him, admits that our fleet was more plentifully supplied than the Armada, in which, he says, ’the supply of cartridges was singularly small.  The King [Philip the Second] probably considered that a single action would decide the struggle; and it amounted to but fifty rounds for each gun.’  Our own supply therefore exceeded fifty rounds.  In his life of Vice-Admiral Lord Lyons,[76] Sir S. Eardley Wilmot tells us that the British ships which attacked the Sebastopol forts in October 1854 ’could only afford to expend seventy rounds per gun.’  At the close of the nineteenth century, the regulated allowance for guns mounted on the broadside was eighty-five rounds each.  Consequently, the Elizabethan allowance was nearly, if not quite, as much as that which our authorities, after an experience of naval warfare during three centuries, thought sufficient.  ‘The full explanation,’ says Professor Laughton, ’of the want [of ammunition] seems to lie in the rapidity of fire which has already been mentioned.  The ships had the usual quantity on board; but the expenditure was more, very many times more, than anyone could have conceived.’  Mr. Julian Corbett considers it doubtful if the ammunition, in at least one division of the fleet, was nearly exhausted.

[Footnote 75:  TheSpanish_War_, 1585-87 (Navy Records Society), 1898, p. 323.]

[Footnote 76:  London, 1898, p. 236.]

Exhaustion of the supply of ammunition in a single action is a common naval occurrence.  The not very decisive character of the battle of Malaga between Sir George Rooke and the Count of Toulouse in 1704 was attributed to insufficiency of ammunition, the supply in our ships having been depleted by what ‘Mediterranean’ Byng, afterwards Lord Torrington, calls the ‘furious fire’ opened on Gibraltar.  The Rev. Thomas Pocock, Chaplain of the Ranelagh, Byng’s flag-ship at Malaga, says:[77] ’Many of our ships went out of the line for want of ammunition.’  Byng’s own opinion, as stated by the compiler of his memoirs, was, that ’it may without great vanity be said that the English had gained a greater victory if they had been supplied with ammunition as they ought to have been.’  I myself heard the late Lord Alcester speak of the anxiety that had been caused him by the state of his ships’ magazines after the attack on the Alexandria forts in 1882.  At a still later date, Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay interrupted his attack on the Spanish squadron to ascertain how much ammunition his ships had left.  The carrying capacity of ships being limited, rapid gun-fire in battle invariably brings with it the risk of running short of ammunition.  It did this in the nineteenth century just as much as, probably even more than, it did in the sixteenth.

[Footnote 77:  In his journal (p. 197), printed as an Appendix to Memoirsrelating_to_the_Lord_Torrington_, edited by J. K. Laughton for the Camden Society, 1889.]