SPANISH ARMADA VICTORIOUS

Taranaki Daily News, 12 June 1926, Page 16

SPANISH ARMADA VICTORIOUS

SO SPANIARDS WERE TOLD. A QUAINT DOCUMENT. A strange relic was recently .offered for sale in the catalogue of a wellknown English bookseller, which throws an interesting sidelight upon history. It is the official Spanish proclamation of the “Victory” of the “Invincible Armada” over the English fleet in 1688. The document is a broadside printed in black letter and bearing the royal arms of Philip IL The price asked for this exceedingly rare (indeed, probably unique) document of 300 odd years ago is £5OO. The proclamation states that, having sailed as far as Plymouth without sighting a single enemy vessel, the Duke of Medina discerned, on August 1, some sixty warships, which refused battle when he overtook them. It admits the loss of the Doequando, “owing to the negligence of an artilleryman,” and the taking of Don Pedro de Valdes’ flagship

“because, while returning with another ship under his command, it was left so close to the enemy that our own ships were unable to rescue it,” and then proceeds to describe how the Armada, on the seventh, anchored at St. Jean, between Calais and Boulogne, while the English, having merely assaulted the rearguard, did the same, “keeping as near to England as he could get.”

The fireships are mentioned and their failure deliberately reported in the following words:—“But, my Lord Duke, foreseeing the danger, obviated it by ordering that the cables should be cut from the ships which lay nearest, and the anchor raised from the others incredibly swiftly. And with this, the enemy being unable to prevent it as he intended, our ships sailed out elegantly

aryl with such precision that, had it not been so, our Armada would have fared ill; for in the very place which we had just vacated, those fireships sent up a discharge of so many, ingenious contrivances us would have been sufficient to set the whole sea alight.” The losses that ensued when the wind arose are carefully minimised and

the powder is well hidden in the jam of the final paragraphs: “From England comes the news that on the thirteenth, fifteen of the Queen’s ships had arrived, saying that the galleon St. Martin, on board which is my Lord Duke, whom God protest, had met Drake’s ship, which he had seized, and taken custody of his person as well as that of other English nobles; and that lie had taken another fiftten ships apart from the ones that were wrecked; and that my Lord Duke was proceeding with his Armada in the direction of Scotland, as the weather had not yet changed.

“With these tidings His Majesty is very well pleased, and has ordered them to be sent to the Empress through his ■Secretary of State, Francisco Yoliaquez.”