The duke brought up in a dangerous position near Gravelines, and when the morning of Monday dawned he found his fleet scattered and demoralised, with a stiff west wind blowing and most of his ships drifted far to leeward. He had only forty ships with him now--one of his great galleasses, the _San Lorenzo_, had been wrecked at the mouth of Calais harbour in the confusion of the night--to fight the united English fleets. The engagement was terrible, lasting from nine o’clock in the morning till six o’clock at night, the English tactics continuing to be the same, keeping up a tremendous artillery fire on particular ships until they were utterly crippled. The Spaniards fought desperately, but they could rarely come to close quarters, and their gunnery was greatly inferior to the English. The result, consequently, was never in doubt. The duke’s ship was in the hottest of the fight, and her decks were like shambles, for she had been hit by 107 shot. At the end of the dreadful day she and her consorts were utterly beaten and riddled; two of the finest galleons, completely unseaworthy, drifted on to the Flemish coast and were captured, and at dawn on Tuesday what was left of the Armada was dragging heavily in a strong westerly gale, with sandbanks on the lee. All spirit and discipline were lost now. The one idea was to get away from these “devilish people,” who would only fight with big guns and would not come to close quarters. The duke himself was for surrender, but Oquendo swore he would throw overboard the first man who attempted such a thing. He brought his ship alongside the duke’s and yelled sailor curses upon the landlubber that wanted to run away. “Go back to your tunny ponds, you chicken-hearted craven,” he cried again and again; and so the poor duke, in complete collapse, shut himself in his cabin and was seen no more till he arrived in Spain. At noon a providential--the Spaniards called it miraculous--wind came from the south-west, and they were able to weather the dreaded shoals. Oquendo and the old sailors were now for turning about and fighting again. But the duke had had enough fighting for the rest of his life, and would have no more. Besides, there was no ammunition on most of the ships. So the fatal order was given to run up the North Sea with the wind to the north of the Orkneys, make a long leg to the west, far out into the Atlantic, and thence set a course for home. Off the Scottish border the English fleet left them to their fate. Assailed by tempests almost unexampled, rotting with pestilence, the water quite putrid now and the food worse, they struggled to the north and west. Many fell off to leeward and were seen no more; many sank riddled like sieves in the wild Atlantic gales; seventeen could not beat far enough to the west and were dashed to pieces on the frowning coasts of Ulster and Connaught, where the men who escaped drowning were slaughtered--several thousands of