Sea Control - Sea Control 467 - The Spanish Armada with Colin Martin

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588, by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, Yale University Press, 2023

Hello and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today I speak with Dr. Colin Martin about the Spanish Armada and the book he co-authored with Jeffrey Parker. I edited and produced this episode. Here at CIMSEC, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out CIMSEC.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, please check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. We are currently looking for articles discussing integrated naval campaigning in partnership with the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation. Submissions are due October 25th.

Please check out SimSec.org for writing prompts and further information. And with that, Kimber's Men. Hello and welcome aboard the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. My guest today is Dr. Colin Martin, and we're discussing the seminal work that he co-authored with Jeffrey Parker entitled Armada, the Spanish Enterprise and England's Deliverance in 1588. Colin, welcome aboard. Could you start by telling our listeners a little bit about your background, please? Well, I've got a slightly unconventional background. I didn't do very well at school because I was bone idle. And I tried to get into aviation. But although I got partway into,

So I became a flying instructor, but I couldn't take it any further for medical reasons. My eyesight wasn't good enough. So in desperation, I joined the army for a bit. And there I learned to dive because I'd been posted to Cyprus, which has got wonderfully clear water around it and wonderful ancient wrecks. and when I came out of the army I struggled a bit to find to make a living. Eventually I homed in on freelance journalism specializing in historical and archaeological things and that's what introduced me to archaeology and in 1968 I read a newspaper article to the effect that an expedition was going to southwest Ireland to look for a Spanish armada shipwreck and I thought well that would make a good story so I jumped in my little minivan and drove to

Ireland and meeting the expedition members in the in the pub after half an hour I had been appointed as the project archaeologist because in those days there were lots of people who could dive and lots of people who were archaeologists but very few people who who could do both even though the archaeology uh in my case was at a very amateur level so i i literally jumped in at the deep end and uh a long uh search for this uh wreck uh which was very well documented uh we eventually found uh part of it um and uh spent the next two years um surveying and excavating it and i i was able to draw on what some of the pioneers had done particularly professor george bass in america who had effectively created the discipline of nautical archaeology underwater archaeology

so i followed his guide like a bible and it worked quite well and so gradually i i sort of became an archaeologist and i i moved on from there to look for another armada wreck up in the shetland islands in scotland and we found that one and that that told us more about armada ships and their armament and finally i got involved with the excavation of one of the armada's largest ships uh which should not so much a a a naval ship uh she was a an invasion transport she got an army on board Not just the soldiers, but also a massive artillery siege train. So that brought me really into looking at armada wrecks for what they contained and what their contents meant to an understanding of the armada in a wider sense. Because it was literally allowing us to go on board armada ships.

that is uh that's quite amazing how you got into it thank you for that um well could i just go on there a little bit because i have to explain how i got into academia absolutely please after uh working on these three armada ships i had become a sort of expert insofar as anyone was an expert in this field in those days this is the early the late 60s early 70s and happily somebody uh who was also in nautical archaeology knew somebody up in the university of st andrews he was actually a professor of english but he was very interested in in naval matters he'd served in the second world war in the navy and had a distinguished record and he got fascinated by the idea of somebody you know diving on the wrecks of the of the armada and to cut a long story short

St Andrews got in touch with me the university and allowed me to set up a research institute in the first instance I think I was paid a pound a year just to keep it legal but I had the resources of their development department and they were able to get funding from various sources so I established myself at St Andrews and after three or four years they offered me a permanent lectureship and that was where I met Geoffrey Parker because he was he was a young lad in those days making his way as a historian with a very particular interest in in the spain of philip ii and and the armada so um he and i naturally gravitated together and we found that our various our two different disciplines um he finding all the documents

and and interpreting them and me uh assessing the uh actual content of the of the ships and we saw that at an early stage this this could integrate it wasn't a question of one side being one sort of discipline and the other being an unrelated one uh they integrated incredibly well because the sort of things you got from the documents you didn't get on the rex sort of things you got on the rex you got in the documents so it was a natural combination and uh jeffrey became my supervisor for the PhD I eventually got. Well, that's wonderful. And as a reminder to our listeners, all opinions here are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. So Colin, kind of turning to the book, I was looking at your

