The Untold Story Of The Spanish Armada: The Truth Behind England's Heroic Victory | Our History

Spain was the superpower of the age under its King Philip II it had grown rich on religious Crusades imposing the Catholic faith on South America and plundering gold in [Music] return Elizabeth I had long been a thorn in Philip's side her country a rogue State Protestant poor and piratical Elizabeth encouraged adventurers like Francis Drake to attack Spanish treasure fleets and cut her in on the proceeds it was a dangerous game Elizabeth had spent 20 years provoking Spain on and off at one moment she was a superb AA the next moment she was belligerent she was steering the ship of State Through The Most Dangerous Waters this country has probably ever seen and Elizabeth's politicking was about to hit the rocks with the execution of the Catholic Mary Queen of [Music] Scots in his Palace outside Madrid Philip had long prepared an invasion plan it was ambitious deploying two separate armies the Armada would escort the first from Spain to the English Channel there they would combine with troops from the Spanish Netherlands together they would land in Kent and March on London Elizabeth knew of Philip's plans but could offer Little Resistance while he had two regular armies she had none her part-time militian were no match for Spanish professionals England's only defense was the Sea and the ships of the royal Navy but how good were they history tells us that ship design changed radically under Elizabeth Now using computer modeling John Adams an archaeologist can see just how far reaching those changes were the ships of the Armada campaign represents almost a revolution the way ships are conceived designed constructed and used has completely been rethought and the benefits of that rethink effectively are manifested in the ships that fight the Armada it's clear that the English warship had been completely reinvented from the bottom up they were more streamlined what a new generation of ship designers called race built race built refers to the profile that these ships presented if you looked at them side by side one is a great big bulky much higher taller structure whereas the raceu gallion has a much sleeker lower hole the performance analysis that we've carried out indicates that ships of the Armada campaign would have been considerably faster we also see the rig the thing that powers the ship along that is also changed as well so it transmits more power per square foot this allows the ship to be used in ways that are much more inventive the the but against the might of the Armada would these technological advances prove enough Elizabeth's Royal Navy was about to be put to the test as the Armada entered the channel on July the 29th 1588 the English saw for the first time the scale of Philip's Invasion Force the chains of beacons had been long prepared the beacons were a traditional system of giving warning of Seaborn attack the mechanisms were were were very well organized districts or parishes were responsible for maintaining their beacons keeping permanent Watchmen and so on um and it was a very effective system it would work uh in most circumstances England was crisscrossed by a complex network of Vantage points relaying signals by line of sight they could communicate only one simple pre-arranged message but they did so with surprising speed I've seen a calculation based on modern experience with lighting beacons that the message could probably have got from Plymouth to carile I the northernmost Frontier of England in about 40 minutes as the beacons flared there was trepidation among the English in Plymouth what would the Spanish do all they were confronted with was this enormous Fleet nothing like it have been seen in the channel since Roman times so finally the great forces of the Antichrist as they would look at it had arrived in the channel in strength but the channel is a capricious stretch of water and in the age of sail both sides were at the mercy of the elements every twist and turn in the battle to come would depend on the vagaries of weather tide and [Music] current four centuries later is it possible to pinpoint the weather faced by the Armada on the coast of Northern Ireland where many Spanish ended up Ken Douglas a self-taught meteorologist believes that it is the weather certainly was a key there wasn't any secret about that but there was nobody had actually tried to put it together uh in modern meteorological terms Ken Douglas has used the ship's logs from the Spanish and English fleets to piece together a picture of the daily weather observations for 1588 I could see from that that there was information there giving us wind speeds whether it was raining Etc wind directions and it seemed logical just to put those on a map and see if it was possible to turn those into some kind of synoptic chart a synoptic chart is a standard weather map showing high and low pressure areas in the atmosphere in areas of high pressure the winds rotate clockwise in low pressure areas anticlockwise knowing the ship's positions and their recorded wind directions Ken could calculate the weather throughout the entire campaign now for the first time this data can be combined with computer images to create a daily weather map for the