Revisiting Nelson and Trafalgar

Revisiting Nelson and Trafalgar

Now that 200 years have passed on one of the most famous naval battles that ever took place in history, it's time to look back and try to get a fresh look upon it. What made this battle so special? In order to answer to this question we must understand Nelson's history.

Chasing Napoleon

Accurate intelligence in the age of sail was a scarce commodity. Accurate intelligence is, of course, scarce at all times but the sea, in the years before radar and radio, let alone satellite surveillance, was an arena of the unknown. The horizon was an impenetrable barrier, the man-of-war, breasting the waves at six knots or so, a ponderous means of extending a captain’s field of vision beyond it. An admiral with a fleet under command could enlarge his supervision by disposing his men-of-war and their attendant frigates at intervals of a dozen miles or so, the maximum distance at which intervisibility and so intercommunication, masthead to masthead, was possible. Even thus, the transmission of news of a sighting was a haphazard business. Admiral Lord Howe, seeking to establish the whereabouts of a French convoy of 139 merchantmen he knew to be nearby, had to quarter the sea for eight days before he brought its escort to action on the Glorious First of June 1794. The interception was rightly regarded as remarkable. The battle took place 400 miles from land at a time when most sea engagements were fought, as they always had been, within fifty miles of the coast.

Admirals, moreover, did not like to disperse their capital ships for purposes of reconnaissance, needing to keep them concentrated for action lest the enemy were met unexpectedly. The need to gather information always had to be balanced against that of keeping firepower massed under the commander’s hand. The strength of a fleet lay not in that of its individual units but in the line of battle, formed bow to stern at intervals of a few hundred feet. Ships isolated were ships exposed to ‘defeat in detail’, or one by one, by superior numbers. Hence the importance of the capital ships’ scouts, the frigates, smaller and swifter sailers which could be sent to and beyond the horizon in search of the enemy.

No admiral ever had enough frigates. The calls on their service were manifold: as despatch vessels, as commerce raiders, as convoy escorts. Such duties chronically depleted the number available as scouts and ‘repeater ships’, which lay close to but outside the line of battle, copying the signals of the flagship, which were often masked by its near neighbours, so that they were visible from van to rear. The scarcity of frigates was odd. As they were much smaller than battleships, a third or a quarter by displacement, carried far fewer men, perhaps only 150 against 800, and cost only a fifth as much to build, it might be expected that they would have been turned out in much larger numbers. Such was not in practice the case. In 1793, at the start of the Wars of the French Revolution, the Royal Navy had 141 first-, second- and third-rates, battleships with between 100 and 74 guns; of fifth- and sixth-rates, frigates of between 44 and 20 guns, it had only 145;1 by 1798, there were still only 200. Little wonder that Nelson, then the Mediterranean admiral, warned that, if he died, ‘want of frigates would be found written on his heart’.

Essential though frigates were as scouts, their value was restricted by the limitations of the signal system then in use. It was not simply that flags – and flags were the principal means of communication – were difficult to discern at long distance, even with a telescope. No comprehensive system of arranging them to transmit information had yet been devised. Various conventions had been in use since the seventeenth century, such as then, for example, hoisting a red flag at the mizzen-top to order a particular manoeuvre. By the late eighteenth century there had been a great deal of elaboration and in 1782 Admiral Howe, then in command of the Channel Fleet, had issued a codebook, superseding many others, which allowed a commander to say 999 different things with three flags and 9,999 with four. Howe’s signal book was not, however, double-entry. The recipient could work out what a signal meant by looking it up, finding the flags picture by picture on the page. The sender, however, had to know what flags he needed to hoist before he composed his message.

Not until 1801, when Home Popham published his Telegraphic Signals or Marine Vocabulary, were sender and recipient put on equal footing. Popham, a sailor of great clarity of mind, simply had a flash of insight into the obvious which had evaded thousands of other sea officers before him. His achievement compares with that of his near contemporary Roget in compiling the first thesaurus. He analysed how language was used and saw that words might be given a numerical value, to be signalled by a set of numerical flags; 212, for example, could be made to stand for ‘cable’, with the numerical flags 2, 1 and 2. Adding a fourth numerical flag, 3, made the signal read ‘Can you spare a cable?’To make the first signal, the sender looked up ‘cable’ in his double-entry book and chose the appropriate set of flags or ‘hoist’; to read it, the recipient looked up 2123 and got the message. By the use of special indicators it could also be signified that flags had alphabetical rather than numerical value and should be read simply as letters, spelling out an unusual word not in the vocabulary. Popham’s final signal book allowed 267,720 signals to be made with twenty-four flags (of which ten doubled as numbers) and 11 special indicators.

