headland. On 20 August (10th, Old Style),
twelve days after the battle off Gravelines, it was passing between the
Orkneys and Shetlands, heading for the Atlantic, helped by a change of wind
which now blew from the east, filling the great sails, but chilling the
southern sailors and soldiers to the bone. Though it was summer, the cold
was like that of winter, and the bitter weather grew even worse as the
galleons sailed on into the North Atlantic. The great ships straggled for
miles over grey foam-flecked seas, under dull cloud-packed skies that sent
down showers of sleety rain. Men huddled below in the crowded gundecks, and
in fore and stern castles, and there were days when only the pilots kept
the deck, while gangs of men took their turn at the never-resting pumps.
There were semi-starvation and fever in every ship. The chaplains were busy
giving the last consolations of religion to dying men, and each day read
the burial service over a row of canvas-shrouded dead, and "committed them
to the deep."

The Armada no longer held together. Small groups formed haphazard
squadrons, keeping each other company, but many ships were isolated and
ploughed their way alone over the dreary sea. Many, despite hard work at
the pumps, settled lower and lower in the water each day, and at last sank
in the ocean, their fate unknown and unrecorded till, as the months went by
and there was no news of them, they were counted as hopelessly lost. Of
others the fate is known.

In his sailing instructions Medina-Sidonia had been warned that he should
take "great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland for fear of the
harm that may happen to you on that coast," where, as a sixteenth-century
sailor wrote, "the ocean sea raiseth such a billow as can hardly be endured
by the greatest ships." There was heavy weather in the "ocean sea" that
August and September, but even so the galleons that steered well to the
westward before shaping their course for Spain, and kept plenty of sea-room
by never sighting the "island of Ireland," succeeded in getting home,
except where they were already so badly damaged and so leaky that they
could not keep afloat. But along the coasts of Scotland and Ireland there
was a succession of disasters for those who clung to, or were driven into,
the landward waters.

The first mishap occurred when the Armada was rounding the north of
Scotland. The "Gran Grifon," the flagship of Juan Lopez de Medina, admiral
of the _ur