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1 - The Spanish Armada
Mystery Ship
It's impossible to say with complete certainty when the name Enterprise
(sometimes spelled Enterprize) was first given to a vessel of the sea. One
source states that a ship called the Enterprise of England sailed under
command of Sir Francis Drake to Cadiz in 1587, shortly before the battles of the
Spanish Armada.1 However, the existence of this
vessel could not be confirmed and now appears unlikely. Two authoritative British
publications list the first British vessel to carry the name Enterprise as a
ship captured from France in 1705.2
Perhaps an explanation for this mystery can be found in two published accounts of
events surrounding the Spanish Armada. Both accounts, one British and the other
from the Spanish point of view, suggest that "Enterprise of England" was not the
name of a vessel, but a term used by King Philip II of Spain for his plan to invade
England. The British author notes that:
Elizabeth of England stood, in the eyes of Europe, as the sole hope of the Protestant cause, Philip of Spain carried publicly the banner of Roman Catholicism. Unless Protestantism was eradicated from Europe, Spanish domination of the Netherlands was a lost cause. While [Queen] Mary lived there was always the hope that she might form the centre of a Roman Catholic revival in England and that Philip's ambition might be realised without fighting. Now that hope was no more. The "Enterprise of England" became a reality in Philip's mind, and in the Spanish ports and harbours an army of labourers began to build and fit out ships to form the biggest fleet the world had ever seen.3 [emphasis added]
And according to the Spanish author:
When Philip II asked the leading advocate of the "enterprise of England," the Marquess of Santa Cruz, to estimate what would be required for the campaign, the old admiral called for a fleet of more than 550 sail, including 156 great ships and forty or fifty galleys with 30,000 sailors and 64,000 soldiers. When the Armada was formed, its strength and resources would amount to little more than a third of what Santa Cruz had originally envisaged. The phantom Armada of Santa Cruz was so impossibly vast that many historians have supposed that it cannot seriously have been intended. The marquess, it is argued, must have lost confidence in the enterprise of England and set his demands unacceptably high in order to get the project shelved without loss of face.4 [emphasis added]
Although a ship named Enterprise probably did not participate in the
battles of the Spanish Armada, a brief look at the experiences of the seamen who
did participate will give the reader an idea of the hardships that these men had to
endure.
Preparing for Battle
When the Armada left Lisbon on May 28, 1588, it was composed of 130 ships and
30,000 men, far fewer than the 550 ships and 94,000 men originally envisioned by the
Marquess of Santa Cruz. Even so, this was the largest expedition ever mounted by
Spain. The ships were provisioned with over 1 million pounds of biscuits, 600,000
pounds each of bacon and salt fish, 300,000 pounds of hard cheese, 400,000 pounds
of rice, and 6,000 bushels of beans. This, with wine and water as drink, served as the
seamen's meager rations. Ordnance consisted of almost 124,000 rounds of great shot
(cannon balls) and over 500,000 rounds of powder for the guns and small arms. The
plan was for the Armada to meet off the coast of the Netherlands with another
flotilla carrying 16,000 soldiers under command of the Prince of Parma to mount an
invasion of England.
Head winds and foul weather made for slow going for the ships of the Armada, and
on June 19 they were forced to seek safe harbor at Corunna, on the northern coast
of Spain. It was not until July 21 that they were again able to set sail toward
England.
During this period, the men settled into a routine that was meant to bring some
degree of familiarity and comfort, especially to the soldiers, who were not
accustomed to life at sea. The passage of time was tracked by the turning of
hourglasses, and young seamen assigned to this task sang a short verse with each
turn. The absence of sleeping accommodations meant that sailors staked out a claim
to whatever small corner of the deck they could find and built little partitions to give
themselves privacy. Frequent exercise drills, weapons training, and religious
observances were added to the routine to keep the men occupied during the journey
northward. In addition to the standard provisions mentioned earlier, the ships
carried limited quantities of chickens and other livestock, which were reserved for
those seamen and soldiers who became ill.