His system remains in use to this day. It was not yet so in 1798, when the Royal Navy still sought to speak fluently between ships through the medium of Admiral Howe’s single-entry book. A great deal of time was wasted, therefore, in frigates closing up to each other or to the main body in order to transmit information unambiguously or to receive precise questions or clear orders. The days when a flag lieutenant could snap his telescope shut and confidently interpret to his superior the meaning of a flash of coloured bunting glimpsed at the extreme limit of visibility on a clear Mediterranean day lay well in the future.

The fallibility of signalling was not a crucial factor in the conduct of maritime operations in the last decade of the eighteenth century. It counted for much less than want of frigates. It counted as a factor, nonetheless, particularly to an admiral like Horatio Nelson, whose mind never rested, who calculated the relative positions of ships and shorelines as a master chess player does pieces and squares, who consumed information of every sort with the compulsion of an addict, who sought decision in battle with the relentlessness of a great financier poised to obliterate his commercial competitors. Home Popham’s signalling system would certainly have assisted him in his searches had it been available; when it became so a very few years later, Nelson enthusiastically embraced it; indeed, the most famous flag signal sent, ‘England Expects’, was made at the opening of the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, with eight Popham hoists and ‘Duty’ spelt out alphabetically.

On Trafalgar Day Nelson had the combined French–Spanish fleet clear in view. The encounter had come at the end of a long chase which had begun in May, taken him across the Atlantic to reach the West Indies in June, back again to the mouth of the Channel in August, and finally south to the Straits of Gibraltar in September, where he blockaded Cadiz until the enemy put to sea in October. He had had a number of false starts and followed a number of false trails but once Admiral Villeneuve had cleared the Straits of Gibraltar from the Mediterranean and set off into the deep Atlantic, Nelson had been able to make the assumption with some certainty that the French were heading for the West Indies. The campaign of Trafalgar was to prove a triumph of strategic manoeuvre. As an intelligence operation, it was not, at least in its later stages, one of complexity.

The contrast with Nelson’s earlier pursuit, discovery and destruction of a French fleet was extreme. In 1798 Nelson, recently promoted to independent command, was appointed to lead a British squadron back into the Mediterranean, from which it had been absent since late 1796, and to mount watch outside Toulon, the principal enemy naval base in the south of France. It was known that General Napoleon Bonaparte was in command of an army assembling there, that transports were gathering also, under the protection of a French battle fleet, and that an amphibious expedition was planned, directed against British interests. The question was which and where? Britain itself? Ireland? Southern Italy? Malta? Turkey? Egypt? All lay within Napoleon’s operational reach and some, Malta in particular, were stepping-stones to others. Beyond Egypt lay India, where Britain was rebuilding a substitute for the overseas empire lost in North America in 1783. If Napoleon could put to sea undetected, the Mediterranean would swallow his tracks and Nelson would discover where he had gone only when he had done his worst. The menace was guaranteed to perturb a watcher day and night. Nelson was perturbed. Before the French left port he was anticipating their departure for ‘Sicily, Malta and Sardinia’ and ‘to finish the King of Naples at a blow’ but also perhaps for ‘Malaga and [a] march through Spain’ to invade Portugal, Britain’s longest-standing ally. After they left, in late May, he was in hot pursuit, sometimes on the right track, sometimes the wrong, sometimes behind, sometimes ahead, sometimes in the wrong continent altogether. In the end he ran his quarry to earth. The scent had died in his nostrils several times, however, and his own false calculations had led him astray. Not until one o’clock in the afternoon of 1 August, when the lookout on HMS Zealous reported masts in Aboukir Bay, east of the Nile delta, had Nelson reassurance that the chase begun seventy-three days earlier had been brought to conclusion. How it had makes one of the most arresting operational intelligence stories of history.