earlier work with Jeffrey that you did on the 400th anniversary of the Armada. And I was kind of curious what made you publish this version and uh what has what new research has been done uh what updates uh were you able to add into the book since that uh previous one was published yes well we realized that 1988 was going to be a big anniversary and there'll be lots and lots of books uh about the armada and in fact uh uh the title uh we called it the spanish armada because in the first sentence, we thought, no, we can't call it the Spanish Armada, because everybody else will be calling it the Spanish Armada. And then we thought, but everybody else will be thinking the same thing. So why don't we just take a gamble and call it the Spanish Armada? So we did. And

there was, I think, one, a kid's book, a ladybird book, called it the Spanish Armada. Everybody else bent over backwards, trying to find a different way, a different title for it. So we were the only one that really sort of hit with the real title of what it was about. And this was very much the result of the collaboration that Geoffrey and I had already been doing, mainly through his supervising my research, which was taking the archaeological evidence and relating it to the documentary evidence. So although it was technically a supervision, it was really a collaboration. And the timing was such, I actually got my PhD in 1983. And so as soon as that was over, Geoffrey and I had a drink and said, why don't we do a book on this, joining our two

elements. So that's what did it. And Geoffrey, of course, was and indeed still is the leading historian, English or Spanish, on Philip II and his world. And so he was absolutely the right person to be collaborating with, because he had looked at the major resource of Armada documentation, which is the archive at Simancas in central Spain. And amazingly, I had done a story in um spain in the mid-1960s totally unrelated to the armada and driving through the middle of spain i we came upon this nice looking castle and i took a photograph of it and jeffrey subsequently uh said right we we talked about the dates and he said right if you look at that window there I was sitting behind it, looking at Armada documents, and we didn't actually meet for another sort of five or six years.

Wow. That is serendipitous, to say the least. Yeah, yeah. So, so Jeffrey had been looking at, once he got a special interest in the Armada, he went back to the archives, not just in Spain, but throughout Europe. he had a handle on all this and started to pull together stuff much of which had never been really published or even recognized for what it was

so I had at my disposal the top man on the documentation of the Armada and he had at his disposal somebody who'd actually found all the bits and pieces that documents talked about so it was a natural

combination it worked very well and uh we we never had a crossword between each other we we just uh you know we're great friends from the beginning sorry you you you did ask about what what happened between the first book in 1988 and and and the current one well triggered not just by our book But by the multitude of works that had been done on the Armada, triggered by the 400th anniversary, an awful lot of new work had been done by a whole lot of people, which was ready to be taken into account and analyzed and linked together with other things. And of these things, the major one, the really important one, was what turned out to be a five volume, a massive five volume work sponsored by the Spanish Navy's historical department. They actually have their own historical department. And this looked at, transcribed and published this vast new corpus, which contained a lot of new material, which was in the public domain now. So Geoffrey was able to to trawl all that material and again, you know, integrate it and put it together to make a story. So that was that. And he himself had discovered some other documents.

Geoffrey's one of his many skills is not just working in the standard archives of particular periods, But in finding little nuggets all over the place, he was especially good at this. And one absolutely mind blowing thing he found was correspondence between three of the principal participants in the armada actually corresponding with one another during the fighting. And two of them were complaining about the way that the head man was actually operating. And this is very rare to get, you know, commanders communicating with each other actually during a battle. And that has been a very, very major plus point to our new book. And then how did the archaeology that you did play into this book? it it enabled us to tell the story of the armada uh in conjunction with the actual hardware

that was being employed the ships the guns the the invasion army um the the tactics of the battle tactics and so forth it was rather like um telling the story of d-day for the first time but without knowledge, without having a tank or a spitfire, you know, to look at and see what you're really talking about when these things happen. So this was our sort of moment of truth, as it were. Historians in the past tended to regard archaeology just as a nice illustration of something they already knew. But this was actually going a good many steps further than that, actually physically coming to grips with the military hardware. So turning a little bit to the history that's actually in the book, you mentioned in the book that the people involved, kind of like you said with the commanders, were pivotal to the history. And that Philip II and Elizabeth knew each other personally.

