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Grenville a defence against this or any other squadron the king of Spain fitted out a powerful fleet of ships of war, and despatched it to the Azores. The Earl of Cumberland, however, then on the coast of Portugal, sent off a pinnace to warn Howard of the impending danger. The pinnace, being a good sailer, kept company with the Spanish fleet for three days, learning the details of its force and gaining assurance of its route ; then leaving the Spaniards, brought the intelligence to Howard on 31 Aug. Howard, then lying at anchor on the north side of Flores, had scarcely heard the news before the Spanish fleet was in sight. It is said to have numbered fifty-three sail all told. Of English ships there were in all sixteen, six of which were queen's ships, but they were very sickly ; quite half the men were down with fever or scurvy, and the rest at the moment were busy watering. Howard determined at once that he was in no condition to fight a force so superior, and, hastily getting his men on board, weighed anchor and stood out to sea. It has been supposed that the Spanish fleet had passed to the southward of Mores, and thus came in on the English from the west; that Greynvile, not knowing or not believing the news which the pinnace had just brought, was convinced that the ships coming round the western point were the long waited-for treasure ships, and therefore refused to follow Howard. Such seems to have been the opinion of Monson, a contemporary seaman, and of Linschoten, who was at the time actually at Tercera. On the other hand, Ralegh, writing, it must be remembered, as a cousin and dear friend, has stated that Greynvile was delayed in getting his sick men brought on board from the shore. But the other ships had also to get their sick men on board, and sickly as the Revenge was, she was no worse off than her consorts. It is quite certain, however, that by some cause the Revenge was delayed, and before she could weigh, the Spanish fleet had stretched to windward of her, cutting her off from the admiral and the rest of the squadron. Greynvile might still have got clear by keeping away large, and so, doubling on the enemy, have rejoined his friends. But he was not a seaman, nor had he any large experience of the requirements of actual war. Acting from what it is difficult to describe otherwise than as a false notion of honour, he scornfully and passionately refused to bear up, and with angry voice and gesture expressed his determination to pass through the Spanish fleet. In attempting to do so, that happened which any seaman could have foretold. The Revenge coming under the lee of some of the huge high-charged galleons was becalmed ; they were enabled to close with her, and she lost the advantage of the superior seamanship and superior gunnery which in all other contests during that war told so heavily in favour of the English. She was beset by numbers, boarded, and overpowered after a long and desperate resistance, the circumstances of which, as related in the first instance by Ralegh, have been enshrined in immortal verse by Tennyson. The Revenge was captured, and Greynvile, mortally wounded, was taken on board the Spanish admiral's ship, the San Pablo, where he died a few days afterwards. His chivalrous courage has been very generally held to atone for the fatal error. The defence has been compared to that of the three hundred at Thermopylæ, and the lines in Campbell's famous ode were originally (Naval Chronicle, 1801, v. 427): Where Granville, boast of freedom, fell, Your manly hearts shall glow. It is therefore necessary to point out that, in the opinion of contemporaries well qualified to judge, the loss of his ship, of his men, and of his own life was caused by Greynvile's violent and obstinate temper, and a flagrant disobedience to the orders of his commanding officer. His ‘wilful rashness,’ according to Monson, ‘made the Spaniards triumph as much as if they had obtained a signal victory, it being the first ship that ever they took of her majesty's, and commended to them by some English fugitives to be the very best she had.’ Mr. Froude, on the other hand, tells us that the gallant defence ‘struck a deeper terror, though it was but the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the Spanish people ; it dealt a more deadly blow upon their fame and moral strength than the destruction of the Armada itself, and in the direct results which arose from it it was scarcely less disastrous to them’ (Short Studies, i. 494). For this statement there is no sufficient authority, and it maybe doubted whether in it, as in Ralegh's prose or Tennyson's verse, there is not a good deal of poetic exaggeration. In the numbers there is certainly such, for of the fifty-three Spaniards a large proportion were victuallers intended for the relief of the Indian ships. Not more than twenty were ships of war, and of these not more than fifteen were engaged with the Revenge (, Considerations touching a War with Spain, in, p. 8). That was sufficient. The truth in its simple grandeur needed no exaggeration. When we have before us the fact that 150 men during fifteen hours of hand-to-hand fighting held out against a host of five thousand, and yielded only when