struck our English home waters before the noble Howard could be apprised of the enemy's approach. This wonderful passage of our national story grows confused presently with the intermingling of contending vessels, disjointed murderous struggles, the flames of fire ships, the rage of battle slowly trending, like a pall of gunpowder smoke, from abreast of the Start to the white terraces of the Forelands. But that incident of Fleming, that detail of his little pinnace seeming to yearn, in her swelling canvas, with the same wild longing to make haste that animated the spirit of the pirate, stands out bright and sharp in its isolation. One sees the figure of the man, in slouched hat, short cloak, belted doublet, jack boots, spiked beard, and mustachios curled upon his cheeks, standing at the rail of his humming craft, and sending a falcon glance under the sharp of his hand into the southern dusk, where the loom of a hundred dark shadows break the continuity of the sea line there.

It was at four o'clock in the afternoon on July 19, according to the old writers, that Master Thomas Fleming, being arrived at Plymouth Sound, rowed to the Lord High Admiral and told him that the Spaniard was close aboard, sailing large under towers of canvas, a vast, incredible multitude of him. It is three hundred years ago, but the variations of human nature are as the polaric changes of the compass, slow, with a steadfast recurrence to the old bearings; and nothing is easier than to imagine to-day what the feeling then was when Fleming delivered his report. There is an old story of Sir Francis Drake leisurely completing his game of bowls, after a glance of indifference seawards. It is a good tale for the marines. There is no illustration in all naval history that so gloriously expressed the English seaman's genius of promptitude as the dispatch Howard and his men exhibited in making ready to prepare for sea and confront the enemy. A large number of the sailors and soldiers belonging to the Royal ships were ashore, as Fleming had heard; yet before darkness had settled down that same night the admiral was lying ready with six ships, waiting for the morning to break for others to join him. They arrived in twos and threes, and assuredly not one moment too soon; for at midday the Armada hove into view, whitening in a crescent seven miles of sea with its flowing canvas, and glorifying the blue of the sky beyond it with the radiance of fluttering pennons. The enemy's strength was

well known.

It had been circulated long before in printed copies, doubtless with the intention of paralyzing the spirit of the English. The description had been dated May 20, and subsequent gales of wind had scarcely rendered its modification needful. The Happy Armada then, as it was styled, consisted of 130 ships, expressing an aggregate of close upon 58,000 tons. It was manned by over 19,000 soldiers, 8450 marines, above 2000 slaves, and armed with 2630 pieces of cannon. The tenders to this fleet, loaded to their ways with a prodigious quantity of arms and ammunition, formed of themselves a considerable armada besides. In addition to the soldiers and sailors there were upwards of 180 monks of several orders, together with 124 volunteers, who represented the noblest blood in old Spain. It is impossible out of mere figures to collect even a poor notion of dimensions, of aspect, of the hundred formidable elements which went to the composition of the vast unwieldy structures of this enormous fleet. There were several fifty-gun ships. Don Pedro de Valdez's vessel was of 1550 tons' burden, carried 304 fighting men, besides 118 sailors. There were pinnaces that rose to the burden of 876 tons. The "Saint Martin," the galleon commanded by the Captain General, was of 1000 tons. There were huge galleasses besides, armed each with fifty pieces of cannon, and manned by an army of soldiers and sailors. One obtains some idea of their bulk on reading that "they contained within them chambers, chapels, turrets, pulpits, and other commodities of great houses." They were propelled with oars by 300 slaves, and, in common with most of the other vessels of Portugal, Biscay, Andalusia, Castille, and the contributory provinces, they were "furnished and beautified with trumpets, streamers, banners, warlike ensigns, and other such-like ornaments."

It was hardly guessed yet, perhaps, by the crowds who viewed that vast floating crescent of white cloths and shining banners from the Devon and Cornwall heights that, but for the blundering of its pilots, by which the Lizard had been mistaken for Rame's Head, Plymouth Sound would even on the yester eve have been crowded with those cathedral-like galleons, whilst the shining armor and gaudy raiment of His Most Catholic Majesty's troops would have gleamed on the rise of the inland moor, or glittered betwixt the hedgerows of the fair summer country. The spectator, to have found heart, must have needed

the deepest and most enthusiastic faith in the courage of the English seamen when, from some Plymouth eminence, he carried his eye from the slender squadron just outside the harbor to the immense flotilla whose southeasternmost wing showed in dim dashes of light against the blue of the horizon, so wide apart were the horns of this unparalleled arc. Yet one may say, with all memory strong in one of such men as Benbow, Blake, Howe, Nelson, that never did British-built structures hold so valiant and noble a company of English sailors as those who chased, fought, harassed, and defeated the Don during those nine subsequent days of thunderous conflict. Sir William Monson, who was eighteen years of age in 1588, and who served, it is said, as a common sailor aboard the "Charles," a pinnace that was engaged in the great fight, tells us that when even the whole resources of the country had come to the help of her mariners there was not above 120 sail of men-of-war to encounter that Invincible Armada, and not above five of them all, except the largest of the Royal ships, which were of 200 tons' burden. It was our seamen, he says, who by their experience and courage were the cause of our victories; not the ships, though elsewhere in his admirable "Naval Tracts" this fine old admiral says that, big as the Spanish galleons were, he would rather have fought them in a vessel of 200 tons, manned by a crew of 100 Englishmen, than in the biggest of the galleons have engaged the same Englishmen with a company under him of 1000 Spanish soldiers and sailors. One needs but glance at the flags flying from the British mastheads to comprehend the certainty of the issue. The pious chroniclers of those times attribute a great deal to the weather; but it is not too much to say that neither the glorious First of June nor Trafalgar itself exhibits instances of fiercer fighting than does this three-hundred-year-old nine days' rage of battle. Charles Howard, of the ducal house of Norfolk, was the Lord High Admiral. The scientific discipline of modern times renders the strategic maneuvers of this noble gentleman somewhat primitive, but no sailor who narrowly follows the movements of the English in this series of engagements but must recognize in Charles Howard as fine an expression of naval genius, as remarkable a combination of every quality which enters into the composition of a great admiral as our maritime annals anywhere offer. Sir Francis Drake was next in command, still bronzed by the suns of the Pacific Ocean, whose mysterious solitudes he was the first Englishman to penetrate.

