A Welsh galley slave claimed to have captured four Spanish galleys single-handedly.

Evidence

The fourth, the Diana, which had parted earliest, stranded trying to get into Bayonne. Her crew, even her galley slaves, and her guns were saved, but the hull had to be broken up. Among the galley slaves was an imaginative Welshman, David Gwynn, whose tale of how he freed his fellow slaves on the Diana, exterminated her Spanish crew and then successively captured the other three galleys, enjoys a celebrity which no amount of refutation has much dimmed. — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 608

Categorization

• FICTION: David Gwynn’s tall tale of freeing the Diana’s slaves is a striking character anecdote for the narrative.
• QUESTION: What is the actual historical record of the four galleys’ fate, stripped of Gwynn’s embellishment?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 608