Gresham remembered one moment vividly. The San Martin had headed for five, six English ships, straight for them. For a moment it looked as if they would collide with the leading English ship. Suddenly, without warning, operating by some pre-arranged signal, the leading English ship suddenly hauled round to port. The San Martin responded to a volley of orders, her sailors cursing as they stumbled over soldiers, and heeled round ponderously to match the turn. The two fleets were broadside to each other now. With a trembling, gaping roar the San Martin let go her main broadside, two decks of guns blaring out hatred to the English. The deck heaved beneath their feet and the rigging shuddered, a hot wave passing over their faces with the bitter stench of powder on its breath. A vast, thick cloud of smoke covered the ship, and dimly through it the English ships could be seen, similarly wreathed in smoke with the flashes of yellow piercing the gloom. The English vessels appeared and disappeared, firing as they came to bear on the Spanish. Here and there a stay snapped, and skipping splashes could be seen on the waves as balls went low, but the English fire seemed to be doing remarkably little damage. It was chaos, impossible to grasp the broader picture, the noise terrible but the ships still fighting at arm's length.
'Do you think that Duke of yours knows about the Shambles?' asked Mannion.
'I don't know about the Shambles!' said Gresham.
Five minutes later he was clambering up to the high poop deck, dismissing the soldier who tried to stop him imperiously and bowing low before the Duke.
'I am in combat,' said the Duke, hardly bothering to look at Gresham. To him the rate of fire from the Spanish flagship seemed painfully slow, the English firing three or four times as fast. Yet for the vast expenditure of powder and ball extraordinarily little damage seemed to be being done. This is the time for those who fight with their hands, not for spies.'
'It may be the time for men who drown at sea, my Lord, unless I can impart my knowledge to you.' Mannion was translating. That got his attention.
'Well?' The Duke clicked a finger, and his own translator took over.
'The large English vessel over there…' said Gresham. 'You have sent your galleasses and some other vessels to cut her out. Yet look where she is positioned.' Gresham had to remember to pause for the translator to do his work. 'The ship is carefully placed under the lee of Portland Bill. There is a four mile an hour tidal rip there that will draw ail but the strongest vessel on to what is known as the Shambles, a long shallow bank two miles east of the Bill. It is possible that the ship is hoping to lure as many of your vessels as possible on to the shoal.'
The Duke looked at him. He turned to the ship's Pilot, and spoke to him in voluble Spanish. The Pilot was deferential, but also angry and sweating.
'E's saying 'e has no knowledge of what you say, but that of course with the coast so badly mapped it might be true. It's balls. 'E's got his tables, they all 'ave. It's just that 'e didn't think we'd be stopping here, so he hasn't done his homework.'
‘I shall send a message to the vessels concerned,' said the Duke, dictating quickly to a secretary. 'I write a warning, but also a question; whether what you say is correct. You will remain here with me.'
The wind was dropping, but it did not seem to bother the tiny patache that skipped across the waves like a dog taken off its leash. The failing wind had caused the galleasses to break out their oars, and in theory the vast vessels were in their element, the oars giving them independent power and manoeuvrability. Yet the great oars, with four men to pull each blade and three to push it back, were vulnerable to cannon fire. One or two blades smashed, destroyed the rhythm of the others, causing the blades to damage each other. As they watched the galleasses seemed to dance in towards the English ship, but then withdraw, as if an invisible fence was keeping them from the final kill. The galleasses hoisted sail, but they were difficult to manoeuvre under sail and even at the distance they held the tidal race could be seen to boil the water under their sterns.
Here and there it seemed as if the high-sided Spanish ships were close enough to board the daintier, leaner English vessels. A great cheer went up from the decks of the San Martin as it looked as though one English ship had been stopped, grappled to the side of a Spanish galleon. There was a groan as it was seen as a trick of the light, the English ship pulling away. The English flagship suddenly detached from the engagement.
'E's seen those there in trouble, and 'e's going off to help 'im,' said Mannion, straining to see through the thick fog of gunsmoke, Both he and Gresham were semi-deafened now, having to shout even to be half heard.