WAR OF THE PACIFIC

Huáscar is a 19th-century small armoured turret ship of a type similar to a monitor. She was built in Britain for Peru and played a significant role in the battle of Pacocha and the War of the Pacific against Chile before being captured and commissioned with the Chilean Navy. Today she is one of the few surviving ships of her type. The ship has been restored and is currently commissioned as a memorial ship. She is named after the 16th-century Inca emperor, Huáscar.

From 1874 to 1879, the South American nation of Chile experienced a depression caused by falling copper and wheat prices, a dropping off of exports, and rising unemployment. The only bright spot in the economy was the expanding nitrate business, but its mining eventually caused war between Chile and its neighbors, Peru and Bolivia. Nitrates were mined in the Atacama Desert along the Chile-Bolivia border. Most of the work was done by Anglo-Chilean companies, which operated in the Bolivian province of Antofagasta and the Peruvian province of Tarapaca. An 1866 treaty between Bolivia and Chile set their border at the 24th parallel, with both countries able to mine nitrates between the 23rd and 25th parallels; tax revenue collected by either country along the frontier would be split with the other country. This taxation arrangement was altered in 1874 when Chile agreed to give up its share of Bolivian tax revenue in return for a promise that taxes on Chilean profits in Bolivia would not be raised for 25 years.

Though Chile had no border with Peru, aggressive Chilean miners pushed into the Peruvian desert to mine nitrates. By 1875, some 10,000 people were employed in mining and subsidiary operations in the Peruvian Tarapaca desert region. Peru had thus far said little about the Anglo-Chilean operations in its province, but in 1875 a faltering economy forced the Peruvian government to nationalize the nitrate companies. The Peruvian government paid for the companies with government bonds paying 8 percent, payable in two years. When the bonds came due, the Peruvians were unable to honor their financial commitments and the bonds’ value plummeted. The Anglo-Chilean companies were able to absorb the loss of the Peruvian assets, but when the Bolivians decided in 1878 to raise taxes on the Chileans along the frontier in violation of the 1876 agreement, the loss of profits was too much to take. Chile refused to pay the higher taxes even when Bolivia threatened to nationalize the operations as the Peruvians had done. According to the 1876 agreement, an arbitrator should have been called in to handle the dispute, but Bolivia refused. The Bolivian government felt secure in its ability to back up its threats because of an 1874 secret mutual-defense treaty with Peru, but the Bolivians failed to consult the Peruvians in advance. In February 1879, Bolivia nationalized the mining companies, and Chilean troops went into action. On 14 February, they occupied the port of Antofagasta against no opposition; soon they were in control of the entire province. Not wanting to get involved in the fighting, Peru offered to mediate a peace settlement. Chile then learned of the secret treaty and, accusing the Peruvians of duplicity, declared war on them on 5 April 1879.

The combined Bolivian and Peruvian effort appeared daunting, especially since they had a combined population twice that of Chile, and Peru had a fairly good navy. However, Chile had a stronger and more stable central government, a more motivated population, a well-trained army, and a navy armed with two modern ironclads. Also, the main theater of operations was handier to Chile; the Bolivians had to cross the Andes, and the Peruvians had to cross the desert. All three countries were in economic trouble, but Chile was in the best financial shape and had the assistance of the British because the mining operations were mainly theirs. Both Bolivia and Peru had defaulted on British loans and angered the British by nationalizing the companies, so they had no qualms about supporting Chile.

The key battle of the war took place at sea on 8 October 1879, when the Chilean ironclads captured a Peruvian commerce raider, the Huascar, that had been hurting their trade and logistical operations. With control of the sea, Chile could supply its troops more efficiently, and the army was soon marching through Bolivian territory into Peru. Bolivia withdrew from the conflict in mid-1880 when Chilean troops occupied large parts of Peru. After a difficult battle, the Chileans captured the capital city of Lima in January 1881, effectively winning the war. Peruvians continued to fight a guerrilla war for two years, but on 20 October 1883 they gave up and signed the Treaty of Ancon. The treaty gave Chile the province of Tarapaca forever and two other provinces for 10 years, after which a referendum was to be held to determine their nationality. The referendum never took place, but in 1929 the two countries agreed to return the province of Tacna to Peru, while Chile kept the province of Arica.

