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.