A sharp cry came from the masthead, and every head on deck turned. A new English force had appeared from nowhere, and was bearing down on the Spanish transports. The Duke had tucked them away to the east, ahead of the main force.
Was Sidonia brave? Or foolhardy? He gave brisk orders for ships to detach and protect the transports, but the San Martin plunged after the English flagship and its followers. Gresham saw the Duke's lips move, half-heard words in Spanish through his deafened eardrums.
‘What's he saying?' he bellowed to Mannion, coughing as powder smoke bit into his lungs.
'Dunno,' yelled Mannion, 'but I think it's something like expecting at last to have a real fight!'
The San Martin ploughed forward, the great banner that had been consecrated in Lisbon Cathedral streaming from its mast. She had to be recognised as the flagship. The English ships, seeing their sole pursuer, started to turn. The soldiers cheered. Now! Now! Now the two Commanders must grapple and fight like men!
The first English ship suddenly slewed round, presented her broadside to the San Martin and let loose. Five or six Spanish guns replied. There was a savage crack and the flagstaff vanished, splintered off, leaving a foot-long stump. Shrieks came from on deck, and three, four men slumped at their posts, the thud of a musket falling on to the deck suddenly audible in one of the strange, momentary silences that take place in battle. Then the English ship sailed on, turning to let the next vessel line up and deliver its broadside.
'That's it!' said Mannion in total exasperation. 'Let the buggers line up and take turns at blowing us to bits! We'll just sit 'ere and be awfully brave…'.
The Duke's face on the quarterdeck was impassive. The English Commander had refused his challenge for combat, preferring instead to stand off and batter the San Martin to pieces.
The Duke had not dismissed Gresham. He stood, exposed, a yard or two away from the man who would be the target of every sharpshooter on board an English vessel, a man who had taken his flagship into combat with five or six of the enemy's best galleons.
He is still challenging the English Commander, Gresham realised. Was it Drake? Hawkins? Frobisher? Challenging him to take advantage of overwhelming odds and lay alongside the San Martin, trusting in God and his own men to turn the battle in their favour, to start the grappling melee that was the only way the Spanish could win this hopeless fight.
It was the longest hour in Gresham's life. Feeling like the target in an archery butt, Gresham found his fear vanishing to be replaced by an analytical calm. He saw the soldiers, straining in the tops and on the decks to find a target, firing hopefully as the English refused to come within range. Every now and then a figure would drop from the masts or collapse on the deck, a sudden rag-doll of silent stillness among the running men.
He watched the process of the men working the guns. Take the powder charge brought up from the magazine by the smoke-stained ship's boy, ram it down the barrel. Shove wadding home with the rammer. Roll the ball from the rack on the deck into the barrel, ram it home. Prick the touchhole clean, smear a powder charge from horn of flask over. Train the carriage to the left or right with the great metal lever, raise or lower the barrel by banging the iron quoins underneath it or ripping them out. Roll the carriage forward, secure it against the recoil with the thick, greasy ropes that were sometimes like snakes with a life of their own, rubbing at even the hardened hands of the sailors and soldiers. Then the gunner, with his glowing linstock, the end holding the slow-match forged in the shape of dragon's jaws or even a hand, bringing the flame down on to the touchhole. And then the monstrous anger of the gun… it became a ritual, almost soothing. And the whole thing in silence. It was as if the body saw no need for it to receive the smashing roar of the guns, the screams of men, almost rejected them and simply cut out hearing as a sense. The San Martin's sails were shredded now, rigging flailing across the heavens. There was only intermits tent noise from the carpenters' mallets. They left the holes in the great after-castle and anything which posed no. threat to a central member of the great hull or which was not letting in water. The winds had been light, the ship not heeling heavily, and so hardly a shot had landed below the waterline.
Eventually — an hour? Hour and a half? — a body of Spanish ships finally managed to come up alongside the San Martin and take her back to the main body of the fleet. The Duke offered no complaint. The battle was declining now, the noise of carnage being replaced by the familiar noises of the sea. The Duke turned to Gresham.
'They will not fight us,' he said simply, revealing for the briefest of moments in his face a depth of tiredness Gresham had never before believed could happen in a man. And speaking in English! Broken English, to be sure, but
