Eight fireships advanced in a perfect line with all sails set and rigging afire.

Evidence

Then lights appeared at the edge of the English fleet. Not lights, fires; two, six, eight of them moving forward rapidly and growing in brilliance until the watchers at the Spanish anchorage could see plainly eight tall ships with all sails set and lines of fire beginning to run up their rigging, driving straight towards them with wind and tide. The fire-ships seemed to maintain a perfect line, and to keep so close together that two pikemen on adjacent ships, if men could have lived on those blazing decks, could have leaned out and clashed their pike-heads above the intervening water. — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 731

Categorization

• FICTION: Pikemen clashing pike-heads across blazing decks is the centerpiece sensory image of the fireship attack.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 731