To escape these dreadful things the Spaniards were obliged to up-anchor and put to sea, losing many ships and lives by fire or the wildly flying cannon-balls, or by going ashore in the effort; and then the Englishmen followed them again, like wolves after a herd of buffalo in winter. The Spaniards dared not go back down the Channel, and nothing remained to them but the hazardous voyage around the north of Scotland—a venture for which the towering, unwieldy galleons were ill-fitted. Storms overtook them in the North Sea and on the Atlantic, and so many were cast away on the Irish coast, where those who reached the shore were slain, that hardly half of the proud Armada crept back to Lisbon and Cadiz. [Illustration: A SEA-FIGHT OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.] This incident was one of the most notable in European history for two reasons: First, historically, it no doubt saved England and her colonies from the Inquisition, and all the other depressing and horrible burdens that long afterward weighted the papal countries of southern Europe and their American possessions; and, second, it reformed naval warfare not only by confirming the value of a regularly organized national navy, but by showing that the old-fashioned, dense fleet formation, carrying soldiers to fight as they would do on land, was wrong and ineffective. But though Spain had been humbled she was by no means crushed, and sea-fighting went on a long time before either she, the French, or the Dutch—and the last were the hardest foes—would fully admit England’s claim to be sovereign of all the seas around Britain, and strike their flags whenever they met one of her “king’s ships” in acknowledgment of it. England asserted that the domain of her crown covered not only the lands of England (and much of France), but also “the narrow seas”; and she defined this domain to include all the Channel waters north of Cape Finisterre and thence in a square area westward to the middle of the Atlantic. This was not an assertion: “I can beat the world in sea-fighting,” but was a legal claim to rule—a declaration that her laws extended over that much sea in the same manner that it is now agreed that the laws of all nations extend to a distance of three miles from their coasts.