Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the
Early Seventeenth Century.
By Carla Rahn Phillips. Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography.
Index. xiv + 318 Pages. $37.50.
Reviewed by Harry Kelsey, Chief Curator of History, Natural
History Museum, Los Angeles County, author of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo (1986).
A series of nautical inventories in the manuscript
collections of the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota
describe the equipment for six galleons constructed in the late 1620's for the
Spanish crown. Intended for use in the squadron guarding the fleets that sailed
to and from the Indies, these ships were the product of Spanish labor and business
enterprise and were important elements in the machinery that kept the Spanish
empire operating during a period of mounting global conflict.
Using the construction of the ships as a starting point,
Carla Phillips has given us glimpses of Spanish social structures, business
procedures, and bureaucratic techniques that can only delight her fellow
scholars. More than this, Professor Phillips has assembled enough information
about mundane matters to enable us to understand the milieu in which most of
these events took place.
For example, Martin de Arana, who contracted to build the
ships, did so at considerable personal cost and continued to operate in this way
over a period of years. At first inexplicable, his behavior seems completely
reasonable, once we learn that Arana expected and received substantial royal
favors for his children and other members of his family. Similarly, Roque
Centeno reduced himself to absolute penury in equipping the fleet, then was
rewarded by the sovereign with a new posting and back pay, plus "pensions,
stipends and preferment" for his six children.
The crown often asked and frequently received more than its
subjects could reasonably be expected to deliver, but perhaps there was no other
choice. Built during the continuing battles of a Thirty Years War, the galleons
have now become vehicles for studying Spanish imperial administration during a
time of crisis. One or another of the six galleons served the crown in the
Indies and in European waters for a dozen years and more, while Spain
successfully fended off European rivals in most of the New World and evaded
total disaster in Europe.
Nonetheless, the value of the book for San Diego historians
lies not so much in the description of Spanish efforts to fight a global war as
in the thorough and scholarly descriptions of ship design, finance,
construction, crews, and shipboard life. The latter includes excellent materials
on salaries, discipline, diet, and health. While all of the information may not
apply directly to ships built and operated along the west coast of New Spain and
in the Pacific, most of it does, including some excellent pages on scurvy and a
surprising Spanish resistance to that disease.
Even more useful is the detailed study of hull design,
derived partly from the Instrucción Nautica of Diego Garcia de Palacio,
who lived in Guatemala in the later sixteenth century and understood the
peculiarities of ship design on the west coast of New Spain. Moreover, the
inventories of the six galleons, thoughtfully translated in Appendix A, can
serve as a guide and outline for understanding the inventories of the ships
built a century earlier by Hernán Cortés for the voyages of discovery to
California.
Based entirely on firsthand accounts, this study by Carla
Rahn Phillips is the best and most concise treatment of Spanish ship
construction and operation for the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth
centuries. No one can expect to understand these ships without first consulting Six Galleons.