His name alone was worth a score of galleons in its terrorstriking influence over the Spanish spirit. Fresh from his easy and cheerful burning of 10,000 tons of shipping at Cadiz, he might be one of the few commanders over whom floated the English colors who could contemplate the result of the approaching strife without the least stir of uneasiness or misgiving. There was Martin Frobisher, again, the hardiest of Yorkshiremen, the most intrepid of seamen, with a body toughened to the inflexibility of his spirit by the Arctic blasts that had obstructed his exploration for the Northwest Passage. There was the lionhearted Edward Fenton, who had been captain of the "Gabriel" in Frobisher's expedition, and who had studied the secrets of his profession, not under the comfortable shining of Spanish suns, but amidst the wild ice plains of the north and the high surge and desperate gales of the Norwegian heights. There was John Hawkins, he who had fired upon the Spanish admiral, who was to bring Ann of Austria from Flanders, for endeavoring to sneak out of Cattwater without saluting the symbol of Britannia's domination of the deep; the hero of the amazing, if disastrous, expedition of the "Jesus of Lubeck," and, after Drake, the most famous seaman of his age. There were many

other renowned and capable men, but the list is too long to exhaust.

It is pleasant to follow Sir William Monson in his brief reference to this famous Armada battle. The mere feeling that he bore a part in the tremendous conflict, young as he was, causes one to read his obscure page as though he were some ancient survivor of the heroic company talking to us out of his armchair about what he saw and did. You get the same feeling in reading Emanuel van Meteran's relation of the fight in the black-letter copy of "Hakluyt," printed in 1598-ten years afterwards; as fresh almost as a newspaper version of a battle two days' old in these times, so slow were people's movements then as compared with our activity. The "Ark Royal" carried the admiral's flag; Drake commanded the "Revenge," Hawkins the "Victory," Lord Thomas Howard the "Lyon," Lord Sheffield the "Bear," Sir Robert Southwell the "Elizabeth Jones," Frobisher the "Triumph." The "Hope," the "Bonaventure," the "Dreadnaught," the "Nonpareille," the "Swiftsure," the "Rainbow," the "Vauntguard," the "Mary Rose," were the names of others. There were besides the " Nory," the "Spy," the "Moon," the "Charles," the "Bull," the "Scout,"

the "Tyger," the "Swallow," with a few more of the smaller fry. Historic names go to the commanding even of these lesser craft, such as Lord Henry Seymour, Fenner, Cross, Richard Hawkins, the two Wentworths, Fenton, Clifford, and others. Later on the English fleet was reinforced by privately equipped ships, "in which number," says the black-letter account, "there were many great and honorable personages, as namely, the Earles of Oxford, of Northumberland, of Cumberland, etc., with many knights and gentlemen to wit, Sir Thomas Cecill, Sir Robert Cecill, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir William Hatton," and some scores besides. All England indeed flocked seawards. Upon the South Coast were cantoned 20,000 men; an army of 22,000 foot and 1000 horse was encamped near Tilbury, and for the guarding of the Queen's person was a third army of 32,000 foot and 4000 horse, all picked men.

In this age of colossal ordnance, it is perhaps excusable to recur somewhat slightingly to the primitive death-smiting engines of three hundred years ago. But do not let us suppose for a moment that the genius of murder was not horribly consummate in its way even in those days. Conflicts meant a species of butchery which the world is happy in regarding as one of the lost arts. The largest gun a ship then carried was called a demi-cannon; but then this weapon weighed 400 pounds, its bore was 6 inches, it threw a shot weighing 30 pounds, could send its missile 1700 paces, and was loaded with 18 pounds of powder. Next was the cannon petro, that carried a 24-pound shot; the culverin, a 17-pound shot; the basilisk, a 15-pound shot, and so on, down to the little serpentine and rabenet, which threw respectively shots weighing three quarters of a pound and half a pound. Here, then, were broadside armaments capable almost of equaling the thunders of Trafalgar and of rivaling the execution done by the gunners of Nelson. But they fought in those days with other destructive engines as well; they discharged flaming arrows of wildfire; they boarded with pikes blazing with the same inextinguishable stuff. From the ship's sides, or from her enormous tops, they flung brass balls and earthen pots filled with powder and bullets stuck in pitch, which made an incredible slaughter when hurled amongst the surging crowd of combatants. They suspended barrels of powder at their yardarms, ready to let fall upon the enemy's deck as the ship rubbed sides together, where they