At dawn the Spanish galleons, attempting with a veering wind from the southward and westward to form in order off Gravelines, were set upon in the closest approach to a general engagement that occurred in the campaign. While Howard and several of his ships were busy effecting the capture of a beached galleass, Drake led the attack in the _Revenge_, seeking to force the enemy to leeward and throw the whole body upon the shallows of the Flanders coast. With splendid discipline, the Spanish weather ships, the flagship _San Martin_ among them, fought valiantly to cover the retreat. But it was an unequal struggle, the heavier and more rapid fire of the English doing fearful execution on decks crowded with men-at-arms. Such artillery combat was hitherto unheard of. Though warned of the new northern methods, the Spanish were obsessed by tradition; they were prepared for grappling and boarding, and could they have closed, their numbers and discipline would have told. Both sides suffered from short ammunition; but the Armada, with no fresh supplies, was undoubtedly in the worse case. "They fighting with their great ordnance," writes Medina Sidonia, "and we with harquebus fire and musketry, the distance being very small." Six-inch guns against bows and muskets tells the tale. A slackening of the English pursuit at nightfall after eight hours' fighting, and an off-shore slant of wind at daybreak, prevented complete disaster. One large galleon sank and two more stranded and were captured by the Dutch. These losses were not indeed fatal, but the remaining ships staggering away to leeward were little more than blood-drenched wrecks. Fifteen hundred had been killed and wounded in the day's action, and eleven ships and some eight thousand men sacrificed thus far in the campaign. The English, on the other hand, had suffered no serious ship injuries and the loss of not above 100 men. In the council held next day beyond the Straits of Dover, only a few of the Spanish leaders had stomach for further fighting; the rest preferred to brave the perils of a return around the Orkneys rather than face again these defenders of the narrow seas. Before a fair wind they stood northward, Drake still at their heels, though by reason of short supplies he left them at the Firth of Forth. In October, fifty ships, with 10,000 starved and fever-stricken men, trailed into the Biscay ports of Spain. Torn by September gales, the rest of the Armada had been sunk or stranded on the rough coasts of Scotland and Ireland. "The wreckers of the Orkneys and the Faroes, the clansmen of the Scottish isles, the kernes of Donegal and Galway, all had their part in the work of murder and robbery. Eight thousand Spaniards perished between the Giant's Causeway and the Blaskets. On a strand near Sligo an English captain numbered eleven hundred corpses which had been cast up by the sea."[1] [Footnote 1: HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, Green, Vol. II, p. 448.]