The Bolivians signed an armistice with Chile in April 1884, in which they ceded the province of Antofagasta to Chile, but cession was not official until 1904, when a treaty was finally signed. That treaty obliged the Chileans to pay an indemnity and build a railroad from the Bolivian capital of La Paz to the coast of Arica. The railroad was completed in 1913.

With their army already mobilized, the Chilean government decided to use it to deal with the Araucanian Indians, a tribe that had been fighting for their land since colonial times. Hopelessly outnumbered and outsupplied, after two years the Indians were forced to sign a treaty in 1883 that placed them on reservations, though they were allowed to maintain tribal government and laws. Chile consolidated the rugged territory that had been the Araucanian homeland. With Peru bankrupt and Bolivia isolated, Chile became the strongest nation on South America’s west coast. Control of the area’s copper and nitrate meant an improving income, but close ties to Britain kept them from enjoying it totally. Chile decided to honor the Peruvian bonds issued when the Tarapaca mines were nationalized, and British speculators had been buying them up ever since Peru could not fulfill them. Thus, the British were able to control 70 percent of the nitrate production by 1890, as well as profit from their own construction of banks, railroads, and subsidiary businesses. Longstanding ties between Britain and the Chilean upper class made the British acquisition smoother, and some Chileans were able to profit from investments in British concerns.

References: Keen, Benjamin, and Mark Waserman, A Short History of Latin America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984); Loveman, Brian, The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Sater, William, Chile and the War of the Pacific (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

Top 10 myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada

Wes Ulm

Top 10 myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada

The Spanish Armada encounter of 1588 was undoubtedly an important and fascinating battle. However, even today it is frequently surrounded by common myths and confusions that date back to Victorian Era days. The battle itself was followed by 16 years of land and naval war between England and Spain in which the Spanish were mostly successful and renewed their control over the high seas, a basic fact that many texts and popular accounts often fail entirely to mention. Spain retooled its navy and shipped three times as much silver in the 1590s as before. The Spanish invasion force, moreover, was never referred to (by Philip or anyone else in Spain) as the “Invincible Armada”; medical resources on the Spanish coast were mobilized with surprising rapidity and effectiveness to tend to sick and wounded returning sailors in 1588, suggesting that the Spaniards very much were prepared for the potential failure of the Spanish Armada and run-ins with rough weather. These are just a few of the common myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada battle; a list of the “Top 10” myths is compiled and tackled below.

Please feel free to quote from, print, and cite the text below as, “Top 10 myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada, history’s most confused and misunderstood battle,” by Wes Ulm, Harvard University personal website, © 2004.

(1a) Myth: The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was a decisive victory for the English that marked England’s triumph in its war with Spain. Spain never again tried to land forces in England after that, failed in its bid to end English buccaneering against Spanish treasure ships, and challenged England only on land, not at sea.

(1b) Fact: False on all counts. The Spanish Armada confrontation was not at all decisive; it was merely an early sea battle in a long, intermittent, but often grinding land and naval war between England and Spain that lasted from 1585 until 1604. As I’ll discuss below, Spain defeated England in most of the land and naval battles after the Armada and won a favorable treaty in 1604. Spain, in fact, dispatched three more Spanish Armadas in the 1590s that were dispersed by storms. Furthermore, in 1595, the Spanish, in fact, did succeed in landing troops in western England, where they attacked and burned several towns before disembarking, as will be detailed below (myth #10a). Of all the common Spanish Armada myths, this one—the failure to even acknowledge the most basic, incontrovertible fact of the war that was waged between England and Spain after the Armada—has always stricken me as the most puzzling. It’s akin to teaching the history of the US Civil War and halting at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, or discussing the Second World War and stopping at the Fall of France in 1940, without mentioning the Battles of Midway, El Alamein, Guadalcanal, or the D-Day Normandy invasion at all! A grossly misleading, terribly incorrect impression of the conflict is thereby imparted. The key here is to recognize that the Spanish Armada was merely one battle, an early one in a long war; this simple fact is often unrecognized and unacknowledged, contributing to many of the other common myths.

