The Antwerp hellburner fire-ship explosion killed more than many pitched battles

Evidence

Just so, a fire-ship had drifted with the tide against such a bridge at Antwerp two years ago. Bold Spanish pikemen had leaped aboard to extinguish what seemed but a sulky fire when the whole ship blew up. Her entrails had been lined with brick and stuffed with gunpowder, stones and scrap-iron, and more men were killed and wounded in that one explosion than in many a pitched battle. No one who had seen ‘the hellburner of Antwerp’ would ever forget it. — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 323

Categorization

• FICTION: The hellburner of Antwerp is a ready-made dramatic set piece for historical or steampunk fiction.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 323