The King never seemed to imagine that Farnese, with 40,000 or 50,000 soldiers in the Netherlands, a fleet of 300 transports, and power to dispose of very large funds for one great purpose, could be kept in prison by a fleet of Dutch skippers and corsairs.
With as much sluggishness as might have been expected from their clumsy architecture, the ships of the Armada consumed nearly three weeks in sailing from Lisbon to the neighbourhood of Cape Finisterre.

Here they were overtaken by a tempest, and were scattered hither and thither, almost at the mercy of the winds and waves; for those unwieldy hulks were ill adapted to a tempest in the Bay of Biscay.

There were those in the Armada, however, to whom the storm was a blessing.

David Gwynn, a Welsh mariner, had sat in the Spanish hulks a wretched galley-slave--as prisoner of war for more than eleven years, hoping, year after year, for a chance of escape from bondage.

He sat now among the rowers of the great galley, the Trasana, one of the humblest instruments by which the subjugation of his native land to Spain and Rome was to be effected.
Very naturally, among the ships which suffered most in the gale were the four huge unwieldy galleys--a squadron of four under Don Diego de Medrado--with their enormous turrets at stem and stern, and their low and open waists.