Sixteenth-century ships’ guns were hard to aim and uncertain to fire and, of course, errors that would have made no difference at fifty yards meant a complete miss at five hundred, but with decent training the gun-crews on both sides should have been able to do a great deal better. Most of the trained gunners in the Armada had never fired a gun from a ship’s deck

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 710