Two things are specially worthy of notice about this great battle. The first is the continued ignorance of the commanders of various English ships as to the actual damage which had been inflicted upon the enemy. They had, of course, only their unaided eyes to trust to, and great difficulty in announcing news from ship to ship. Lord Howard writes as late as August 8: "Although we have put the Spanish Fleet past the Firth, and I think past the Isles, yet God knoweth whether they go to the Nase of Norway or into Denmark or to the Isles of Orkney to refresh themselves and so to return." And Drake, too, wrote on the evening of the battle: "God hath given us so good a day in forcing the enemy so far to leeward, as I hope in God the Prince of Parma and the Duke of Sidonia shall not shake hands this few days." And the second point is that though the English loss was small during the actual days of the battle, yet the strain and the food and the sanitation were such that directly they came to port, a frightful epidemic broke out among the men, who died, we are told, by hundreds in consequence. In the actual fighting Ralegh probably took no part. When the first news came of the Armada's approach, he was in Ireland, attending to his duties as Mayor of Youghal. With the utmost speed at that time possible he sailed from Ireland and rode to the English coast. Certain it is, however, that he arrived too late for any official post to be assigned him, for the battle had been in progress for two days before his arrival. But many private gentlemen joined the fleet in craft hastily equipped for warfare, and it would be a thing to wonder at if Ralegh was behindhand when such doings were happening. No positive information is, however, forthcoming. Only it is known that the Lord High Admiral's ship was built from designs which Ralegh had matured, and that he agreed completely with the plan of the Lord High Admiral's attack. Many an evening Drake and Effingham and Ralegh would have spent in discussing the tactics of sea-battles, proud, as they well might be, of the swiftness and ease with which an English ship could be manoeuvred in comparison with the large unwieldiness of the carracks of Spain, who still considered herself (God help her) mistress of the sea. In his "History of the World" occurs a passage about the tactics employed by the English against the Armada. There is a strong element of pathos in the idea of the man shut up in the little room in the Tower of London (he could watch the ships making their way down the Thames) writing of this great action, which he had seen, and writing with ardour, which nothing could extinguish. He had been recounting a fight between Roman vessels, heavy and slow, and the swift African galleys. Then he bursts out into this great paragraph of reminiscence, as though once again he were convincing some obstinate fellow of the patent rightness of the plan of attack.