Armada from the period after they entered the channel the luck seemed to favor the Spaniards a high pressure cell developed to the Northwest and in high pressure the winds circulate clockwise so that the wind would be from the West it also produces good weather and it stayed with them the rest of the week everything favored the Spanish they were in open sea with the wind behind them at anchor in Plymouth the English were a sitting Target yet when s Francis Drake was warned of the threat he is said famously to have shown more concern for his afternoon sport than for the approaching Spanish this was a dramatic moment this was the Spanish Fleet of 130 OD ships found in the western approaches just off the lizard Drake's response is one of cool calculated fmatic dismissal that there is plenty of time to deal with this enemy and finish the game of bulls whether it's absolutely correct we don't know but it works it's a piece of theater it's gone into the Armada Legend but why did Drake do nothing looking at the tide patterns for that July day Steve Hall an oceanographer reckons he simply had no choice it's possible to predict quite accurately what the state of the tide and the the current flow would be and we can see that if uh Drake had been wanting to finish his game of bows there wasn't really anything he could do until 8:30 9:00 in the evening anyway because of the state of the tide there was no way of getting those ships into the English Channel the English lay helpless but the Spanish made no attempt to strike their Commander the Duke of Medina Sedonia had orders to keep strictly to Philip's battle plan 18,000 Spaniards to shore in Plymouth would have been quite a headache for us fortunately the Spanish orders were so inflexible that this golden opportunity that the Juke of Medina might have taken advantage of was missed there for Spain an opportunity which the English seized as the tide turned up wind the Spanish were still confident but they were about to be confounded by the quickness of the English warships because the English ships were capable of sailing much closer to the wind than the Spanish thought to their horror the Spanish found them the English ships working their way behind them ahead of them around their Fleet and getting into tactically advantageous positions that they hadn't anticipated at all the Spanish ships couldn't compete they were solidly built but lacked the nimbleness of the English we have two images here one is generically English type of gallion and another is a reconstruction of the San Diego Spanish gallion just in looking at the two profiles you can see that the English Hull form is slightly more compact the castle structur is a little bit lower the Spanish gallion has a much longer forward raking stem a shorter Keel by comparison and a much more angular rake in the stern post and perhaps some of the differences that we see are part of the reason why the performance of the English ships in 1588 so surprised the Spanish the English had used the maneuverability of their ships to seize the advantage of wind and weather from the Spanish now they could dictate tactics the important thing about gaining the weather gauge or getting upwind of the enemy is it gives you total flexibility of maneuver you can either attack or pull away as you will those who are downwind really have to react to what you're doing they're not in a position to really do much about it that you can drop down from upwind on them it's very hard for them to claw their way back up to get at you it was the Spanish who were vulnerable now but they responded quickly they switched into the defensive Crescent formation used by their treasure fleets the Spaniards were very experienced at organizing defensive convoys they had been doing it for a long time and it was a good formation the English could really only attack the trailing Wings where the main Spanish warships were stationed uh they couldn't safely penetrate into the gap between because it would have been too easy for them to be trapped by Spanish ships the Spanish expected that any fighting would be at Close Quarters that was how sea battles had always been fought but the English had a new kind of warfare in mind they intended to sink the Spanish at long range what was new was that the English were carrying into action much heavier gun batteries than anybody had done before and the Spaniards were well aware of this and they were intensely concerned that they were going to find themselves facing a weight of gunfire which they couldn't possibly match and this was the weapon the Spanish feared most the long barreled Cannon known as the culverin or snake to the English it was a ship killer but would it prove the decisive factor in Sinking the Spanish C are characterized by having these long cender Barrels in relation to their caliber the caliber of this gun's about 5 1/2 in the reason for this long proportion is probably because they believed that you get the maximum benefit from the burning powder charge in the long barrel and it would probably fire quite accurately as well but it's a high velocity weapon I mean we we we're getting a very fast moving Cannonball going more or less straight where you aim it for the elizabethans it was a super weapon but how deadly was