so how did their their personal interactions play into this series of events well i i probably you should be asking jeffrey this but i don't think uh elizabeth and and um philip uh knew each other terribly well. They were, well, Philip II married Mary Tudor, Queen of England, before Philip became King of Spain. And he came over to England. And Mary Tudor was very pro-Catholic. She had had initiated pogroms against Catholics in England and so forth. Elizabeth, who was also a daughter of Henry VIII, so she was Mary's half-sister, but she was keeping her powder dry, as it were,

but she was of Protestant inclination. So I don't think there was very much contact between them, while they were both in England together. She was the black sheep of the family. But then Mary died, I think, in 1556. And Elizabeth became queen because she was the next in line. And what we do know is that Philip proposed to her. He wanted to marry Elizabeth because it was a great, great idea because he liked the idea of a marriage to the English queen because it got England on side, particularly in his relationship with France, which was a very unsettled one.

So he thought, well, when Neri died, he might as well just marry the next queen and carry on as before. But Elizabeth kept him on a hook for quite a long time and eventually turned him down. And that was a moment of, you know, separation. And Elizabeth then made it worse by allowing her sea dogs, people like Francis Drake and John Hawkins, to go on these freelancing joint stock expeditions to loot Spanish possessions around the globe. and one of the principal investors though she kept quite quiet about it was Elizabeth the Queen so this didn't go down well with the Spanish

and the other thing was that the English were increasingly supporting the Dutch revolt against their Spanish overlords so those were the two real major things which arose with the separation of good relationships between England and Spain. There was an irony that when Philip II was titular King of England, he obviously wanted to find something useful to do.

So he said, your navy's in a bit of a bad state. I think I'll get it updated a bit. We'll get some new ships built and so on. And this was the origin of many of the race-built galleons, which eventually were to perform so well against the lumbering armada ships. speaking about turns of fate here in history and and how someone who needs a project has you know works on the the navy what were some of the some of the turning points in this history oftentimes people uh lay people like myself see history as somewhat preordained but it's far from that Well, it is and it isn't. It's preordained in the sense that from our perspective, that is what happened. And you can't alter that. But that doesn't mean, as I know you're saying, it doesn't mean to say it couldn't have gone another way if things had been a bit different or people had just made different decisions. um so yes i i think the interesting thing the core character in the whole armada is philip ii and it's not really to his credit i mean his problem was that he was a micromanager

he wanted to be in control of everything and he thought he was he sat in his little cell in the heart of the escorial the great uh monastery palace that he had built and this tiny little office in the middle of it was where he was the sort of as far as he was concerned the center of everything everything from wherever had to come there uh he would process it uh take it on on board and and make decisions which then were sent out uh for everyone else to do now that would have been hard enough in the days of of uh you know um the internet you know in the day in the 16th century when travel you know to get to somewhere took weeks if not months and then another set of weeks if not months uh to get an answer and the idea of controlling everything

from this central position on this basis was just appalling because obviously events just moved on and and particularly uh if one of the elements in in in your your strategy was a mobile one like an armada uh they you know it wouldn't be where it was when you got when you sent the last message so it's really that communication and the belief that he could do everything And, you know, he he was the only one who was privy to all this information because he was a sense of which it all came. But and that was exacerbated by his conviction, which was a totally genuine one, that he was working in God's cause and that therefore, you know, God would always be on his side. And he would he was actually quite a reasonable man. He wasn't like your standard dictator, sort of yelling and bawling at everybody.

He was, you know, very civil and discursive, but he was always right. And in several instances when he made wrong decisions, his subordinates, many of whom were extremely competent people, um uh they were they would point this out to him and he would say yes you're absolutely right to point this out to me but you seem to forget that um we're doing this in god's cause and that consequently all these difficulties that you quite rightly have given rise to uh he he he will he will he will sort them all out for us and you couldn't with short of heresy you couldn't argue with that So this is really, I mean, he was the one that got it all wrong. The original concept of the Armada was based on, what was the word I'm looking for?