(2a) Myth: The defeat of the Spanish Armada was the beginning of England’s control of the high seas. Spain never recovered from the Spanish Armada fiasco and relinquished control of the ocean lanes to the English. England’s status as mistress of the seas would be unchallenged for centuries as the British Empire grew in size, and the vaunted English navy could trace its dominance of the sea lanes to the Spanish Armada’s defeat in 1588.

(2b) Fact: One of the most common statements about the Spanish Armada, and one that is totally false. Spain recovered quickly from the Armada debacle and defeated England on land and at sea in multiple military engagements in the decade following the Spanish Armada. (In fact, an English Armada sent in 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada, suffered a crushing defeat against Spain, just as its Spanish counterpart did against England in 1588.) One of the most important consequences of the Spanish Armada was that it altered assumptions about naval warfare, since the English at Gravelines had opted for smaller, rapidly reloading, more maneuverable light coastal defensive ships in place of the heavy ocean-going galleons with single-firing cannon (followed by seize-and-grapple tactics) used by Spain. The most eager students of the English naval innovations and tactics were… the Spaniards. Philip’s post-Armada squadrons were much more agile and nimble than those prior to it. The Spaniards developed and implemented an efficient convoy system that enabled them to ship three times as much gold and silver from the Americas after the Spanish Armada than before it—indeed, Spain transported more precious metals in the decade of the 1590s than in any other! England’s buccaneering sea dogs were no longer able to raid Spanish treasure transports effectively, a fact that was underscored by the complete failure of a privateering expedition by Sir John Hawkins and Sir Martin Frobisher in 1589-1590 against Spanish shipping. Furthermore, both John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake—the most famous of England’s privateering pirates—were killed in a disastrous raid against Spanish America in 1595, a multi-pronged attack against Spanish colonies in the Americas that was anticipated and utterly crushed by Spanish defenses, one of the worst defeats that the English navy would ever suffer. Spain’s post-Armada navy was retooled and expanded, and Spain ruled the waves for most of the 1600s; in contrast, by the last year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, England remained relatively weak as a sea power, and its maritime strength during the early years of the Stuart Dynasty (James I and Charles I in the early 1600s) grew only gradually and haltingly. When Spain was finally replaced as a naval bellwether in the late 17th century, it was the Dutch who assumed the mantle of dominant sea power, defeating England in several Anglo-Dutch Wars of the late 1600s. Only in the mid-1700s does England truly emerge as the naval power controlling the sea lanes, after victories in consecutive Anglo-French wars (including the famous French and Indian War with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the victory that finally enabled England to dominate North America and spread its empire on a global scale).

(3a) Myth: Spain was eclipsed as a great power following the Spanish Armada, sinking into insolvency and rapid decline, while England became rich, prosperous, and powerful.

(3b) Fact: Spain definitely did not slip into insignificance following the Armada defeat. As noted above, Spain in fact defeated England on land and at sea in numerous battles of the decade after the Spanish Armada and retained substantial influence over affairs in Europe and the Americas well into the 1600s. Crushing debt afflicted both Spain and England as a result of their war; by the close of Elizabeth I’s reign, the English were nearly £3,000,000 in debt and had sold offices and crown lands to avoid slipping further, and Spain’s Philip II had declared several bankruptcies in parallel. In addition to the exorbitant expenses in the conflict against Spain, the English were dragged into a draining, costly, inconclusive guerrilla war against Ireland from 1594-1603 led by an Irish lord named Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone. Late Elizabethan England also suffered crop failures, famines, and plagues that engendered severe poverty in much of the country. Most importantly, the continuation of the war with Spain drained English financial resources and hindered trade, leaving a severe financial burden for the Stuart kings of the early 1600s. This debt, in conjunction with the Stuarts’ profligacy, would contribute to the crisis between monarch and Parliament which caused the English Civil War of the mid-1600s, a particularly bitter and bloody conflict that would split the nation. As for Spain, the nation was eventually crippled in the late 1600s by internal corruption, failures in its monarchical system— marked by feeble rulers with a propensity to play favorites and indulge prodigally in festivities— and severe inflation caused in part by its precious metals shipments from the New World. However, in a military sense, the most decisive defeats it suffered were in the Battles of Rocroi and Passaro against the French in the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648), not the English. It was these land defeats that most severely enfeebled Spain as a European power, enabling the French to replace Spain as Europe’s dominant nation during the reign of Louis XIV.

