The bitter lesson for the English was that, in the face of Spanish discipline, their chosen tactics were not working. They had not expected to sink many of the Spanish fleet at the first encounter, or the second, but they had expected to cripple the galleons one by one so that they would have to drop out of formation and be overwhelmed. So far they had taken only two Spanish ships, the Rosario and the sinking hulk of the San Salvador, and, although the English may have thought their gunfire a contributory cause, both of these had been crippled by accidents.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 674