The English attacked the stranded galleass in pinnaces and boats, Howard with some of the larger ships standing by "to give the men comfort and countenance." Some of the Spaniards escaped to the shore. The rest, headed by Moncada, made a brave stand against the boarders, who swarmed up her sides, led by one Richard Tomson, of Ramsgate. Moncada was killed, and the ship taken. The English pillaged her, but the hulk was abandoned and seized later by the French Governor of Calais. During this fight on the bar Medina-Sidonia had reassembled about half his fleet, which he formed in a great crescent off Gravelines. The wind was from the west, and numbers of galleons were away to leeward. Some of them were in dire peril of driving ashore. Howard saw his advantage, and the whole English fleet bore down on the Spanish crescent. It was the nearest thing to a pitched battle in the whole Armada campaign. The English came on with wind and tide helping them and, with the confidence that was the outcome of their growing sense of superiority, ventured to close quarters with the tall Spaniards, while taking care never to give them the chance of grappling and boarding. As the fight went on the Spaniards worked slowly towards the north-east edging off the land, for their deep draught and the fate of Moncada's galleass made them anxious about the Flanders shoals. Howard and Hawkins led the English centre, Drake and Frobisher the right, Seymour and Winter the left. Not a shot was fired till they were at musket range, and then the English guns roared out in a well-sustained cannonade in which every shot told. It was the first of modern naval battles, the fights decided by gunfire, not by hand-to-hand conflict on the decks. The Spaniards answered back with their lighter and more slowly served artillery, and with a crackle of musketry fire. Before noon the Spanish cannon were mostly silent, for sheer lack of ammunition, and the galleons defended themselves only with musket and arquebuse, while striving in vain to close and grapple with their enemies. Spars and rigging were badly cut up, shots between wind and water were letting the sea into the huge hulls. Just as the English thought the "San Juan de Sicilia" had been put out of action and would be their prize, the galleon heeled over and went to the bottom. Soon the fight was only sustained by the rearward ships, the rest trying to extricate themselves from the mêlée, not for any lack of courage, but because all their ammunition was gone, their decks were encumbered with wreckage from aloft, and the men were toiling at the pumps to keep them afloat.