Martin Stephen - The galleon's grave

The flickering of distant fire came at midnight. The sudden, violent ringing of bells, first from one ship then another, until the whole of Calais roads seemed like a vast Cathedral tower. The pinnaces and longboats the Duke had stationed to guard his fleet leaped forward, grapnels ready. Two of the outermost fireships, yards already outlined in a dull red flame, were caught and hauled aside, but the combination of wind and tide was too much, sending the ships at ferocious speed down on to the Spanish ships. One pinnace was engulfed in flames itself, a longboat smashed to pieces as the flaming monster bore down and through it. Then from the lead ship a roar of cannons shattered the anchorage, a series of massive explosions. Devil ships!

The English would say that the Armada panicked. Yet Gresham saw no panic. A hundred and thirty ships cut their cable, left their anchors rotting in the Calais roadstead, and all evaded the fireships, made it out of harbour. The discipline was superb. Hardly a man spoke on the San Martin as the men clambering oh the yards dropped the great sails, saw them fill with wind. The soldiers were lining the sides in five minutes of the alarm bell sounding. There was no collision, no crashing of great timbers hurled into each other.

'God help us!' said Mannion at dawn the next morning, in the last period of sanity either men would have for twenty-four hours. It was not an expletive, but rather a genuine plea for help. The San Martin had cut her cable, dodged two fireships with relative ease and come round, dropping her spare anchor less than a mile from where she had started. And she was virtually alone in the anchorage.

The San Juan, San Marcos, San Felipe and San Mateo were within hailing range. The San Lorenzo, flagship of the galleasses, was crawling inshore, her rudder destroyed by fouling on a discarded cable, her mainmast broken. And that was all. The remainder of the Armada was scattered out at sea, heading north before the driving wind.

'Anchors,' said Mannion. 'I'll bet most of 'em ain't carrying spare anchors. Most used-two, even three to keep themselves steady here.' There was shifting sand on the bottom, and fierce currents. 'Only one spare anchor left, you 'as to stand out to sea. No point comin' back in here and trying to hold fast in a strong wind with only one anchor.'

A squadron of English ships broke off from the main body, heading inshore after the wounded galleass.

'Ain't nothing 'e can do for 'er,' said Mannion, 'don't care how brave he is.'

Orders were shouted, and the San Martin started to pull out of the roadstead.

'He's going to put himself and these few ships between the rest of the Armada and the English,' said Gresham. 'Hope the other ships can get back and reform in the time he buys them. It's madness. We're outnumbered ten, twenty to one. We'll be blown to pieces.'

'Yep,' said Mannion. 'Want to watch it from the deck, or get below and try to hide?'

The leading English ships, twenty of them led by a fine galleon, were on a converging course with the San Martin and her four companions. The leading English ship made a minor alteration of course, heading straight towards the San Martin.

The artillery captains, one for each side of the gun deck, yelled their orders. The San Martin was perilously short of shot and powder. No shot could be wasted. 'Fire only at point blank range! Hold your fire.' The musketeers on the deck and the arquebusiers aloft braced themselves against deck and yard, many surreptitiously crossing themselves as the enemy ship boiled towards them, crashing the waves aside from her bow in her headlong rush to destroy.

'This is new,' said Mannion, sucking on the inevitable tooth.

The lead English ship was holding her fire, coming within cannon then musket range, coming on even further, until within pistol range, fifty or a hundred yards. Then her bow guns flared out, and she luffed up to present her broadside to the San Martin. The two ships were so close that Gresham felt he could reach out and touch the men on the opposite deck, smell the ship and the fear and tension of its men. And there, on the quarterdeck, strutted the familiar figure, Gresham's nemesis, Sir Francis Drake. Yelling, red-faced at his gunners, forcing them to hold fire until the very last minute by sheer force of will alone. Drake looked round, and for a single brief second their eyes came together.

At this range the explosion of the cannon was felt as a pressure and a hot breath, as well as a gout of black smoke, red and yellow flame. Drake's broadside shattered into the side of the San Martin, its impact at such close range unlike any other assault the brave vessel had received. The ship actually shuddered in her tracks. There were howls and screams from below. The shot had cut through the thick timbers of the main hull, sending a savage spray of splinters through the gun decks, upending a great gun before it could be fired, half its men crushed and screaming under the great wooden carriage. A ship's boy was crawling along the deck, leaving a trail of blood behind him on the grimy deck, hand clutched disbelieving to his stomach where the grey sausages of his intestine had been exposed. It would be minutes before the shock wore off and the pain came in its place. As quickly as she had come, Drake swung out of line, revealing another English ship behind her, already swinging at monstrously close range to punch the San Martin with all her power.

The San Martin's return fire was sporadic, almost measured. At fifteen minutes to reload a gun, and twenty English ships taking it in turns to draw up and empty their broadsides into her hull, the Duke had ordered several guns to hold their fire, so that there was at least something awaiting the next English vessel as it hauled round and poured iron into the long-suffering hull of the San Martin.

Without speaking and with no conscious communication

Gresham and Mannion started to haul such wounded as could be moved to the companionways, where other willing hands took them down to the sweated and agonised hell of the surgeon's deck. There seemed no end to the line of English ships, the crash and roar of the guns, the replies from the San Martin, the continual crack and pop of the small arms. There were problems loading the guns. Gresham could see. The soldiers whose job it was to return from their station to reload were unwilling to do so. Feeble, hope-less battle though it was, for the first time they had targets on board the English ships, someone to aim and fire their weapon at. Loading a heavy gun would have done more damage to them, and done more to save their lives, but men in battle are not subject to logic. Soon Gresham and Mannion found themselves serving a gun, obeying the screaming orders amid the stench of blood and warm bronze, the bitter biting tang of powder in the nose and throat.

The tone of the battle changed. The San Martin seemed almost dead in the water now, a shadow blotting out the light from the open gun ports on the starboard side. Blood was running out from the scuppers and gun ports. A great English galleon had drawn up almost alongside the flagship, struck his tops'ls and started to try to pound her to pieces from pistol shot range. Other vessels were ' engaging her port side now, though the whine and crack of shot suggested the English too were reduced to firing lighter broadsides than they might have wished.

Three, four, five hours the monstrous cannonade went on. For a moment, Gresham felt his world go dark, came round to see himself looking up at the grating on the San Martin's deck. He felt his head gingerly. A flying piece of timber had cracked his head open, the wound soaking his hair with blood. Mannion dragged him upright. 'On deck!' he said firmly. 'Get yourself taken to the surgeon and 'e's as likely to amputate your head as put a dressing on it.' They stumbled up the ladder. A bucket miraculously still full of sea water lay on the deck, part of the precautions against fire. Unceremoniously Mannion dumped it over Gresham's head. The sting of the salt water on the open wound cut through the mists in his head.