IIRC, just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the Spanish armada. Some nice weather or good health of the originally slated commander might have possibly prevented the British Empire.
A few years later Napoleon almost broke the Allied line at Waterloo. According to the Duke of Wellington it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life." If Napoleon had succeeded we would be living in a very different world.
Or if Ney had sent forward some light cavalry to reconnoiter the crossroads at Quatre Bras at some point in the morning, he'd have seen that Wellington was not waiting there on the reverse slope. Had he seized the crossroads, he could've totally changed the circumstances that led to the battle at Waterloo.
Yeah talk about misfortune. I once read an account of a Ragusan merchant ship that was pressed into the Armada. Imagine being a run-of-the-mill Ragusan sailor one day, then, several hellish months later, trying desperately to navigate the Irish coast on a leaky galley just to survive and get home.
