Читать книгу Champions of the Fleet. Captains and men-of-war and days that helped to make the empire онлайн

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“Powerful vessels ... with little tophamper and very light, which is a great advantage for close quarters and with much artillery, the heavy pieces being close to the water,” reported, in a confidential letter now in the royal archives at Simancas, one of the King of Spain’s agents in England who saw the Dreadnought and Swiftsure not long after they had joined the Medway fleet. So too, indeed, some of King Philip’s sailors were destined to find out for themselves.

The Dons, indeed, were destined to taste something of the Dreadnought’s quality more than once; beginning with the memorable event of the “Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard.” There, Drake’s right-hand man on many a battle day, commanded the Dreadnought, Captain Thomas Fenner, a sturdy son of Sussex and a seaman who knew his business.

How thoroughly Drake—“fiend incarnate; his name Tartarean, unfit for Christian lips; Draco—a dragon, a serpent, emblem of Diabolus; Satanas himself”—did his work among the Spaniards at Cadiz, burning eighteen of their finest royal galleons, and carrying off six more in spite of fireships and all the shooting of the Spanish batteries, is history. The Dreadnought, after experiencing a narrow escape from shipwreck off Cape Finisterre at the outset of her cruise, took her full share of what fighting there was. She was present, too, at the second act of the drama, which took place off the Tagus with so fatal a sequel for the hapless Commander-in-Chief designate of the Armada, the Marquis de Santa Cruz—the “Iron Marquis,” “Thunderbolt of War,” the real Hero of Lepanto, by reputation the ablest sea-officer the world had yet seen. First, the news that his flagship and the finest fighting galleons of his own picked squadron—all named, too, after the most helpful among the Blessed Saints of the Calendar—together with his best transports and victuallers, had been boarded and taken and sacrilegiously set ablaze to, burned to the water’s edge, one after the other, by those “accursed English Lutheran dogs.” Worse still. To be then defied to his face, he, Spain’s “Captain-General of the Ocean”; to be audaciously challenged to come out and fight and have his revenge then and there—Drake and the Dreadnought and the rest openly waiting for him—in the offing. The shame of the disaster was enough to kill the haughty Hidalgo, to make him fall sick and turn his face to the wall and die, without Philip’s espionage and unworthy insults goading him to the grave. The Dreadnought had a hand in shaping the destinies of England, for, in the words of the Spanish popular saying, “to the Iron Marquis succeeded the Golden Duke,” whose hopeless incompetence gave England every chance in the next year’s fighting.