The galleon: Spain’s treasure ship

What is a galleon?

A galleon was a big ocean-going sailing ship that could carry cargo and fight. Shipbuilders in Spain and Portugal developed it in the early 1500s from two older types, the tubby carrack and the small caravel. Spanish galleons were in service from around 1530.

The name comes from “galley”, the oared warship of the Mediterranean, but galleons had no oars. What they kept from the galley was a pointed beak, called the beakhead, that jutted out at the front below the bowsprit. In peacetime many galleons worked as merchant ships, and in wartime they could be fitted out as warships.

What did a galleon look like?

Compared with a carrack, a galleon was longer, lower and narrower, roughly three or four times as long as it was wide. That made it steadier and better at sea.

• Castles. At the back rose a tall, flat-sterned sterncastle, often gilded and carved, with the ship’s saint’s name painted on it. The forecastle at the front was lower.
• Masts. Three or four. The foremast and mainmast carried square sails, which hang across the ship and push it along with the wind behind. The mizzen at the back, and a fourth “bonaventure” mast if there was one, carried triangular lateen sails, which run fore-and-aft and help with steering and sailing across the wind.
• Guns. One or two decks of cannon fired through ports along the sides, with swivel guns on the rails.

Atlantic galleons were usually about 500 to 1,000 tons, and the biggest Manila galleons reached about 2,000. A crew of 100 to 250 sailors might share the ship with soldiers and dozens of passengers.

How did a galleon sail?

Slowly but strongly. A galleon could make about eight knots in ideal conditions, and its thick hull could take cannon fire and carry a huge cargo. But the high castles caught the wind, and lower, sleeker ships were quicker and handier. Tropical water was hard on them too: a hull might last only about ten years in the Caribbean.

English shipwrights built similar ships but rarely used the word “galleon”; they simply called them ships. Even Spanish records mixed their words, calling the same vessel a nao one day and a galeón the next. By the mid-1600s navies were turning to purpose-built warships and faster frigates, and the galleon was no longer a front-line fighting ship.

How did the Spanish treasure fleets work?

From the 1550s Spain sent its American trade in armed convoys. The New Spain fleet, called the flota, sailed to Veracruz in Mexico. The Tierra Firme fleet, known simply as the galeones, left Spain in August for Cartagena and Portobelo, where silver from Peru was traded at a great fair. Both fleets then met at Havana and sailed home together, guarded by armed galleons. Spain built a set of twelve galleons, named after the Twelve Apostles, in 1589 to 1591 partly for this escort work.

On the other side of the world, the Manila galleons sailed across the Pacific between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico, usually one ship a year, from 1565 to 1815. They carried Chinese silk and porcelain east and Mexican silver west, and some of their Asian goods went on overland to Veracruz to join the Atlantic fleet.

Were there still galleons in 1715?

The word was still in use, but the ships were changing. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701 to 1714) wrecked the fleet timetable, and sailings became irregular. Spain was short of ships, so it bought them where it could.

The fleet of 1715 shows this. Antonio de Echeverz’s Tierra Firme squadron was made up of merchant ships. His flagship was the Hampton Court, an English 70-gun warship built in 1678, captured by the French in 1707 and sold to Echeverz in 1711 for 10,000 pesos. He renamed her Nuestra Señora del Carmen. Another ship in the fleet was a French prize, and a storeship, the Urca de Lima, was a 305-ton Dutch-built vessel.

From the end of the war Spain rebuilt its navy. The official ship designs of 1712 and 1720, by the Basque shipbuilder Antonio de Gaztañeta, were for warships and frigates of 10 to 80 guns, not galleons. Only in the Pacific did true galleons keep sailing for another century.

What happened to the 1715 treasure fleet?

Eleven Spanish ships under General Juan Esteban de Ubilla and Antonio de Echeverz, with a French ship, the Grifon, left Havana in late July 1715 (most accounts say 24 July; a NOAA account says 27 July). Early on 31 July a hurricane caught them off the east coast of Florida, south of Cape Canaveral. Three ships sank in deeper water and eight were driven onto the reefs and beaches. Of about 2,500 people aboard, about 1,000 died, Ubilla among them. Only the Grifon escaped.

Ubilla’s flagship alone carried about 1,300 chests of silver coins, with gold, jewels and Chinese porcelain. Spanish salvors working from a camp on the beach had recovered more than 5 million pieces of eight by late October 1715. In January 1716 English raiders led by Henry Jennings attacked the camp, part of the story of the pirates of Nassau. Coins from the wrecks still wash up on what is now called Florida’s Treasure Coast.

What was the San José?

The San José was the flagship of the Tierra Firme galleons, a three-masted ship of 62 or 64 guns. In 1708 she was carrying the fleet’s silver when a small British squadron under Commodore Charles Wager attacked the fleet near Cartagena. The battle took place on 28 May by the English calendar, which was 8 June by the Spanish one. According to Wager’s journal, a shot set off her gunpowder store and she blew up and sank. Most of the roughly 500 to 600 people aboard died.

In November 2015 a robot submarine found the wreck more than 600 metres down off Cartagena. Bronze cannon decorated with dolphins confirmed who she was. Colombia, Spain and a salvage company have all claimed her cargo.