I've been reading a very dreary, imperfect and badly edited biography of Sir Walter Raleigh--the most recent one, by Raleigh Trevelyan--and came across a reference to the fight of Raleigh's ship Revenge with the Spanish fleet at Flores in the Azores in 1591. The battle is famous--perhaps the best known "against all odds" story in English history--and was documented by Raleigh in what is probably the first printed piece of popular propaganda in English history; but I was totally unaware of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's much later poem on the subject. In a strange way, the poem drives home Raleigh's point better than he did himself.
It seems strange to me that our tour guide didn't mention this incident (although he stressed the defeat of the Armada 3 years before), because this incident--especially as decorated by Raleigh and interpreted by Tennyson--graphically explains the attitude of many Englishmen towards the Spanish. That attitude will come to the fore when reach the 1620s.
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