Most Armada gunners had never fired a gun from a ship

Evidence

Sixteenth-century ships’ guns were hard to aim and uncertain to fire and, of course, errors that would have made no difference at fifty yards meant a complete miss at five hundred, but with decent training the gun-crews on both sides should have been able to do a great deal better. Most of the trained gunners in the Armada had never fired a gun from a ship’s deck — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 710

Categorization

  • QUESTION: What training were English gunners given that Spanish lacked?
  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 710