The first engagement with the Spanish Armada took place on Sunday, June 21st. It was more in the nature of a skirmish than anything else. The Spaniards made several vain and entirely ineffectual attempts to close with the swifter and handier English vessels. They took care, however, to preserve their formation, and so to that extent defeated the English tactics, which were to destroy in detail what could not be destroyed without heavy loss in the mass. So the Spaniards reached Calais on the 27th with a loss of only three large ships. They there discovered that Parma’s flat-bottomed boats were all blockaded by the Dutch, and that any invasion of England was therefore entirely out of the question. It must have been perfectly obvious to the most sanguine of them by this that they could not force action with the swifter English ships, while they could not relieve the blockaded boats without being attacked at the outset. In a word, the Armada was an obvious failure. On the night of the 28th, fire ships were sent into the Spanish fleet by the English. This, though the damage done was small, brought the Spanish to sea, and the next morning they were attacked off Gravelines by the English. The battle was hardly of the nature of a fleet action, so much as well-designed tactical operations intended to keep the enemy on the move. It resulted in the Spaniards losing only seven ships in a whole day’s fighting. The only really serious loss that the Spaniards sustained was that they were driven into the North Sea, with no prospect of returning home except by way of the North of Scotland. Followed for awhile and harried by a portion of the English fleet, which fell upon and destroyed stragglers, the Spaniards were driven into what to most of them were unknown waters and uncharted seas. To the last the retreating fleet maintained a show of order. Fifty-three ships succeeded in returning to Spain. [Illustration: THE END OF A “GENTLEMAN-ADVENTURER.”--THE “REVENGE.”--CAPTURED BY SPANIARDS, 1591.] Stripped of romance this is the real prosaic history of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The wonder is not that so few Spanish ships returned, but that so many did! The loss in Spanish warships proper appears to have been little over a dozen all told, and of these not more than three at the outside can be attributed to “the winds.” Havoc was undoubtedly wrought, but the “galleons” which “perished by scores” on the Scotch and Irish coasts were mainly the auxiliaries, transports, and small fry; the battle fleet proper kept together all the time, and with a couple of exceptions the ships reached home together as a fleet.[10]