the calvarin Nick Hall is about to put this replica to the test on a modern firing range 16th century Gunnery was a black art with few scientific principles Gunners worked by trial and error and their knowledge of ballistics was limited but on paper the culverin appeared formidable with a range of over 600 yard at zero elevation okay distance is 307 M over Nick Hall and his colleagues are examining these claims using 21st century tools high-speed cameras and Doppler radar undercover gun ready stand by 5 4 3 2 1 fire the calin's opening shot is well over a quarter of a mile already close to the performance claimed by the Elizabethan Gunners did you get that um muzzle velocity no 48 m/s and the distance for the long range warm-up shot was 4778 M so 4778 m i mean that's good so that's almost horizontal isn't it and that's nearly the range that that born in 1587 is saying with 666 yards yeah what those early Gunners could not have dreamed of measuring was the speed of the Cannonball leaving the mule at over 400 m a second the 24lb iron shot is traveling at a the speed of sound the calvarin then has a powerful reach but how accurate is it we know that the Spanish feared above all the sharp shooting of the English Gunners Philip II briefed his commanders that the English would try to shoot low they would try to damag the Spanish hulls ideally uh just below the waterline so what do you think we are we're slightly left well I thought slightly right we're slightly right we it's time to try the Calver in against a Target just 10 ft square but the thickness of a ship's Hull the target is 150 M away the gun barrel dead level 3 2 1 fire but the Cannonball flies High on the negative side we missed the Target by an appreciable amount but we would have had a very good hit on the ship it was well within the bounds of the ship wasn't it m yes striped markers indicate the overall length of the imaginary ship but only a direct hit on the woodwork will produce real damage wooden gallions were surprisingly Hardy as the Elizabeth and Gunners soon found it was one one thing to hit the enemy but to sink them needed repeated shots on target accurate and consistent fire is a time when most sailers had no knowledge of maths or science our present day Gunners have different problems 21st century knoow ought to give them an edge but their mental arithmetic seems to confuse even them we reckon it was about 6t higher so we want to come down about 12T don't we four me m four M when it come down yeah yeah and what's that in 4 meters in Mills um 4,000 a mil sub 10s a meter at a th000 so at 100 it sub 10.1 of a mil I'm sure you're right the logic is clear enough if the shot is flying too high the gun must be lowered but the muzzle already below horizontal there 5 4 3 2 1 fire amazingly even with the gun pointing down the shot is still going skywards the experts agree to aim lower still the shot went straight over the top of the Target and I saw it impact in the ground at about 1,000 M so it's gone well over the top of the target so we actually need to lower the elevation quite considerably I think but in reality how much more would you depress a gun we probably want to come down almost um 100 Mil so we were looking at bringing it down about four or 5° with the do the radar I'll tell you whether it's hit respect is rising for the English Gunners of 400 years ago it's hard enough to aim the Calver in on dry land let alone on a pitching warship in full sale is this it that's it isn't it well that's perfectly in line look at it and suddenly recognition Dawns the reason that the shot is flying high is staring them in the face a Telltale track where it's ricocheted off the ground difference well maybe we just leave it where it is we're sure this happened from this firing and not one of the only ones hav this one belatedly the 21st century Gunners realize they've been aiming too low all along it's time to beat the retreat what we've done now is effectively raised the gun by 40 minutes so 40 minutes is about 10 ms so therefore theoretically we should raise it 1.5 M on the Target that would be 10 m um a kilometer so that would be 1 M they're averaging just one Cannon shot an hour with as yet no [Music] hits the Elizabethan Gunners managed exactly the same rate of fire but even after 6 days at Sea They too had made little impression on the enemy and such heavy longrange shooting had used precious powder and shot of course one of the big questions is why the English Fleet or the Royal Navy was so relatively ineffective it had the advantage of the weather gauge it had the advantage of the fast maneuverable ships he had the advantage of heavy artillery yet had to break off the attack cuz it was using up too much ammunition and it had had very little to show for itself it was round one to the Spanish and with English hopes crumbling the way was now open for the armad to follow through with its long planned invasion in Flanders the soldiers of the Duke of Palmer were waiting these were the crack troops that would lead the Spanish invasion of England all that was needed was the ships to get them there out in the channel the Armada had left their English pursuers trailing but a crucial flaw now appeared in the Spanish Invasion plans their command Commander Medina