back to the Texel with the loss of several ships. The Duke of York had behaved with courage and spirit during the fight, and was covered with splashes of the blood of officers killed beside him on the quarter-deck, where he himself was slightly wounded. But he showed slackness and irresolution in the pursuit, and failed to reap the full results of his victory.

During the rest of the summer there were more or less successful enterprises against Dutch trade; but the plague in London, in the ports and dockyards, and even in the fleet itself, seriously interfered with the prosecution of the war. As usual at that time, the winter months were practically a time of truce. In the spring of 1666 both parties were ready for another North Sea campaign.

The Dutch had fitted out more than eighty ships under Admiral De Ruyter, and the English fleet was put under the command of Monk, Duke of Albemarle, with Prince Rupert, the fiery cavalry leader of the Civil War, as his right-hand man. Both were soldiers who had had some sea experience. It was still the time when it was an ordinary event for a courtier to command a battleship, with a sailor to translate his orders into sea language and look after the navigation for him. Pepys tells how he heard Monk's wife, the d.u.c.h.ess of Albemarle (perhaps echoing what her husband had said in private), "cry mightily out against the having of gentlemen captains, with feathers and ribbons, and wish the King would send her husband to sea with the old plain sea-captains that he served with formerly."

Monk and Rupert went to join the fleet that was a.s.sembling at the Nore on 23 April. It was not ready for sea till near the end of May. On 1 June, when part of the fleet was detached under Rupert to watch the Straits of Dover, Monk met De Ruyter (who was in superior force) off the Ess.e.x coast and began a battle that lasted for four days. The news of the first day's fighting set London rejoicing, but soon there came disappointing reports of failure.

The four days' battle had ended in defeat. Outnumbered as he was, Monk had made a splendid fight on the first two days, hoping from hour to hour for Rupert's arrival. On the third day, the Sunday, he had to retire towards the Thames, covering his retreat with a rearguard of sixteen of his best ships. Several of these touched on the Galloper Sand, and Ascue's ship, the "Prince," ran hard aground on the bank. Ascue struck his flag, and the Dutch burned his ship, abandoning an effort to carry her off because at last Rupert's squadron was in sight. On the fourth day a confused melee of hard fighting off the Thames mouth ended in Monk retiring into the river.

He had lost twenty ships and some three thousand men; but he had fought so well that the Dutch bought their victory dearly, and, after attempting for a few days to blockade the Thames, had to return to Holland to refit and make good their losses.

Amid the general discouragement at the failure of the fleet there was an outburst of mutual accusations of misconduct among the captains, and even some bitter attacks on Monk, the "General at Sea." Fault was found with the dividing of the fleet on a false report; with Monk's haste to attack the Dutch when he was short of ships; and, finally, with his retreat before the enemy into the Thames. Monk, however, did not bear himself like a beaten man. He spoke of the long battle as, at the worst, an indecisive engagement, and said he had given the Dutch as many hard knocks as he had taken, and now knew how to defeat them. He had sufficient influence at Court to be able to retain his command, and so could look forward to trying his fortune again before long.

The work of refitting the fleet was taken in hand. At any cost, the danger of a blockade of the Thames must be averted, so the merchants of the City combined to help with money, and even some of the rich men of the Court loosed their purse-strings. A fine three-decker launched at Chatham was named the "Loyal London," in compliment to the exertions of the City, and work was pushed on so rapidly that she was soon ready for commission. Many of the ships had been shorthanded in the four days' battle. The pressgangs were now set vigorously to work, and, though there was a constant drain of desertions to contend with, the numbers on board the ships at Chatham and in the lower Thames rose day by day.

At the end of June a new impetus was given to the preparations by the reappearance of De Ruyter's fleet. He had repaired damages more quickly than his opponents, and put to sea to blockade the Thames. It was on 29 June that the fishermen of Margate and Broadstairs saw a great crowd of strange sail off the North Foreland. It was the Dutch fleet of over a hundred ships, great and small, and commanded by De Ruyter, Van Tromp, and Jan Evertszoon. Some of the ships stood in close to Margate. The militia of the county was called out, and the alarm spread along the southern coast, for the rumour ran that the Dutch had come to cover a French invasion. But no Frenchmen came, and the Hollanders themselves did not send even a boat's crew ash.o.r.e. They were quite satisfied with stopping all the trade of London by their mere presence off the Thames, and they had the chance too of picking up homecoming ships that had not been duly warned. So, favoured by fine summer weather, the Dutch admirals cruised backwards and forwards in leisurely fashion between the North Foreland and the outer end of the Gunfleet Sand. They watched with their light craft all the channels that traverse the tangle of sandbanks and shallows in the estuary of the river; but their main fleet was generally somewhere off the Ess.e.x coast, for on that side of the estuary lay the channels then best known and most used, the Swin and the Black Deep.

