The Portuguese Armada

5 Key excerpts on "The Portuguese Armada"

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  Media and the Portuguese Empire

  • José Luís Garcia, Chandrika Kaul, Filipa Subtil, Alexandra Santos, José Luís Garcia, Chandrika Kaul, Filipa Subtil, Alexandra Santos(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  A PORTUGUESE EMPIRE IN THE SEAS OF ASIA While other European countries—France, Great Britain, Holland, Germany, Belgium, Spain—had empires, it is important to note that the Portuguese empire provided continuity with an earlier ‘seaborne empire’, the origins of which go back to the Renaissance. 5 Historians see the mili- tary expedition to Ceuta in 1415, which led to the seizure and occupa- tion of that North African town, as the starting point of that series of initiatives which together would lead, long-term, to Portugal becoming an established maritime power with military and commercial capability in vast areas of the globe. 6 Efforts to understand how a small and relatively weak body politic achieved this focus on a variety of motives, both inter- nal and external, in which ideological, economic, military, social and reli- gious components were all involved. 7 The drive to expansion, first made manifest in the military conquest of various cities in the kingdom of Fez, led over the course of the fifteenth century to the discovery, settlement and economic exploitation of several Atlantic islands (the archipelagos of Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde, S. Tomé and Príncipe, the islands of Fernando Pó and St Helena), as well as to the founding of trading posts along the African coast, in the regions of Senegambia, the Gulf of Guinea and the Congo. 8 The arrivals of Portuguese navigators in India in 1498, under the command of Vasco da Gama, and in Brazil in 1500, under Pedro Álvares Cabral, were also major events. This dual undertaking was the result of the ongoing commitment, over nearly a century, first of Prince Henry (‘the Navigator’), and later of Kings Afonso V and D. João II, to push- ing the caravelas—ships suited to navigating the oceans—ever further south, in the hope of finding the passage from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. 9 It was a coherent plan, over almost a century, to reach India.

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  Portugal in European and World History

  • Malyn Newitt(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  Philip had ordered Santa Cruz’s fleet to be overhauled and ready to sail by the end of October 1587 and to speed matters along had agreed to pay the costs of repair to the Portuguese galleons from the Castilian treasury. However, throughout the autumn the shortage of seamen, anchors, artillery and especially money meant that the preparations could not be completed. In February 1588 Santa Cruz himself fell victim to the typhoid epidemic and died, unmourned by the Portuguese, to whom he had appeared cruel and arrogant. In March the Duke of Medina Sidonia was appointed to succeed Santa Cruz, his apparent reluctance to take command probably being a manoeuvre to extort more time and resources from an increasingly anxious king. Meanwhile soldiers were recruited from Portugal to add to the complement in the ships.

  At the heart of the fleet that gradually assembled in Lisbon in 1587 and 1588 were the royal galleons of Portugal. Indeed as Augusto Salgado, the latest Portuguese historian of the Armada, has pointed out, it is impossible to imagine the Armada of 1588 being viable without the Portuguese contribution. The Crown of Portugal supplied nine galleons, the largest being the São João (700 tonnes), two zavras and four royal galleys, as well as a large number of smaller caravels and supply boats. The flagship of the Armada was the now veteran São Martinho , which had accompanied Dom Sebastiao to Morocco and had already served three times as the flagship of Spanish armadas in the Atlantic.

  The felicissima armada eventually sailed from Lisbon at the end of May 1588.

  The story of the Armada does not need to be told again. The tight organization of the fleet prevented the English ships (which probably exceeded those of the Armada in total numbers and firepower) doing any serious damage until the fleet reached the Low Countries, where it found that Parma’s army was not ready. Then, having been forced out of its anchorage by fireships and scattered by a storm, Medina Sidonia gave the orders for the fleet to return around the north of Scotland and the west of Ireland. On this journey twenty-one ships were lost but the majority (one estimate says five out of six) of the ships of the Armada returned safely, though hardly gloriously, to the Iberian peninsula. Six of the nine royal galleons of Portugal returned including the São Martinho which had borne much of the battle. Most of the ships took refuge in Santander and Corunna where next year the São João

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  Empire Imagined

  The Personality of American Power, Volume One

  • Giselle Frances Donnelly(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Gran Armada has been often and, occasionally, well told. The sailing and sighting of the “Invincible Armada,” the initial skirmishes, the employment of “fireships” and the battle off Gravelines in Flanders, the fortuitous blowing of the “Protestant wind” that scattered the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s disorganized fleet, and its later wrecks off the coasts of Ireland are all central components in the making of Elizabethan myth. Less well remembered is the effectiveness of the Dutch in bottling up Parma’s army and its barges. But perhaps the most strategically revealing moments of the encounter came in the aftermath, in the Portugal expedition that followed.

  Figure 4.1. Theater of Maritime Operations, 1588–1589.

