Battle of Flores

The Battle of Flores, fought August 30–31, 1591, between Spain and England off Flores Island in the Azores, was a Spanish victory, showing the resurgence of Spain’s naval power after the debacle of the 1588 armada. For the English, the heroic fight put up by Richard Grenville’s Revenge became a national legend, commemorated in Tennyson’s poem “The Revenge.”

The Azores were a favorite theater for English raids in the decade before and for several years after the defeat of the armada, with captains such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh regularly preying on Spanish and Portuguese shipping. Now, led by Thomas Howard, an English squadron of 16 ships sailed to the Azores in the mid-Atlantic, hoping to intercept the annual Spanish treasure fleet laden with silver and gold from the Americas. For months they waited for the treasure ships in vain, their crews progressively depleted by disease. Meanwhile, Spain organized a powerful fleet numbering 53 ships under the command of Admiral Alonso de Bazán to attack Howard’s squadron.

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The English, many of them still ill with fever, were taking on water at Ponta Delgada on Flores Island, the westernmost of the Azores, when the Spanish arrived on August 30. Although Bazán tried to trap them with a pincer movement, all of the English ships slipped away except one. Lagging behind, Grenville’s Revenge was rammed by a Spanish galleon and surrounded by enemy warships. Grenville was a fighting man with a fearsome reputation, and his ship was credited as the finest galleon in the English navy, having served as Drake’s flagship during the fight with the armada. Grenville fought off Spanish boarding parties and kept his men firing, taking on five enemy ships simultaneously and succeeding in sinking one of them. The battle lasted fifteen hours. On the morning of August 31, with further resistance impossible, Grenville gave the order to blow up his shattered ship rather than surrender. His crew refused to obey. Gravely wounded, Grenville had the chagrin of seeing his ship taken over by the Spanish before he died of his injuries two days later. Bazán’s flotilla rendezvoused with the treasure fleet a week later, and the combined fleet of some 140 ships sailed to Spain. They never succeeded in taking Revenge home as a prize, however; the ship sank in an Atlantic storm near the island of Terceira en route, with all of its Spanish crew and their English prisoners perishing.

The following year Drake returned with a small fleet, its command later assumed by Martin Frobisher, that seized a Portuguese treasure ship and damaged but did not sink several other Spanish and Portuguese vessels off Flores. English warships would continue to harass shipping off the Azores until England and Spain signed a peace treaty in 1604.

Losses: English, 1 ship captured; Spanish, 1 ship sunk.