Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

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.

Rollo 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.

The English 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.