Sedonia discovered there was no Port large enough for him to take Palmer's Army on board Medina Sedonia was clearly extremely worried about what the outcome would be because he didn't really see how this vital linkup with the Duke of Palmer was actually going to take place he began to realize that total disaster was in the offing for 6 days the Spaniards had run the gauntlet of English Firepower in the channel now they had no choice but to heave two in Open Sea they were at anchor and vulnerable and the weather was turning the armad luck was beginning to run out they had had a good time coming up the channel as far as wind was concerned but as the day progressed they came under the influence of low pressure to the Northeast and that produced Northwest winds which got stronger all the time and it's now clear that it wasn't just the weather that was beginning to conspire against the Spanish it's a full moon we're going to have some very strong Tides with strong tidal flows and the Spanish wouldn't really be able to get out of certainly not information we're coming up to the evening we see it gets to 8 8:30 9:00 the tide changes strong Tides about 3 knots and so these ships would have been pinned against the coast at the mercy of the wind and the tide and the English the English had a plan a handful of ships would be sacrificed soaked in pitch and set Ablaze they would become weapons of Terror carried on the rising tide deep into the Spanish Fleet with their defensive shape broken the scattered Spanish troop ships made easy targets for the first time the English could now close on the enemy this is the point at which the English started firing in very close range and this is the point uh it's clear when Spanish ships are beginning to suffer serious damage and heavy casualties at long range the English guns have been ineffective now at Close Quarters they proved fearsome we are beginning to see I think enormous damage being inflicted on the Spanish ships their decks are being raped by run shot SES of splinters are sing through men anything with soft tissue is being cut down and severely damaged rigging structures of the boat are being smashed the Spanish actually are taking a terrible pounding at this stage and that hammering is getting worse getting more and more intense yet while the English were out shooting the Spaniards they still had difficulties sinking them Medina sidonia's Flagship was hit 200 times but kept sailing and the English powder and shot were almost spent they were firing in comparison with the Spaniards much more quickly much more effectively and causing real damage to the Spanish ships but it was relatively limited they just didn't have the ammunition stocks to keep up the continuous attrition which is necessary to physically disable or sink a wooden ship quite frankly we there was not enough Firepower going down to stop the Armada we could not put enough weight of fire into various vessels to slow them down otherwise we would have expected far higher casualty rate you want to go to slightly more elevation that's not a problem 7° um even at close range it seems the English still had a problem achieving the consistent and accurate fire that they needed so can our present day Gunners do any better just as their predecessors closed on the Armada they too are hauling in their target to just 50 m Drake would have approved 5 4 3 2 one fire fire fire five 4 3 2 1 fire oh I heard something what happened sh I saw the ball or was I thought actually with a bit of the target flying off oh God how that's impossible war is hell but this is worse firing at a fixed Target at Point Blank Range a fusel a of gunfire has brought just one tantalizing possible strike I wonder whether it just kissed the top which would give you a sound look I I'm right what look it's either the narrowest of Misses or a glancing hit Nick knows which theory he favors and it gave aong it was definitely a dong I'm not just clutching at straws but I'm convinced the sound was right yeah and I I think that bit of that bright piece of metal there on the front of that or the edge of that flange and the bit of muck on the that flange I and then it went off to the right was you know I was going to see a hole in the Target cuz I just saw the ball most of the target was hidden by smoke and I thought then as the smoke cleared I'd see a hole and obviously we didn't just a question you want me to no I'm not going to f there's only one way to prove it time to inspect the evidence close up did I get that against oh and then what is it I thought that was some nice gunpowder fouling that is from the fork LIF right grease from the forks I think I might have to retract how are you going to get down now I don't know 400 years ago the Elizabethan Gunners were also left high and dry they had put their faith in heavy guns like the calvarin but that hadn't been enough every generation has its new super weapon they all think it's going to work wonderfully they've all done trials when it comes to the real war somehow things are different well it was the same with their new heavy guns it didn't work as well as they thought it was going to and they were a long way from having worked out the most effective ways to use smooth B muzzle loading guns the Spanish were