by a Spanish fleet consisting of 53 men-of-war.  Eleven out of the twelve English ships obeyed the signal of the Admiral, to cut or weigh their anchors and escape as they might.  The twelfth, the Revenge, was unable for the moment to follow; of her crew of 190, 90 being sick on shore, and, from the position of the ship, there was some delay and difficulty in getting them on board.  The Revenge was commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, of Bideford, a man well known in the Spanish seas, and the terror of the Spanish sailors; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl Talbot or Coeur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores frightened children with the sound of his name.  “He was of great revenues,” they said, “of his own inheritance, but of unquiet mind, and greatly affected to wars,” and from his uncontrollable propensities for blood-eating, he had volunteered his services to the Queen; “of so hard a complexion was he, that I (John Huighen von Linschoten, who is our authority here, and who was with the Spanish fleet after the action) have been told by divers credible persons who stood and beheld him, that he would carouse three or four glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his teeth and crush them in pieces and swallow them down.”  Such he was to the Spaniard.  To the English he was a goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned his back upon an enemy, and was remarkable in that remarkable time for his constancy and daring.  In this surprise at Florez he was in no haste to fly.  He first saw all his sick on board and stowed away on the ballast, and then, with no more than 100 men left him to fight and work the ship, he deliberately weighed, uncertain, as it seemed at first, what he intended to do.  The Spanish fleet were by this time on his weather bow, and he was persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh’s beautiful narrative and follow it in his words) “to cut his mainsail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of the ship.”

“But Sir Richard utterly refused to turn from the enemy, alledging that he would rather choose to die than to dishonour himself, his country, and her Majesty’s ship, persuading his company that he would pass through their two squadrons in spite of them, and enforce those of Seville to give him way, which he performed upon diverse of the foremost, who, as the mariners term it, sprang their luff, and fell under the lee of the Revenge.  But the other course had been the better:  and might right well have been answered in so great an impossibility of prevailing:  notwithstanding, out of the greatness of his mind, he could not be persuaded.”

The wind was light; the San Philip, “a huge highcarged ship” of 1500 tons, came up to windward of him, and, taking the wind out of his sails, ran aboard him.