the spanish navy -- 6/11/24

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Today's selection-- from How the Spanish Empire was Built: A 400 year history by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo. The Spanish Navy, including its famed Armada, “should be the most perfectly finished machine in the monarchy”:

“A global empire is unsustainable without sea power. As Jose de Mazarredo, generally hailed as the most talented Spanish naval commander of his time, told King Carlos IV in 1801, ‘The navy should be the most perfectly finished machine in the monarchy: the machine to end all machines.’ The Bourbon monarchs shared the sentiment. In that respect, they maintained the nautical outlook of the Habsburgs, whom they replaced on the throne, despite rhetoric designed to flatter the new dynasty. By comparison with their supposedly inferior, decadent and opprobrious predecessors. The myth – exaggerated and unfair though it was – of the senescence of the previous dynasty stimulated attention to everything that seemed up-to-date and fixated on the future. As Christopher Storrs has pointed out, the Bourbons inherited a monarchy – paradoxically divided and united by the oceans it embraced – that demonstrated in defeat more often than in victory. So profound were convictions among the elite that Spain’s maritime defences were antiquated, and her ships deficient in design, size, capacity, and equipment, that an entire lexicon came into being, or was developed to a novel extent, deploying nautical metaphors for the tribulations of life, especially of political life. Fray Juan de los Angeles, like so many moralists of the time, expressed revulsion: 

“ [A] very substantial fleet setting sail with its painted prows and mainsails, its gilded lanterns, its unfurled banners, its gelleons in escort, with all the vast company of boys and men, marines and merchants, while trumpets sound and hautbois pipe. And where is that great city of wood headed? Whither those separate edifices, striving for unison, whither those floating islands, lurching alarmingly, and all those people within them, whom two fingers’ breadth part from death and yet who seem so content, heedless of the fury of the waves and winds? What are they seeking? Riches. 

The Battle of Lepanto, 1571

“Maritime figures of speech expressed every hazard and every hope. A vessel aflame in the midst of the ocean represented the conflagrations of Christendom. From a ‘safe haven’ writers contemplated estuaries as thresholds and oceans as the menacing future that lay beyond them. Taking sounding, testing draught reckoning, leeway, weighing anchor – such were the operations that individuals at peril on the voyage of life must undertake. To make moral progress, as to make way under sail, one spoke of scraping away the barnacles. Harbours became metaphors for escape from ambition or pride. ‘To find shelter from the stormy blast’ was a common euphemism for death. For the just, as for ships, ‘ the storm shall not for ever trouble them.’ A ship’s carved figurehead stood for the political profile of a maritime state. Extravagant alterpieces dedicated to the Virgen del Carmen – Our Lady of the Vine – were likened to the heavily carved adornments of ship’s poops.

“Such language was stimulated by visits to Cadiz, in 1694 and 1695, by depressingly impressive fleets of heretical foreigners – Dutch and English – whom the fortunes of war brought together for a while in the cause of Spain’s Habsburg pretender. Objective comparisons with their own navy might not have alarmed Spaniards. The Spanish armada in Italy, for instance, had 21 ships of a total of nearly 14,000 tons and a complement of 8,197 men in all: by no means despicable. Nuestra Señora de la Conception y de las Animas, the vice-flagship, displaced 1,500 tons and bore 92 guns, with a crew 1,110 strong. The flagship had the insuperably optimistic name of Nuestra Senora de la Esperanza – Our Lady of Hope. Was imperial defence irremediably decadent? The mixture of curiosity, resentment and fear with which Spaniards beheld their competitors made it seem so."

author:	Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Manuel Lucena Giraldo
title:	How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History
publisher:	Reaktion Books
pages:	186-188