The fleet which thus for some three weeks held possession of the very gateway to the Thames numbered seventy-three line-of-battle ships, twenty-six frigates, and some twenty light craft fitted to be used as fireships. By great exertions Monk and Rupert had got together in the lower Thames eighty-seven fighting-ships and a squadron of fireships. Some fifteen more frigates might have been added to the fleet, but it was thought better to leave them unmanned, and use their crews for strengthening those of the larger ships. The fleet a.s.sembled at the Nore had full complements this time. The men were eager to meet the enemy, and numbers of young gallants from the Court had volunteered for service as supernumeraries. The "Loyal London," fresh from the builders' hands at Chatham yard, with her crew of eight hundred men, was said to be "the best ship in the world, large or small." Pepys noted that it was the talk of competent men that this was "much the best fleet, for force of guns, greatness and number of ships, that ever England did see." England had certainly need of a good fleet, for she never met on the sea a more capable and determined enemy than the Dutch. In fact, the republic of the United Provinces was perhaps the only state that ever contended on anything like equal terms against England for the command of the sea.

When at last Monk and Rupert were ready to sail they had to wait for a favourable wind and tide, and, with the help of their pilots, solve a somewhat delicate problem. This problem was something like that which a general on land has to solve when it is a question of moving a large force through defiles of which the other end is watched by the enemy's main army.

But it had special complications that the soldier would not have to take into account.

Monk's fleet sailing in line ahead, the only order in which it could traverse the narrow channels, would cover about nine miles from van to rear. There were then no accurate charts of the Thames estuary such as we now possess, and the pilots of the time believed the possible ways out for large ships to be fewer and more restricted than we know them to be at present. They advised Monk to take his fleet out from the Nore through the Warp and the West Swin, which form a continuous, fairly deep channel on the Ess.e.x side of the estuary along the outer edge of the Maplin Sands. At the outer end of the Maplins a long, narrow sandbank, known as the Middle Ground, with only a few feet of water over it at low tide, divides the channel into two parallel branches, the East Swin and the Middle Deep. At the end of the Middle Ground these two channels and a third (known as the Barrow Deep) unite to form the broad King's Channel (also known as the East Swin), where there is plenty of sea room, and presently this again expands into the open sea.

In those old days of sailing-ships a fleet working its way out of the narrower channels inside the Middle Deep in presence of an enemy would court destruction if the whole of its fighting strength could not be brought out into the wide waters of the King's Channel on a single tide. If only part of it got out before the tide turned, the van might be destroyed during the long hours of waiting for the rearward ships to get out and join in.

On 19 July Monk brought his ships out to the Middle Ground, beside which they remained anch.o.r.ed in a long line till the 21st, waiting for a favourable wind and a full tide. The ebb flows fast through the narrows from west to east, and weighing shortly before high water on the 22nd, the fleet spread all sail to a fair wind, and led by the "Royal Charles" with Monk and Rupert on her quarter-deck, the long procession of heavy battleships worked out into King's Channel, soon helped by a racing ebb.

Those who saw the sight said that no finer spectacle had ever been witnessed on the seas, and certainly England had never till then challenged battle with a more powerful fleet. Officers and men were in high spirits and confident of victory, Rupert as eager as when in his younger days he led his wild charges of cavaliers, Monk impatient with prudent counsels urged by timid pilots, and using sharp, strong language to encourage them to take risks which he as a landsman did not appreciate. Not a ship touched ground. Some Dutch ships were sighted on the look-out off the edge of the Gunfleet, but they drew off when Captain Elliot, in the "Revenge," led a squadron of nine ships-of-the-line and some fireships to attack them. De Ruyter, who had been waiting with his main fleet off the Naze, stood out to sea, having no intention of beginning a battle till there were long hours of daylight before him. As the sun went down the English fleet anch.o.r.ed in the seaward opening of the King's Channel, with the "Royal Charles" near the buoy that marked the outer end of the Gunfleet Sands, and on both sides men turned in with the expectation of hard fighting next morning.

At daybreak the English fleet weighed anchor. The Dutch fleet was seen some miles to seaward and more to the south, sailing in three divisions in line ahead. Evertszoon was in command of the van; De Ruyter of the centre; Van Tromp of the rear. There were more than a hundred sail. Monk stood towards them before a light breeze, challenging battle in the fashion of the time with much sounding of trumpets and beating of drums. But De Ruyter kept his distance, working to the southward outside the tangle of shallows in the Thames estuary. All day the fleets drifted slowly, keeping out of gunshot range. Towards evening the wind fell to a sullen calm with a cloudy sky, and Monk and De Ruyter both anch.o.r.ed outside the Long Sand. After sunset there came a summer storm, vivid flashes of lightning, heavy thunder-peals, and wild, tempestuous gusts of wind. The anchors held, but Monk lost one of his best ships, the "Jersey." She was struck by lightning, which brought down a ma.s.s of spars and rigging on her decks, and so crippled her that she had to leave the fleet at dawn.

The Dutch fleet had disappeared. De Ruyter had weighed anchor during the storm and run out to sea. Monk suspected that he had gone back to his old cruising ground off the Naze, and when the wind fell and the weather cleared up in the afternoon of the 24th he weighed and sailed for the end of the Gunfleet to look for the enemy in that neighbourhood. He found no trace of him, and anch.o.r.ed again off the Gunfleet that evening, getting under way again at two in the morning of the 25th.

De Ruyter's light craft had kept him informed of Monk's movements. The Dutch admiral had avoided battle, when it was first offered, because he hoped to manoeuvre for the weather gage, but the failing wind before the storm had made it hopeless to attempt to work to windward of the English.