It was based on sort of combined operations, invasion task forces. and this had worked very well in the Mediterranean and Spain was obviously very dominant with this but it was all about logistics and mobility galleys on which this was all based were so much limited in what they could carry because their motive power they had 15 horsepower engines

which consisted of of a hundred people sort of rowing away um and they had to be fed watered etc and they were taking up an awful lot of the space which itself was limited because the galley had to be long and sleek um uh in order to have the speed to um out perform its enemies so the important thing was not just the galleys but the bases from which they operated so this combination of a network of bases and this highly mobile um force of galleys um was the basis of of mediterranean naval strategy um and it was highly highly specialized um and it was very much to do with with complicated logistics and supply um well uh the one of the great experts or the great expert was the Marquess of Santa Cruz. And when Spain was annexing Portugal, Spain had captured,

had invaded Portugal, but the Azores, which were Portuguese, were still hanging out way out in the Atlantic. And Santa Cruz, the great expert on invasions, was brought in, in his declining years, to organize an Atlantic-based invasion task force to take out the Azores. And he did this terribly effectively. He gathered together at Lisbon an army and the size and equipment of the army and the nature of its composition

was exactly designed to campaign on land to take the Azores. Then he had to work out how you get them there. So he worked how many ships he'd need and then all the supplies, the munitions, etc. Everything down to the last pair of shoes was all meticulously calculated and gathered together. A huge effort of logistics in a period where, you know, economics and production and transport were in their infancy. and he got the whole lot over

they landed, there's a wonderful picture of this in the Azor, in the Escorial, in the Hall of Battles, show the whole operation, the fleet going in landing the troops with their heavy artillery, everything forming up, marching on to

seize their objective so Philip II thought, well that's great that's just what we need for England so he wrote to Santa Cruz He said, right, make me a list of everything you would need to invade England, just what it'll all cost. So Santa Cruz went off and he produced this document, which, of course, is a much bigger operation than the Azores. And it was absolutely huge and hugely expensive, drawing on or attempting to draw on the resources of the entire Spanish influence, empire and spheres of influence. And it just wasn't workable. Even the king realized that this couldn't be done.

um but he the king knowing that he was always right because this was being done in god's cause uh he he had got he asked two other people uh for uh their opinions one was the duke of parma um sorting out the the um um the the rebellion in the netherlands um and the other was Santa Cruz himself and the king said the original idea was far too big, it was beyond management

we've got a super army under the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands only a few miles from England and why don't we therefore have a smaller armada assembled at Lisbon carrying the supplies and the backup troops and so

forth and they'll come together um you know the the armada will sail from lisbon uh a rendezvous with palmer's men in their invasion barges uh in in the low countries and over to england and bingo we'll we'll have it um so that's what actually happened but both commanders said no it won't work because um you You know, first of all, if the Palmers said we can creep over one dark night, you know, be in England before the English recognize it. And once you've got the army on shore, they're the best troops in the world. They'll walk it. And Santa Cruz. Yes, Santa Cruz says that really the big problem in linking up these two forces will be to coordinate it, because once the armada sails, it'll be out of touch. No one will be able to communicate it. And Palmer needs at least a week's advance warning,

even if he's got everything ready to actually get people loaded and onto the landing craft, etc., etc. But the king came back with, you know, you're quite right to point out these difficulties, but you seem to forget again that it's in God's course and he'll sort it all out. So the top Spaniards knew what the problems were, but they couldn't disobey. They couldn't disobey the king more so. They couldn't disobey God. so so they said as one uh not fully identified spaniard said um uh that we are sailing in the hope of a miracle that is uh that is quite the statement there uh and kind of as as that alludes

