The attack was made on the 20th of April, in the early hours of the morning. The fleet had sighted the harbour by daybreak, and the look-out frigates had reported that the Spanish ships were still in the bay. The decision to attack was taken at once, and the English fleet stood in. The result fully justified the calculations we may suppose Blake to have made. The English ships ran past the forts with little or no damage. They were in the midst of the Spanish ships and in hot action by eight o'clock. The Spanish galleons were as ill fitted for war as the vessels taken outside of Cadiz. Though the English remained in the bay while daylight lasted, they lost only 50 killed and 120 wounded, while none of the ships received more damage than could be made good at sea in a few days' work. The fate of the Spaniards was very different. By seven in the evening they were all sunk, driven on shore, or set on fire. When the work was thoroughly done, the English prepared to drift out on the ebb-tide. By this time daylight must have been over, and in the dusk and following darkness they would probably in any case have passed the forts with very little injury. But by one of those strokes of good fortune which commonly come to the help of a bold and skilfully conducted enterprise, the wind arose from the south-west, and they regained the sea swiftly, with no further injury. The attack on the Spaniards at Santa Cruz de Tenerife was not only the most brilliant achievement of the navy during Cromwell's Government, but it was by far the finest single feat performed in the seventeenth century, and, though it has been equalled, it has never been greatly surpassed in later times. Even Nelson's attack on Copenhagen was not more intrepid. The delight felt by all Englishmen, without distinction of party, was unbounded. Cromwell sent Blake a "jewel" consisting of his portrait set in gold and diamonds, and the royal historian Clarendon has praised him without stint or qualification. Blake, indeed, deserved alike the jewel and the praise. Nothing quite of the same stamp as the attack on Santa Cruz had ever been done before, except his own bombardment of the forts of the Dey of Tunis. The captures of the Puntal Castle at Cadiz by the Earl of Essex in 1597, and then by his son in 1625, were small in comparison. In the Elizabethan time, ships had either shrunk from attacking forts, or, as in the case of Drake's attack on San Juan de Puerto Rico, had been beaten off. At the Ile de Rhé, our ships had shown no inclination to tackle the French fortifications. It is to Blake, as Clarendon justly pointed out, that the credit belongs of first showing what a fleet could do. But for Blake, his work was over. The destruction of the West India fleet had completed the task he was sent to do on the coast of Spain. He was therefore ordered to return home, but he never lived to reach his native country. He died, as it would seem, of scurvy, on