Linschoten was at that time a resident in the Islands, and may very well have had at least the substance of this speech from the Spaniards who actually heard it. It is too consistent not only with the character of the man, but of that of the type to which he belonged, to be wholly false. There was in the action as well as in the literature of the Elizabethan time a strain of rodomontade. The death of Sir Richard Grenville was emphatically what the sixteenth century described as a rodomontade in act. The capture of the =Revenge= was much boasted of by the Spaniards, and is still remembered by them with some complacence. Even, however, if we allow for a large element of exaggeration in our own accounts of the battle, it was not a feat which redounded much to their glory. Nor was the end of this effort to protect the return home of the trade from America fortunate. Lord Thomas Howard was indeed driven off, and two days after the action the galleons on their way home from America joined Don Alonso. They represented only the remains of the convoys which had sailed from the ports of New Spain. The ships stopped by Philip's orders in the preceding year had suffered much from the _teredo_ or boring worm, and numbers went down before reaching the Islands. Of the remainder few ever lived to see Spain. Shortly after they had joined Don Alonso, a violent gale, which lasted for seven days and blew in succession from different quarters, burst on the hundred and forty ships now collected under the command of the Spanish admiral. More than a hundred went down or were wrecked on the Islands. The loss was greater than that of the Armada, and the blow sustained by the naval power of Spain even more irreparable.