battered but unbroken the English in good order but desperate for ammunition no glorious Victory just a standoff it was essentially a draw neither had achieved what it wanted to achieve the Spaniards hadn't landed in in England but equally the English hadn't defeated the Spaniards the Armada was still in good order its disciplined formation was intact and it was still a very formidable Force the Duke of Medina Sedonia was in charge and Medina Sedonia was still determined to carry out the invasion plan what settled matters was not the English but the weather an onshore wind now threatened imminently to break the Armada against the Dutch Coast but just when catastrophe seemed certain the wind reversed direction and blew them back out to sea to the Spanish there was only one explanation divine intervention the Spanish thought this change of wind was a miracle but we can now see that a high pressure cell had developed and come in just at exactly the right moment for them produced Southwest wind and that enabled them to escape into the North North Sea but once in the North Sea and with the wind behind them there could be no going back for the Armada their Invasion plans were put on hold now Medina sidonia's priority was to get his Armada safely home to Spain and there was only one way to do it the long way round this is the route that he set for his Fleet taking them north of Scotland and far out into the Atlantic attic before heading south and homewards he was well aware of the [Music] dangers they were to make as much Seaway into the Atlantic as they could so that they get a safe run Southward to Spain because the great danger was to be caught by the prevailing Westerly winds and dashed on the wild Atlantic coasts of Scotland and Ireland and he took particular care to say take great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland for fear of the harm that might happen to you upon that Coast orders from Medina Sedonia were not to be taken lightly he was a disciplinarian who had already executed one Armada Captain for breaking formation but despite his orders to stay clear of Island within weeks 3,000 of his men would end up dead on its short was no one has ever questioned how that came to be but now we can reveal new evidence that the Spanish were victims of a natural phenomenon one which made it impossible to follow their Commander orders blooded but unbeaten the Spanish Armada was heading homewards forced by the weather to take the long Northern passage out into the Atlantic Medina Sedonia had given particular particular orders to stay clear of Ireland's dangerous Coast so how did a third of his Fleet end up Shipwrecked there to search for Clues Ken Douglas has gone back to the ship's logs of the Armada they revealed the disqui of one man in particular a senior officer called Marcos de aramburu aramburu was an experienced and professional seaf farer and he left a detailed account of how despite all his efforts to steer out into the Atlantic he still ended up on the Irish [Music] Coast this is Medina Sedonia ceiling instructions as we've seen Marcus de aruru kept a careful log of his positions and on certain dates he estimated how far west he had got and on the 9th of September he was at 54° North he estimated he was 360 Mi west of Ireland but on the 11th of September after just two days sailing he was on the Irish Coast it would have been impossible for him to sail that distance in two days the implications obvious he was never as far west as he thought he was so he could never have been out there so how had aramburu ended up on the coast working back painstakingly from his landfall Ken Douglas discovered that he had in fact been steering an erratic course 300 M further east than he thought he record soundings on the seabed which would have been impossible in the deep ocean he said it's a colossal error of navigation what could have brought the Spanish to make it the missing factor in my view is the North Atlantic drift the Gulf Stream they didn't know it existed they were navigating by dead reckoning so that as they thought they were making Headway westwards they were in fact losing about 25 mil a day by not knowing to deduct their allance for the North Atlantic drift the Gulf Stream is one of the world's most powerful currents rising in the Gulf of Mexico at its peak it's five times stronger than all the world's Rivers combined even after reaching the British Isles its energy remains formidable and to the unwary [Music] unpredictable I don't think that the Spanish would have had any concept that this current continued anything like as far north as it does they they might have been familiar with parts of this current further across the Atlantic from their voyages between Spain and the Americas but it's is most unlikely that they would have had any knowledge that this current carried this far north or retained this much strength at these latitudes how might the Gulf Stream have affected the Armada for 10 full days in late August bad weather blocked any progress southwards instead as aramburu record shows the Spanish tried to head out into the Atlantic but with the Gulf Stream against them any impression that they were making Headway could well have been an illusion when the wind finally turned turned on