  THE ENGLISH ARMADA

  On August 9, 1588, the day after the clash off Gravelines, Lord Burghley had written to Walsingham that he was “not of the opinion that the Spanish fleet will suddenly return from the north or the east, being weakened as they are, and knowing that our navy is returned to our coast where they may repair their lacks and be strong as before.”14 It took an additional two weeks to confirm that the Spanish fleet had sailed northwards past the Orkneys and thus past the point of no return where they must loop entirely around Scotland and Ireland to sail for home. With the immediate danger of invasion also past, at the end of August 1588 Elizabeth summoned her closest councilors to ponder her next move. For all the rejoicing over the defeat of the Spanish, no one expected that it was a decisive moment; Philip would come again. Now was the time to mount a counteroffensive to exploit what surely would be a fleeting moment of Spanish weakness. The first impulse was to try to intercept the American treasure fleet, but the English fleet was in no condition for that, according to the reports of Charles Howard, the Earl of Nottingham and lord admiral, and Francis Drake. Nonetheless, some countering blow had to be readied, the initiative seized, and the naval victory exploited. Sir John Norris was also brought in to consult on land-force matters.

  What would become the Portugal expedition of 1589—“the English Armada” to Spanish historians15 —is, like the Northern Rebellion two decades previously, a little-studied but greatly revealing story of British strategy-making. It was also a textbook example of the ineradicable “maritime” or “blue-water” element that emphasized naval power and colonial commerce and sought to avoid entanglement in continental European affairs in British strategic culture and the improvised, “public-private” method of generating military forces that betrayed the weakness of the Elizabethan state. By mid-September 1588, it was agreed that the survivors of the wreck of the Gran Armada were likely to return to Spain and Portugal for refitting and that a raid of the sort that Drake specialized in would forestall the building of a new Spanish fleet. Burghley made note of a September 20 meeting to decide objectives: “(1) to attempt to burn the ships in Lisbon and Seville; (2) to take Lisbon; (3) to take [the Azores, the way station for the treasure fleet].”16

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  Chinese and Indian Warfare - From the Classical Age to 1870

  • Kaushik Roy, Peter Lorge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 Indo-Portuguese naval battles in the Indian Ocean during the early sixteenth century K.S. Mathew DOI: 10.4324/9781315742762-9

  The discovery of the direct sea-route connecting the Indian Ocean regions with the Atlantic ports by Vasco da Gama, the undaunted admiral of the Indian Ocean, and the subsequent establishment of Portuguese factories and fortresses on the coastal regions of the subcontinent of India are considered important milestones in world history. The sixteenth century witnessed a significant encounter between the West and the East in the socio-economic realms. The Westerners observed with great interest whatever they came across in the East and reduced to writing most of the interesting aspects of life in the East to which probably an Indian observer paid only scant attention. The rich corpus of information available in the Portuguese archives and libraries throws considerable light on the naval activities of Indians and especially the Indian encounters with the Portuguese. The present study is an attempt to highlight some of the aspects of the Indo-Portuguese naval battles during the early decades of the sixteenth century. Contemporary European as well as ‘native’ sources are made use of in the preparation of this chapter. This period is chosen chiefly for the sake of brevity and also because of the fact that the Portuguese during this point of time had confrontations with the Indians on the eastern as well as on the western coasts of India and by this time they had established a sort of naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean regions.

  Indian ships were found in the far-flung regions of the Indian Ocean before the arrival of the indefatigable mariners of Portugal. When Vasco da Gama reached the East African coast, there were Indian merchants in Moçambique, presumably Gujaratis, selling cloths, cloves, pepper, ginger, pearls, silver rings and rubies, most of which was taken to the East African coast by vessels from India. Huge vessels sewn with coir and propelled with the help of veils made of palm trees, owned by Indian merchants used to leave for Soffala.1

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  Tudor England and its Neighbours

  • Glenn Richardson, Susan Doran(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Yet although the Armada sustained great damage, so far only six major vessels had been lost. Much worse was to come on the way home, for more than thirty ships, already weakened by English artillery, went down off the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland in severe summer storms. Nevertheless, as the experienced admiral of the Biscayan squadron observed in his campaign journal, the whole venture was lost at the moment in August when they were forced away from the banks of Flanders and prevented from linking up with Parma. 35 This was not luck, or a draw, but an outstanding English naval victory. A FTER THE A RMADA The years that followed, including the failure of the incoherent English counter-attack, the ‘Portugal expedition’ of 1589, are usually seen as a dreary aftermath leading to the treaty of London in 1604. Again, this view wrongly assumes that conflict between England and Spain was bilateral. In fact Elizabeth was faced with the opening of two new major theatres of war, in France and Ireland. She had little choice but to commit her forces to both, to fight off threats less dramatic than the Armada but almost equally menacing. In August 1589, the assassination of Henry III led Philip II to intervene directly in France, instead of merely funding the Catholic League. Spanish control of the French coastline posed an intol-erable threat, quite apart from the strong feelings of solidarity felt by many English Protestants for their Huguenot brethren. For five years English troops and English money supported the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, whose accession to the French throne was determinedly con-tested by Spain. The burdens were heavy, since out of an annual royal revenue of around £300,000, the campaigns in Brittany, Normandy and Picardy cost around £290,000 – nearly one fifth of the queen’s total income during the years of her involvement in France.

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