The Battle Is Joined
The actual confrontation between the Spanish Armada and the Royal Navy was not
a single battle, but a series of engagements which occurred during the period July
31 to about August 12, 1588. As the Armada reached the southern coast of England
and began to sail up the English Channel, the opposing fleets traded shots which
proved to be largely ineffective. For example, although the Spanish Flagship
San Martin was the target of broadsides from the English for almost an
hour on August 4, the damage she received was limited to the loss of her
flagstaff.
On August 6, Medina Sidonia, commander of the Spanish Armada, took his ships to
anchor at Calais, France, where he expected the army of the Prince of Parma to
meet them to be escorted across the Channel to invade England. However, on the
night of August 7, the English sent fireships against the Spanish vessels, causing such
a stir that the ships of the Armada hastily cut their anchor lines and sailed away to
safety. The English commander, Lord Howard, however, did not take advantage of
the chaos he had caused among the Spanish. Instead, he mounted an operation to
capture a large galleass (a sail and oar-powered vessel) wallowing rudderless at the
mouth of the Calais harbor. This diversion allowed the ships of the Armada to
regroup.
Further battles ensued on August 8, as the Armada tried desperately to evade the
English fleet and keep off the shoals on the eastern coast of England. An eye-
witness account by Pedro Coco Calderon, a seaman on one of the Spanish ships, tells
the story:
The enemy attacked our flagship with a great fusillade from seven in the morning, which lasted for more than nine hours, and on the starboard side fired so many shot that more than two hundred struck the sails and the flank of the hull, killing and wounding many men; and they caused the loss of three great guns, knocking them from their carriages so that they could no longer serve, and they tore through much of the rigging, and from the shot which pierced the waterline, the galleon was taking in so much sea that two divers could hardly mend the leaks, working at it with tow and lead plates and working both pumps all day and night. The men were exhausted from the many tasks they had faced during the previous night and from helping to manhandle the guns without having been given anything to eat.5
The battles of August 8 are the ones made famous as the English victory over the
Spanish Armada. In truth, the English fleet was anything but victorious, and the end
of the Armada was still weeks away.
The Armada had entered the English Channel with 125 vessels. By the end of the
engagements on August 8 only six ships had been lost, and only two of these to
English guns. On the other hand, although the invasion of England did not occur,
all of England knew that it was vulnerable to future attacks, and the bulk of the
Armada was still at sea and still very much capable of mounting such an attack.
The End of the Armada
The Armada continued north into the North Sea, with the intention of sailing around
the western side of England and Ireland and returning to Spain to regroup. The
British fleet gave chase until August 12, when the first of many North Sea and North
Atlantic storms struck the Armada. The first remnants of the once mighty Spanish
Armada arrived at Santander, on the north coast of Spain, during mid-September
1588. What the Royal Navy had failed to do, the fierce ocean storms accomplished.
According to one account:
The men in San Sebastian in October were dying like bugs, pitiful to behold, naked and without so much as a shirt. The hospitals which ... were quickly mobilized in the receiving ports were full. At the most conservative estimate, there were a thousand sick in Santander alone, and probably well over three thousand in the fleet as a whole.6
These seamen were the lucky ones. Two-thirds of the Armada's 119 remaining ships
had foundered, were abandoned, or were wrecked on the coast of Ireland. The defeat of the Spanish Armada was not the end of Spanish dominance of the oceans. Within 4 years, King Philip II had forty new galleons under construction, and the age of the Spanish Conquistadors was still alive. However, the tide was beginning to turn, a tide which would eventually make England's Royal Navy master of the seas.
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| Intro
| Dedication
| Foreword
| Preface
| Spanish Armada
| European Fleets
| Independence
| Copyright ©
1996-2008 Arnold E.
van Beverhoudt, Jr.
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