But from the poop-deck of his flagship the pilot who stood beside him could see something that would, the look and colour of very shoal water too close under his lee, stretching north-eastward as far as the eye could see, with here and there the black tooth of a rock showing. Francis Drake and John Hawkins would have known all about the Owers, and if they could have held the Spaniards’ interest and kept nudging them northward they would have had the whole Armada on the rocks in another twenty minutes.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 700