(4a) Myth: The British Empire—in the sense of the long-term settlement and colonization of distant overseas territories—was initiated following the defeat of the Spanish Armada, since settlement was now finally opened up to the English and other northern Europeans.

(4b) Fact: Not by a longshot. Once again, we have to remember that the war dragged on unsuccessfully for England after the Spanish Armada, and the country’s resources and seafaring vessels had to be spared for the conflict against Spain. The failure of the English Armada in 1589, an English-led expedition to Spain and Portugal, frustrated attempts to break Spain’s naval power, and the material, financial, and human cost of this defeat prevented expeditions to North America—probably contributing to the failure of the Roanoke Colony in what is now Virginia in the United States, which had been attempted in the 1580s but from which there were no survivors. When the Treaty of London in 1604 officially ceased hostilities between Spain and England (the treaty having been signed by England’s King James I, who had succeeded Elizabeth in 1603), England lacked a permanent settlement in the Americas or anywhere else. It was only after this negotiated peace that England was finally freed to begin colonization, following on the heels of Spain, Portugal, and France.

(5a) Myth: Spain’s King Philip II craved nothing less than the wholesale conquest of England with the Spanish Armada, and the annexation of the island country as a colony of New Spain. England would have been converted into a Catholic nation and, had the Spanish Armada been successful, we’d all be speaking Spanish today.

(5b) Fact: Philip II had relatively modest goals with the Spanish Armada and never intended to “conquer England,” let alone convert the English populace to Catholicism en masse or compel them to speak Spanish. As I discuss in more detail below in this article’s main text, Philip’s center of attention was on the European Continent—in fact, his principal enemies were the Protestant rebels from the provinces of the Netherlands, then a part of Spain, as well as Protestant French Huguenots and Portuguese nationalists who opposed Philip’s annexation of Portugal in 1580. England was more peripheral to Philip’s scheme, and his objective with the Armada was chiefly to stop England from interfering with Philip’s central aims elsewhere—namely, to cease English military and financial support of the Dutch insurgents (whom the Protestant English had been assisting considerably) and to halt English buccaneer attacks on Spanish treasure ships. Philip certainly did seek to win tolerance for English Catholics and restore them to a more exalted status but, as discussed in the text, conditions in England since Henry VIII’s break with Rome had rendered it virtually impossible for Philip or anyone else to have forced England to convert back into a Catholic country. There was no viable Catholic replacement for the Protestant Elizabeth I since Mary Queen of Scots had been executed in 1587. Moreover, Spain’s problems in the Netherlands, the logistical issues posed by England’s location as an island nation, and the experience of Spain’s invading armies on the Continent clearly indicate that even an entirely successful Spanish Armada invasion in 1588 would have had little cultural effect on England.

(6a) Myth: In the Battle of Gravelines, the chief confrontation between the English defensive fleet and the Spanish Armada, the English won a stunning underdog victory, having been outnumbered and outgunned by the vastly more imposing Spanish Armada fleet.

(6b) Fact: The English were neither outnumbered nor outgunned at the Battle of Gravelines, as is so often claimed. There was a rough parity in the sizes of the fleets; Spain had more bulky galleons, but England had more total ships in the water.

(7a) Myth: The Battle of Gravelines was a titanic clash on the high seas, one of the largest and most extraordinary naval battles in history. The English ships inflicted heavy damage on the Spanish Armada vessels while suffering little of their own, sinking a large number of Spain’s ships and forcing the Spaniards to flee.

