For two hours the struggle lasted. As fast as the defenders threw down
the fire, the English piled it up again; and in the midst of the smoke
and the bullets the admiral toiled like a common seaman, with his arms
full of fagots and his face black with soot. How long his obstinacy
would have continued it is impossible to say, but at the end of the two
hours the Spanish commandant sank under his wounds and the garrison
surrendered. Daunted by a feat which every one regarded as little short
of a miracle, the castle and monastery of St. Vincent, together with
another fort near it, capitulated at the magician's first summons, and
left him in complete possession of the anchorage to water the fleet
undisturbed.
Having fired the captured strongholds, and tumbled their guns over the
cliffs into the sea, Drake returned to the fleet to find the sailors had
not been idle. Between St. Vincent and a village some nine miles to the
eastward which they had been ordered to burn, they had taken forty-seven
barks and caravels laden with stores for the Armada, and destroyed
between fifty and sixty fishing-boats with miles of nets. The
tunny-fishery, on which the whole of the adjacent country chiefly
depended for its subsistence, was annihilated. For the time Drake's work
on the Algarve coast was done, and, having watered the fleet and fished
up the captured guns, he sailed for Lisbon.
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