Who actually led the broken fleet on the last leg of its voyage, we shall never know. Captain Marolín de Juan should have done so, but that veteran seaman and skilled navigator had been unintentionally left behind at Dunkirk. There were four pilots aboard the San Martín, one of them an Englishman. Three died at sea. It must have been the fourth who brought the flagship staggering past Corunna before a westerly gale, and conned her to her landfall off Santander. We do not know his name.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 832