(7b) Fact: The Spanish Armada battle at Gravelines itself was definitely not a titanic naval clash, but a short, inconclusive, rather anticlimactic encounter between two large fleets, both of which committed major blunders and neither of which damaged each other significantly. It’s true that the Spanish Armada caused little damage to the English ships, but then, neither did the English ships cause much harm at all to the Spanish fleet, as discussed in the main text below. It was an unusually ferocious September Atlantic storm as the Spanish vessels were rounding the tip of Ireland, that damaged and/or sank most of the Spanish Armada ships that did not return to port, either directly or in compelling the vessels to beach on the rocky Irish coast. Most of Spain’s casualties from the Spanish Armada invasion resulted when sailors died of or were incapacitated from disease and exposure, not from battle wounds. In any case, most of the Spanish Armada ships did manage to return to port in Spain or Portugal. Many of the lost ships had already been in a state of disrepair, while Philip II’s crucial Atlantic class vessels—the most seaworthy in the Spanish Armada and designed for oceanic traversal, the key to Spain’s New World empire and the newly conquered Philippines archipelago in the Pacific Ocean—returned to the Iberian Peninsula largely intact. In fact, excellent seamanship was displayed by both the English and Spanish sides in their encounter, and it is quite remarkable that the Spaniards did not suffer greater losses considering the unremittingly powerful storm they had encountered.

(8a) Myth: The Spanish Armada was dubbed “the Invincible Armada” (La Armada Invencible) by an overconfident, swaggering King Philip II of Spain and his advisors, having been so nicknamed since they all assumed that the Armada was so strong that it could never be defeated by the English.

(8b) Fact: This tale is repeated with bewildering frequency—and it’s utterly, absolutely false. The Spanish Armada was never, ever referred to by King Philip or his Spanish ministers as “the Invincible Armada” (“La Armada Invencible”); this term was an English invention, not a Spanish one, used by English historians who later described the battle, yet the term is frequently attributed to the Spaniards incorrectly. In fact, the rapid mobilization of Spanish resources upon the return of the Armada ships to harbor in Spain lucidly demonstrates that the Spaniards had been very much prepared for the Armada’s potential failure. Populations in coastal towns were rapidly drafted and quickly responded to aid the often injured and seasick sailors; food supplies, hospital beds and equipment, and physicians were immediately and efficiently mustered for the Spanish Armada’s crews, saving hundreds of lives.

(9a) Myth: The English suffered barely any casualties at all in the Spanish Armada encounter, celebrating their victory with great revelry following the departure of the Armada fleet from England’s coastal waters.

(9b) Fact: The English themselves suffered thousands of casualties among their sailors in the Spanish Armada engagement due to exposure and outbreaks of infectious disease, and the battle’s aftermath was characterized not by celebration but by finger-pointing, infighting, and bitter protestations when many sailors were not compensated for months.

(10a) Myth: After the Spanish Armada’s failure to invade England, the Spaniards were never able to successfully land troops on English soil. This was a continuation of England’s long and remarkable defensive tradition, in which no hostile military force has ever succeeded in landing troops on the territory of the English island mainland since the Norman Conquest.

(10b) Fact: Not true! The claim that England has never suffered a hostile landing since 1066 is repeated with extreme frequency; and it also happens to be inaccurate. That’s because in 1595, a Spanish force led by Don Carlos de Amesquita managed to achieve just that, even though the Spanish soldiers had not intended such a landing initially. Amesquita’s small force had been patrolling the waters of the English Channel when they encountered a scarcity of potable water. Navigating the rough and fickle winds in the Channel, Amesquita’s troops were blown ashore near Cornwall on the western English coast. The Spaniards easily intimidated or defeated local militia resistance and set fire to much of Penzance and surrounding localities while plundering the hamlets for whatever victuals, nautical aids, and freshwater supplies that they could find. Eventually the English began to muster a professional army and summon naval forces under Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins, but the Spanish managed to evade their adversaries when Amesquita’s force decamped and returned home to the Iberian Peninsula— after holding a traditional Catholic Mass on English soil.

The rest of this essay fleshes out the material summarized above with greater detail and a more in-depth picture of the conditions surrounding the Spanish Armada clash and its aftermath. Intended as a companion to the English Armada article, this piece cuts through the myths and lays out the facts of the Spanish Armada battle, still significant in numerous respects as discussed below, but in ways far more subtle and intricate than are generally appreciated.

Please feel free to quote from, print, and cite this essay as, “Top 10 myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada, history’s most confused and misunderstood battle,” by Wes Ulm, Harvard University personal website, © 2004.