It concerned the inventor of the hellburners of Antwerp, the most terrible weapons ever used by men in war, fire-ships which were actually enormous bombs capable of killing more men in one blast than might fall in a great battle, and of strewing a circle more than a mile across with a litter of flaming wreckage. The designer of these infernal machines, the Italian engineer Giambelli, was said to be now in England, working for Queen Elizabeth. And so he was indeed. At the moment he was harmlessly occupied with a somewhat impractical boom, meant to close the Thames at Gravesend. The only effective weapon he lent the English for the Armada campaign was the terror of his name. It was enough.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 729