Volume 36, Number 2 · February 16, 1989
1588 and All That
By J.R. Hale
The Spanish Armada
by Colin Martin, by Geoffrey Parker
Norton, 296 pp., $27.50
The Armada
by Garrett Mattingly
Houghton Mifflin, 443 pp., $29.95
Armada: A celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588–1988
by Peter Padfield
Naval Institute Press, 208 pp., $24.95
Armada: 1588–1988, An International Exhibition to Commemorate the Spanish Armada: The Official Catalogue (Greenwich)
edited by M.J. Rodríguez-Salgado. the staff of the National Maritime Museum
London: Penguin Books in association with the National Maritime Museum, 295 pp., £12.95 (paper)
The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588
by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Oxford University Press, 300 pp., $24.95
The Enterprise of England: The Spanish Armada
by Roger Whiting
St. Martin's, 248 pp., $29.95
Most of the great naval events that excited the imagination of contemporaries and have retained their hold were battles named after a nearby landfall or a stretch of water: Lepanto, Quiberon Bay, Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway. 'Armada' simply means battle fleet. The Spanish Armada, or, simply, Armada, refers not to an event but to a story. It has a beginning, the sailing from Lisbon (Portugal was then under Spanish rule) on May 30, 1588, of one of the largest long-distance expeditionary forces that had ever sailed; a middle, the armed encounter with the English fleet in the Channel and the North Sea from July 30 to August 9; and an end, a horrific one, as the weather took over from the adversary, until the survivors of storm and privation returned from the long swing around Scotland and out into the Atlantic during late September. The flagship reached Spain on the twenty-first, trussed with hawsers to keep her from splitting apart.
Review, 3763 words
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