ABSTRACT
Without the energy and efficiency of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Armada would never have sailed at all. Having failed in a desperate bid to avoid the honour, he managed to convert the chaos which he had taken over in mid-February 1588 into the impressive looking fleet which he was able to lead out of the Tagus on 30 May. However, nobody knew better than he how deceptive the impression was. Of his 130 ships only about 30, mainly from the squadrons of Portugal and Biscay, were properly armed warships. Guns had been a constant problem; neither Spanish gunfounding nor powder manufacture being equal to the demands being placed upon them.1 In 1586 Santa Cruz had envisaged his ships carrying no more than an average of four of five guns each, but the experience of Drake's raid on Cadiz had convinced the King of the inadequacy of such a scale of armament, and he ordered a dramatic increase. When they eventually set out, the Armada ships carried an average of 19 guns each, but only six in the entire fleet carried more than 40, which was the normal level by then for any English ship of more than about 250 tons.2 Moreover, many of these guns were old, or unsuitable in other ways, designed for siege work on land rather than sea-fighting. Nor were they properly mounted, most of them being on the large two-wheeled carriages used ashore, so that their long trains inhibited re-loading. There may have been a shortage of trained sea-gunners in England, but the Spanish plight was much worse. The Armada guns were handled by soldiers with no experience of sea fighting, and a deeply rooted reluctance to pay any attention to seamen. There
was no general shortage of powder or shot, but much of the powder was of inferior quality, and because of the haste which had been necessary the shot was not always matched to the guns.1 Also the guns, having been scraped together from all over the place, were very miscellaneous in size and design, so that a gunnery expert was needed on every ship to make sure that each piece was correctly primed and fired. It is hardly surprising that, when it came to combat, the Spanish gunfire was desperately slow and inefficient.