to the operation was ultimately a failure uh for a multitude of reasons um but i in in your book i found the chapter uh analysis of failure uh to be particularly illuminating um and you can you describe some of the things that that were in that chapter and some of the things that led to ultimately the armada's demise well one of the things um that could have been different was that if the commander of the armada a was competent to to to uh lead a large force in battle um and b if he'd been given the authority to do so now poor old medina sidonia who's a much maligned man um was a top class administrator it was he who got the armada when it eventually sailed to sail in really quite a reason in reasonable condition um he and he was good

with people he was a bit like eisenhower in the in in the second world war you know uh you know all these squabbling generals um but you had this this this overlord who who who was just nice to people and he got them to do things medina sidonia was a bit like that he's often denigrated uh because of the letter he wrote to the king when he was told he was to take over from santa cruz after santa cruz's death and he wrote this rather pathetic letter saying uh please don't make me do this you know i'll make an awful i have no experience of this sort of thing i'll make an awful mess of it you better get somebody else but the king insisted and so medina sidonia had to take it on now it's pretty obvious that what medina sidonia was trying to do but he certainly

wasn't a coward was to say to the king look this is a stupid plan it'll lead to disaster and I'm prepared to sacrifice my own honour to give you a less out. So poor old Medina Sidonia, you know, that was, so he wasn't the right leader. His number two, who is my particular hero, was Juan Martinez de Ricaldi,

who was the vice-admiral of the whole fleet. He was a very experienced man and a very nice man. You know, we've got little examples of how caring some of these people were, especially for the people under their command. And another character, another nice man, was Don Alonso de Lleiva, who was a very, very aristocratic young sort of galley commander. And he and Ricaldi were great friends and they were the ones who were exchanging letters, which Geoffrey discovered. Just a little thing that when they were in the voyage back home around the western seaboard of Ireland, Ricaldi and Liva were communicating with each other, partly on technical matters and partly on what had gone wrong with the Armada.

But amazingly, Ricaldi had some live sheep still on board. These animals were, you know, they towed the ship's boats and the ship's boats on these big vessels were quite big. And they kept the sheep on the boats. And these were not for the grandees to feast on. They were for the sick and injured on the ships. And Ricaldi was sending across to Deliver some sheep for Deliver's wounded. And that's just nice people. Anyway, where was I? I forgot what question I was answering.

i know i uh i was just wondering about uh the chapter analysis of failure and uh the things that you you thought led to the i guess the ultimate demise of the uh yes yes um well first of all the armada wasn't designed to fight a naval battle it was designed to land an invasion task force on a set landing place and to get there intact and without getting dispersed by a major sea battle. So they actually evolved quite a clever plan. They had a very rigid formation that was set out. All captains were issued with a copy of where they were to be in the formation. And to move from their position in that formation without authority was a capital offense. They'd hang for it. And one captain indeed was so hanged.

However, within the scattered throughout the formation where 20 or 25 special ships, not necessarily special in their power or heaviness of armament, But in the rank of the senior officer, in terms of your aristocratic rank, these would be men who would always want to be where honor demanded, where the fighting was thickest and all the rest of it. And these guys and their ships were given special authority to break formation on their own initiatives whenever a particular part of the formation as a whole was threatened. So there was an automatic response. If there was a trouble developing in one particular part of the formation, these people would just, they would, without any further instructions, they would be where the fighting was thickest. And once they dealt with the problem, they would go back to their places in the formation. So the idea was that it wouldn't interrupt the movement forward towards the objective, but it would provide a very effective response to any attack. So we really found that out when looking at the various sources we looked at. And so that was the Armada's idea.

uh the english on the other hand uh didn't want to get clothes and board well sorry the great strength of the spaniards was that they were very heavy high ships most of them were um and uh they were packed with soldiers because they were the main main purpose was to transport soldiers for the invasion. So they wanted, because the advantage of height and having lots of soldiers was that if you could close with an enemy and actually clap sides and send all your guys across, that's how you would win the battle. Unfortunately, the English didn't want to play it that way. And they had, because Philip II had given them some ships but they were designing them anyway um and also a very major factor was they were operating

