"Roughly one hundred and thirty ships and thirty thousand men made up the armada, dispatched by a royal fanatic who thought that ""he could organize a huge operation of war without leaving his study."

In 1884 a Spanish naval captian, Cesareo Fernandez Duro published one hundred and eighty-nine letters of documents of the sixteenth century which he discovered in the royal archives. Between them they told a story of how and why the Spanish Armada made its voyage...." This book is based on that information along with some more contemporary records.