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

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From six till nearly eight the ships of Drake’s squadron had to bear the brunt of the fight, with, for antagonists, Medina Sidonia himself and his chief captains, who had gathered to stand by their admiral. Trying to rally the Armada after the panic of the night, this gallant band had at first, from before daybreak, anchored in a group, to act as rear-guard to the Spanish fleet, firing signal guns to stop their flying consorts, and sending pinnaces to order the fugitives back. Then Hawkins in the Victory, with the Dreadnought, the Mary Rose, and Swallow, and other ships unnamed, came up and struck in. Now moving ahead through her own smoke to plunge into the mêlée and come to the rescue of some hard-pressed consort, now working tack for tack parallel with and firing salvo after salvo at short range into some towering galleon or huge water-centipede-like galleass—so the hours of that eventful forenoon wore through on the Dreadnought’s powder-begrimed decks. “Sir George Beeston behaved himself valiantly,” records the official Relation of Proceedings, drawn up for the Lord High Admiral. In vain did the most formidable of the Spanish galleons try to close and board. Ship after ship was forced back with shattered bulwarks and splintered sides, and with their scuppers spouting blood, after each English broadside, as the round shot crashed in among the masses of Spanish soldiery, packed on board the galleons as closely almost as they could stand.