Armada. They were a purely English device, and were taken by Richard
Hawkins upon his voyage to the South Sea in 1593. He highly commends
them, but nevertheless they appear to have fallen out of fashion, and
no trace of their use in Jacobean times has been found.[6]

A still more suggestive indication exists in the heading which is
prefixed to Gorges's Appendix. It runs as follows:--'A form of orders
and directions to be given by an admiral in conducting a fleet through
the Narrow Seas for the better keeping together or relieving one
another upon any occasion of distress or separation by weather or by
giving chase. For the understanding whereof suppose that a fleet of
his majesty's consisting of twenty or thirty sail were bound for
serving on the west part of Ireland, as Kinsale haven for example.'
The words 'his majesty' show the Appendix was penned under James I;
but why did Gorges select this curious example for explaining his
orders? We can only remember that it was exactly upon such an occasion
that he had served with his father in 1578. There is therefore at
least a possibility that the orders in question may be a copy or an
adaptation of some which Sir William Gorges had issued ten years
before the Armada. Certainly no situation had arisen since Elizabeth's
death to put such an idea into the writer's head, and the points of
rendezvous mentioned in Gorges's first article are exactly those which
Sir William would naturally have given.

On evidence so inconclusive no certainty can be attained. All we can
say is that Gorges's Appendix points to a possibility that Ralegh's
remarkable twenty-ninth article may have been as old as the middle of
Elizabeth's reign, and that the reason why it has not survived in the
writings of any of the great Elizabethan admirals is either that the
tactics it enjoins were regarded as a secret of the seamen's 'mystery'