September the 3rd they clearly felt confident that they could steer safely home to Spain but if in fact they were further east that fatal turn would bring them directly onto the coasts they had been trying to [Music] avoid Ken's theory is new no Armada history has ever questioned the spaniard's navigation but how plausible is it the only way to find out is to put it to the test Roger Proctor is an expert on ocean currents so we have to think about how fast the ship can actually sail into a current like this with the fact also that there is wind and wave activity his computer model is more often used for tracking oil spills or drifting mines than 16th century warships and whether or not the ship can actually sail into that kind kind of and it would be losing ground and it would be losing ground so it could actually be going backwards instead of going forwards as it thought it was yes but by combining the observations of aramburu with what we now know of weather and sea conditions it may be possible to recreate the armada's true course in September 1588 well we've pretty well factored in most of these things now so we have some idea of the the currents due to the winds we have some idea of the Winds themselves the winds Direct and and we have some idea that the ship was sailing at the time it's not straightforward in these Northern Waters the Gulf Stream is constricted and flows at only half a knot wind speed and ocean depths also affected you know with a 20 knot wind if that could add an extra point4 of a knot to the the current against the the ship I mean one of the factors we have to be thoughtful about is the North Atlantic current is actually quite a narrow feature so the positioning here is quite [Music] critical the first run through isn't promising it seems that aramburu could have cleared Ireland easily the wind turns around and enables him to sail at a a good speed down across the Rocko bank then miss his Island completely this assumes that the ship is actually fairly efficient in its sailing but this track is based on a First Rate sailing ship handling well to reproduce the performance of the Spanish vessels they will need to adjust the profile of the computer model saely that's right so there could well be other Ships coming in drifted East and they would be the ones that come down on the arish coast they could be as we know the Spanish ships did not sail well Against the Wind so it's really down to the efficiency that the ship can sail uh yeah when it's trying to batter through its way through stormy conditions really many ships also had structural damage and their Crews were exhausted by the by the time these guys got this far west they'd have been pretty much Starving in a pretty sorry State weren't they yes their efficiency would have dropped off a lot yeah to reproduce the likely sailing qualities of aramburu ship Roger makes one final adjustment then 400 years on the Spanish once again struggle against the Gulf Stream as they head for home in this calculation here then U we we're really assuming the captain is having difficulty sailing into the wind at all he can't can't make seems to be heading for Ireland well it's Hing du out at the moment in the August 20th before [Music] that it's quite [Music] surprising let not away yeah I could agree with that the effect of the current is slight but Insidious and over a period of time deadly in the grip of the Gulf Stream aramburu turns as he thinks for [Music] Spain and despite A desperate struggle to avoid it he is thrown onto a hostile [Music] Shore just brings it alive I'm trying to work it out in my imagination and there it is in real life and you have to feel sorry for the the crews who had already experienced a tremendous amount of privation they had suffered battle damage and they suffered heavy weather damage and here they were out in Seas as they said themselves almost unknown to them and the fact is they didn't know where they were they must have felt completely lost in a matter of days some 40 Spanish ships appeared on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland and once on on the shoreline they had tried so hard to avoid many found it impossible to get off again they were pounded to Pieces by storms to this day no one knows how many were lost but almost half the ships that had sailed from Spain so proudly never [Music] returned God blew and they were scattered reach the medal commemorating England's Deliverance Elizabeth like Phillip put her faith in God not man but the Armada was not sunk by the weather alone and certainly not by English gunfire those who died were victims of a colossal error of navigation and of a natural phenomenon whose existence they never even suspected [Music] all

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Keywords: our history, documentary, world history documentary, documentary channel, award winning, life stories, best documentaries, daily life, real world, point of view, story, full documentary, history, historical, history documentary, spanish armada, armada, naval history, british history, spanish history, irish history, scottish history, sir frances drake, queen elizabeth II, Queen elizabeth I

Id: 4sl0PGk4jsE

Length: 43min 15sec (2595 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024