A Column of Fire (103 page)

The Spanish armada unnerved Ned in other ways. The ships gleamed with paint in bright colours, and even from a distance he could see that the men on deck were all in their best finery, doublets and hose in crimson, royal blue, purple and gold. Even the slaves at the oars of the galleasses wore bright red jackets. What kind of people dressed for war as if they were going to a party? On the English ships, only the noblemen wore fancy clothes. Even commanders such as Drake and Hawkins had drab workaday woollen hose and leather jerkins.

Lord Howard stood on the poop deck of the
Ark
, an elevated position behind the mainmast from which he could see most of his ships and the enemy too. Ned stood close to him. Behind them the English fleet formed an unimpressively ragged line.

Ned noticed a sailor spreading sawdust on the main deck, and it took him a moment to figure out that this was to prevent the wood becoming slippery with blood.

Howard barked a command, and the
Ark
led the fleet into battle.

Howard headed for the northern horn of the crescent. Far to the south, Drake’s ship
Revenge
chased the opposite tip.

The
Ark
came up behind the rearmost Spanish ship, a mighty galleon that Howard thought must be the
Rata Coronada
. As the
Ark
began to cross the stern of the
Rata
, the Spanish captain turned so that the two vessels passed broadside to broadside. They fired all their guns as they did so.

The boom of the cannons at close quarters was like a blow, Ned found, and the smoke from all that gunpowder was worse than fog; but, when the wind cleared the view, he saw that neither ship had scored any hits. Howard knew that the Spanish wanted nothing more than to get close enough to board, and in taking care to avoid this disaster he had kept too great a distance to do any damage. The Spanish fire, from heavier, shorter-range guns, was equally harmless.

Ned had experienced his first skirmish at sea, and nothing had happened.

The ships following behind the
Ark
now attacked the
Rata
and three or four galleons close to it, but with little effect. Some of the English fire damaged the rigging of enemy ships, but no serious harm was done on either side.

Looking south, Ned could see that Drake’s attack on the southern horn was having a similar result.

The battle moved eastward until the Spanish had lost all opportunity of attacking Plymouth, and with this objective achieved, the English withdrew.

However, it was a small gain, Ned thought gloomily. The armada was proceeding, more or less undamaged, towards its rendezvous with the Spanish army of the Netherlands at Dunkirk. The danger to England was undiminished.

*

R
OLLO FELT MORE
optimistic every day that week.

The armada sailed majestically eastwards, chased and harried by the English navy, but it was not stopped nor seriously delayed. A dog snapping at the feet of a carthorse can be a nuisance, but sooner or later it will get kicked in the head. The Spanish lost two ships in accidents and Drake, to no one’s surprise, deserted his post long enough to capture one of them, a valuable galleon, the
Rosario
. But the armada was unstoppable.

On Saturday 6 August, Rollo looked ahead over the bowsprit of the
San Martin
and saw the familiar outline of the French port of Calais.

Medina Sidonia decided to stop here. The armada was still twenty-four miles from Dunkirk, where the duke of Parma was expected to be waiting with his army and flotilla of boats ready to join the invasion; but there was a problem. East of Calais, shoals and sandbars reached as far out as fifteen miles offshore, lethal for any navigator not intimately familiar with them, and there was a danger that the armada could be forced too far in that direction by westerly winds and spring tides. The cautious Medina Sidonia decided again that he did not need to take risks.

At a signal gun from the
San Martin
the ships of the great fleet all dropped their sails simultaneously and came to a choreographed halt, then dropped anchor.

The English came to a less impressive stop half a mile behind.

Sailing along the Channel, Rollo had watched enviously as small vessels appeared from the English coast bringing supplies to their fleet, barrels of gunpowder and sides of bacon being manhandled onto the ships. The Spanish had not been resupplied since Corunna: the French were under orders not to do business with the armada, because their king wanted to remain neutral in this war. However, Rollo had passed through Calais many times on his travels, and he knew that the people of Calais hated the English. The governor of the town had lost a leg thirty years ago in the battle to win Calais back from its English occupiers. Now Rollo advised Medina Sidonia to send a little delegation ashore, with greetings and gifts, and, sure enough, the armada was given permission to buy whatever it needed. Unfortunately, it was nowhere near sufficient: there was not enough gunpowder in all Calais to replace a tenth of what the armada had expended in the past week.

And then came a message that made Medina Sidonia mad with rage: the duke of Parma was not ready. None of his boats had any supplies, and boarding had not begun. It would take several days for them to prepare and sail to Calais.

Rollo was not sure that the commander’s fury was justified. Parma could not have been expected to put his army on little boats and have them wait there for an indefinite period. It made much more sense to hold off until he knew that the Spanish had arrived.

Late that afternoon, Rollo was unpleasantly surprised to see a second English fleet sailing towards Calais from the north-east. This was the other part of Elizabeth’s pathetic navy, he reasoned; those ships that had not been sent to Plymouth to meet the armada. Most of the vessels he could see were not warships but small merchant ships, armed but not heavily, no match for the mighty Spanish galleons.

The Spanish armada was still much stronger. And the delay was not a disaster. They had already held off the English navy for a week. They just had to wait for Parma. They could manage that. And then victory would be within their grasp.

*

T
HE
E
NGLISH NAVY
had failed, Ned knew. The Spanish armada, almost intact and now resupplied, was on the point of meeting up with the duke of Parma and his Netherlands army. Once they had done that, they were less than a day from the English coast.

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 manoeuvrability. 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 towards 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 amongst 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 towards 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 towards 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 towards the enemy fleet.

*

R
OLLO 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 towards 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 pre-loaded, 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 sea bed.

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.

*

A
S DAWN BROKE
over Calais, Barney Willard, on the deck of the
Alice
, saw that the fireships had failed. Their smouldering remains littered the Calais foreshore, but no other vessels had been burned. Only one wreck was visible, the
San Lorenzo
, drifting helplessly towards the cliffs.