Miguel de Horna was nobody's idea of a knight-errant. He commanded the Armada of Flanders - the Spanish naval squadron operating out of Dunkirk - and his job was practical, not romantic: hunt Dutch shipping, raid the herring fleets, and bring prize cargoes back to a king who needed every ducat. On 18 February 1637 his five ships and two frigates fell on an Anglo-Dutch merchant convoy of 44 vessels off the southernmost point of England, the toe of the Lizard Peninsula. By the time the smoke cleared and the winter night came down, twenty ships were lost to the Dutch and Horna was sailing for Dunkirk with seventeen prizes loaded with ammunition and stores. It was, in the brutal accounting of the Eighty Years' War, one of the better days the Dunkirkers ever had.
Dunkirk in the 1630s was a problem the Dutch had not solved. Held by the Spanish Habsburgs, the port sat right on the flank of the Dutch Republic, and from it sailed a permanent squadron of fast, lightly-armed warships and privateers whose business was Dutch trade. The Armada of Flanders did not fight set-piece fleet actions if it could help it. It worked like a wolf pack - intercepted convoys, picked off the herring busses that fed Amsterdam, raided the Bordeaux wine ships and the Baltic timber traders, and ran for home before the Dutch lieutenant-admiral could close the door. The previous commander, the Flemish admiral Jacob Collaert, had been undone by exactly that strategy: caught off Dieppe in early 1636 by five Dutch warships under Captain Johan Evertsen, his galleon sunk, captured with 200 men. He was exchanged but never recovered, and died of illness at A Coruña in August 1637.
Horna sailed from Dunkirk on 18 February with his five ships and two frigates and a roster of captains drawn from across the polyglot Spanish empire - the Basque Antonio de Anciondo, the Flemings Marcus van Oben and Cornelis Meyne, the Castilians Antonio Diaz and Salvador Rodriguez. The convoy he found off the Lizard was richer than usual: 44 merchant ships carrying ammunition and stores, escorted by six warships of the Dutch States Navy. The merchants opened fire with what cannon they had to support their escorts, but Horna's squadron pressed in and sank three of the six warships. The remaining two struck their colours. As night fell, the merchant ships scattered into the dark and the gunsmoke, each trying to slip home alone. Fourteen of them were run down and taken before the morning.
Horna ran for Dunkirk with three captured warships and fourteen captured merchantmen, all of them loaded with the supplies that Dutch armies and Dutch cities required to keep fighting. The Dutch lieutenant-admiral Philips van Dorp was at sea with twenty warships, dispatched to intercept, and he missed Horna entirely. Dorp then tried to blockade Dunkirk and was equally unable to keep the Spaniards penned in. By July, Horna was loose again, ambushing two Bordeaux convoys and carrying off twelve prizes that included a hundred and twenty-five cavalry horses bound for service. He took the Venice-to-Amsterdam convoy. He took fourteen ships of the Dutch East India Company. He took eight that were carrying diplomatic gifts to Louis XIII of France. The year was, by Spanish naval standards, an annus mirabilis.
The Lizard Point is the southernmost cape of mainland Britain, a wedge of serpentine and hornblende schist running out into the western entrance of the English Channel. Every ship sailing between northern Europe and the Atlantic - from Amsterdam to Cadiz, from London to Lisbon - passed this corner. The Dunkirkers knew it. The Dutch knew it. Storms drove convoys against the coast, fog obscured pursuit, and the long beat from the Channel out into the western ocean offered hours in which a fast squadron could close from windward. In 1707 the same waters would see another Battle off Lizard Point, this one between French and Anglo-Dutch fleets and ending the other way around. Horna himself returned for a second exploit on exactly the same date two years later - 18 February 1639 - and saved a Spanish convoy from a Dutch fleet of seventeen ships despite being outnumbered. He understood the geography. He had been making his living on it.
The battle was fought offshore from Lizard Point (49.96 N, 5.20 W), the southernmost tip of mainland Britain, in waters that funnel all Channel traffic toward the western approaches. The Lizard lighthouse and the coastguard station stand on the headland. Newquay (EGHQ) is 32 nm to the north; Land's End (EGHC) is 28 nm to the west. From 2,500 feet the wedge of the Lizard Peninsula is unmistakable - serpentine cliffs in cliffs the colour of dark green and slate-grey, the white spray of Manacles reef visible to the east when seas are running. Below your wingtip is the densest concentration of historic shipwrecks in British waters; more than 150 nineteenth-century wrecks alone lie off the surrounding coast. Channel weather is volatile - expect fog, squalls, and shifting visibility, especially from late autumn through early spring.