ABSTRACT
Professor Michael Lewis published a series of articles on Armada Guns. He completely overturned existing orthodoxy which portrayed the Spanish as contemptuous of the gunner" and the Spanish Armada as lightly and inadequately armed, mainly with 9, 6 and 4 lb. shot, as Laughton, Corbett and the Spanish naval historian, Fernandez Duro, had intimated at the end of the nineteenth century. For the Spanish fleet, however, Lewis had only fragmentary and indirect information. This chapter presents an overview of a fighting force at least as strong as Lewis's Fighting Galleons and perhaps, on paper at any rate, rather stronger. Indeed, it actually goes further than Lewis by eliminating the one serious weakness in his argument, which was that although the English were overwhelmingly preponderant in the 'culverin' class as a whole, he nevertheless gave the Spanish a substantial majority of the only guns that perhaps might have done some damage at long range, the 17 lb.
