The English believed, and so did the Spanish, that a fleet with a marked advantage in long-range weapons, culverins and demi culverins, could lie off at extreme range or nearly, and knock the enemy fleet to pieces without danger to itself. It turned out not to be so. At ranges of three to seven hundred yards a sixteenth-century culverin or demi-culverin might fail altogether to pierce the thick hull of a galleon or stout greatship, and when it did would only make a small hole quickly caulked by an alert crew.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 709