But if these major operations seem to have missed contact, there were many lively actions on a minor scale, the well-armed trading vessels of the north easily beating off the galley squadrons guarding Gibraltar and the routes past Spain. Among these lesser encounters, the famous "Last Fight of the Revenge," which occurred during operations of a small English squadron off the Azores in 1591, well illustrates the fighting spirit of the Elizabethan Englishman and the ineptitude which since the Armada seems to have marked the Spaniard at sea. In Drake's old flagship, attacked by 15 ships and surrounded by a Spanish fleet of 50 sail, a bellicose old sea-warrior named Sir Richard Grenville held out from nightfall until eleven the next day, and surrendered only after he had sunk three of the enemy, when his powder was gone, half his crew dead, the rest disabled, and his ship a sinking wreck. "Here die I, Richard Grenville," so we are given his last words, "with a joyful and a quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a good soldier ought to do, who has fought for his country and his queen, his honor and his religion." The naval activities mentioned in the immediately preceding paragraphs had no decisive effect upon the war, which ended, for England at least, with the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and the accession of James Stuart of Scotland to the English throne. James at once adopted a policy of _rapprochement_ with Spain, which while it guaranteed peace during the 22 years of his reign, was by its renunciation of trade with the Indies, aid to the Dutch, and leadership of Protestant Europe, a sorry sequel to the victory of fifteen years before. The Armada nevertheless marks the decadence of Spanish sea power. With the next century begins a new epoch in naval warfare, an age of sail and artillery, in which Dutch, English, and later French fleets contested for the sea mastery deemed essential to colonial empire and commercial prosperity. REFERENCES DRAKE AND THE TUDOR NAVY, Sir Julian Corbett, 2 vols., 1898. THE SUCCESSORS OF DRAKE, Sir Julian Corbett, 1900. THE STORY OF THE GREAT ARMADA, J. R. Hale, no date. ARMADA PAPERS, Sir John Knox Laughtun, 2 vols., Navy Records Society, 1894. LA ARMADA INVENCIBLE, Captain Fernandez Duro, 1884. A HISTORY OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE ROYAL NAVY, 1509-1660, by M. Oppenheim, 1896. A HISTORY OF THE ROYAL NAVY, William Laird Clowes, Vol. 1., 1897. THE GROWTH OF ENGLISH COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY, W. Cunningham, 1907. THE DEVELOPMENT OF TACTICS IN THE TUDOR NAVY, Capt. G. Goldingham, United Service Magazine, June, 1918. CHAPTER IX RISE OF ENGLISH SEA POWER: WARS WITH THE DUTCH.