Fishing-skippers embellished eyewitness accounts of the naval battles.

Evidence

From a distance and through dense clouds of smoke the Newfound-landers may have thought they saw something like the Rouen account. Mendoza must have had confidence in the judgment of his Rouen agent, for this time he transmitted the news without the customary cautions and with expressions of rejoicing. — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 794

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how rumor and propaganda outpaced true information in early modern Europe, echoing the earlier chapters on Mendoza’s spy network.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 794