close to their bases so they didn't have to have large quantities of extraneous things or particularly all the invasion equipment that the other ships had to carry which were bigger heavier clumsier and more heavily loaded so that they were not as maneuverable as the light well rigged well-manned ships of the english so in a sense there was a stalemate and at the very beginning when the armada started its advance up the channel and came together in its special formation that was going to let it defend itself um uh the english uh were really they didn't really know what to do they said we can't go in close because they'll board us and if we don't go in close we can't really hammer them to bits with our guns so at the beginning there's a kind of standoff

that the the um uh we durst not venture to put them uh amongst them uh their fleet being so strong said one disgruntled englishman um but eventually uh the english were testing them particularly people like francis drake he was trying those experiments on weaker spanish ships to see you know if he could out sail them gradually it all came together and eventually uh when it was clear that the armada didn't know where the armada was going to land uh so they were worried it might land in plymouth or or um you know in in the solent but once it got past the solent um and uh the armada's sole objective now was to make the rendezvous with palmer this was a difficult thing if he was just sailing to its its landing place

uh it would have been much easier but it had to link up with palmer and it the communications were breaking down because you know the the moving fleet and the distance and all the rest of it so um where were we um so yes the the two sides couldn't really engage they were they were sparring the English were beginning to get short of ammunition and so once they their experiments told them they could get close

enough to the Spaniards and give them a good blast of artillery fire without laying themselves open to being boarded and captured so the English decided to keep their ammunition

or keep their powder dry, so to speak, and wait until the critical moment arrived. The critical moment arrived when the armada anchored off Calais, trying still to make contact with and escort Palmer's army across to the landing ground in Kent. and at this point the the English sent in fire ships it was a very obvious move it wasn't particularly clever I mean it was just obvious here is a a large fleet anchored and the wind and tide are in the right direction set a few ships on fire and let them drift into into the

the the armada and it had the effect not of causing great damage but causing great panic and the ships cut their anchor cables or many of them did and were blown off towards the east towards the sandbanks that they were trying to avoid but fortunately for the spaniards there was a change of wind and they were blown into the north sea meanwhile medina sidonia and a dozen or or so of his principal ships had stood to face the English. Here's Medina Sidonia showing his true mettle. He stood and they let his fleeing comrades escape into the North Sea. But at this point, the English,

having saved up their ammunition for the critical point, tore in and there was a battle. and the English weren't exactly victorious but they gave the Spaniards a hammering and they then withdrew and the English had to withdraw because they

had run out of ammunition, they hadn't any left so they were they and England were at that point totally defensive if the Armada had known it could have gathered itself together and just sailed sedately there's nothing the English

could have done But that's not what happened. They went up into the North Sea and Medina Sidonia had really only one option because, you know, they were in no condition to fight. The opportunity to link up with Palma, make the invasion was lost. And so they went home and they had to go home around the top of Britain. And that's where so many of them got wrecked. But there was another feature that we did find, that when we found the first Armada wreck off the southwest of Ireland, we actually only found the bottom of the ship, which had dropped out. She'd hit a rock, sunk very quickly, and the upper works had broken away and drifted with the tide to an unknown place. so all we found was the bottom of the ship

but it was absolutely crammed full of cannonballs now this was strange or it was strange to us because one of the major reasons that the Spaniards had

failed was that they'd run out of shot and this was in all the history books somebody suggested it in the 19th century and everybody else copied it but here we are here we had a ship that's absolutely full of the things so we had to explain this um and we went to find another armada wreck um which we hoped we're going to find gun we didn't find any guns on that first armada wreck they'd all gone with the rest of the

ship to places unknown uh so we looked for we looked at the sources and we targeted on a ship on Fair Isle between Orkney and Shetland, away in the north of Britain. And we found that ship, the El Gran Griffon. And again, lots and lots and lots of ammunition, but also lots of guns as well. So we were able to test the quality of some of the guns and find that at least some of them had been very badly made,

were probably not only inaccurate, but highly dangerous to whoever loaded and fired them. So that was interesting. And then we got involved in this final Armada wreck where we'd got any number of guns, including the siege guns. The army was going to land in England to support the advance on London. And what the most important find was

was a little wooden stick. about a foot long and it had engraved on one side a set of graduations each had a number beside it and then on the other side was another set

the same sort of general spacing but different overall dimensions and we identified this as a gunner's rule and it was an artillery implement which allowed you to

