desiring to come to close quarters so that the fight should be of the hand-to-hand description to which they were accustomed. The English ships were smaller, and though more numerous, of little more than half the total tonnage of the Armada, and were, on the whole, more lightly armed. Still, a large number of the English vessels carried what were long, heavy guns for those days, and they used them at short range when they assumed a windward position and attacked the Spanish rear, inflicting great damage and throwing the enemy into confusion. This defeat definitely established the cannon as the principal weapon for warfare afloat, and inaugurated a new era in the history of the world’s fighting navies. [Illustration: THE “ARK ROYAL,” THE ENGLISH ADMIRAL’S FLAGSHIP. _From a Contemporary Print._] Of the merchant ships engaged, the largest were the _Leicester_, sometimes called the _Galleon Leicester_, and the _Merchant Royal_, each of 400 tons. The great galleys and galleasses of the Armada were not the largest ships afloat by a great deal, for they were far exceeded in size by many contemporary merchantmen in the Mediterranean. The Queen’s ships were sometimes employed upon peaceful and ambassadorial errands. The voyage of the _Ascension_ to Constantinople shows a definite attempt to spread English prestige in distant seas by means of English trade openings, instead of by the diplomacy of the day, a prominent feature of which was the discovery of means and opportunities of raiding a state having much portable riches and not sufficient power to protect them. The _Ascension_, in which Queen Elizabeth sent her second present to the Sultan of Turkey, left London in March, 1593, and arrived in August, 1594. She was “a good shippe very well appointed, of two hundred and three score tunnes (whereof was master one William Broadbanke, a provident and skilfull man in his faculties).” Some days after the arrival when the wind suited, “our shippe set out in their best manner with flagges, streamers, and pendants of divers coloured silke, with all the mariners, together with most of the Ambassador’s men, having the winde faire, and came within two cables’ length of this his moskyta,[20] where (hee to his great content beholding the shippe in such bravery) they discharged first volies of small shot, and then all the great ordinance twise over, there being seven and twentie or eight and twentie pieces in the shippe.”[21]