You would put it across the mouth of the cannon you wanted to find a cannonball for, and you'd see what graduation it said, and the number would be the number of pounds of weight that the cannonball would be. So you then had another set of things of which we found, I think it was three, which were round wooden gauges, which you would go down And you simply use to from the ammunition store, you'd select a ball that fitted, you know, the round gauge. And that would be the one that you put in. I mean, pretty obvious stuff when you think about it, except except when you start doing the mathematics, you actually measure these things. you equate the individual

measurements to the diameter of the ball and the pounds weight of shot it should be and they just don't match they just don't work and the errors are not constant errors they're just all over the place the only thing is that if you were one gunner

and you had one set of these things probably you'd made yourself, they would work because as long as the thing you measured across was the same as the size of the shot, that would be okay. So if all these measuring instruments across the armada were the same, although inaccurate, it wouldn't have mattered. They'd have still done the job. But that wasn't the case because we found,

Well, we didn't find, more than 100 years ago, a similar object had been found, though it was unrecognized for what it was, from the Armada wreck on the island of Mull in the Hebrides. And it was a brass one, but it was similarly right up the spout as regards, you know, accuracy and conformity. but all the errors were quite different than the errors that were on the one we'd found elsewhere so if you start thinking about this and it's quite difficult because usually we are so conditioned in the modern age of conformity and you know standardized measurements and although if you remember uh one of the the uh mars landings uh failed because somebody had confused inches with And anyway, it's not just that the individual course people when they got sets of balls and things they could work out which didn't didn't fit into the gun they wanted to put it. But that's not where it happened. It's the supply system, the manufacturing, the supplying, the dividing up, the issuing to particular ships and so on.

I think they had a huge, huge problem. in fact there's a nice again one of jeffrey's finds um there's there's this thing in samankus which simply draws a document with a load of circles drawn on it to different sizes and by each circle there is a a number and it's it's the captain general of artillery the biggest gun man in spain saying i don't care what you measurements you use the from now on a circle this size and the number that's on it that's the bore of the gun and the weight of the shot put in it so they some people realize but in in a huge you know uh chaotic bureaucracy such as Spain's and not just Spain, you see, they've got different guns and shots coming from all over the place.

They're all using different systems of weights and measures. They must have just had a huge muddle. The other thing we found, and this was both documentary and archaeological, that the Spaniards didn't have the same kind of gun carriages as the English did. The English had the type that we're very familiar with. You see on board HMS Victory and places like that. There are two sides of stepped, stepped edges and four little round wheels, one at each corner. And these could easily, the gun didn't project much behind the thing. And there's quite a lot of it in the front. So you could push it well out. You could easily manhandle it back to reload it.

Later, they used the recoil of the gun itself, but that did come later. But even so, they were efficient to use and particularly to reload at sea. So, you know, if you could reload your guns twice as quickly as your enemy, you only needed to have half as many. You know, it was a huge, huge advantage. The Spaniards, they weren't particularly bothered with fast reloading because their guns, in their way of thinking or what they wanted, would be just the final thing as you were closing in order to clap sides and board. This one broadside, which would just create confusion and dismay in the seconds before the troops were over the edge. So they had much simpler two-wheeled gun carriages, which are illustrated in the documents and also examples that we found on the wrecks. So that was another reason for the Spanish failure in artillery.

But it wasn't it wasn't the crucial failure. The real the real victor, so to speak, against the armada was Philip II himself. Well, with that, I'm so sorry, but I have to say that's all the time that we have today. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Again, my guest is Dr. Colin Martin. And Colin, do you have an online presence? Is there anywhere that my listeners can follow any work that you're doing moving forward? Not really. It is in the book. There is a our appendices got too long. And so some of them have been put online.

and if you buy the book you'll be able to access the online material Fantastic, well I highly recommend that to everyone listening, thank you again for joining us and to the listeners

thank you for tuning in, we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon