John Simpson wrote:He has a point. I would not have called HMS Victory (built in the same year but with more guns) a galleon but a 'man of war', or 'first rate'. However, rating was a Royal Navy device. It then occurred to me that we tend to call any big Spanish ship with many guns a galleon - particularly if full of gold! So what is the definition of galleon, and what should the San Juan correctly be called? Well, the way I always understood it is that all ships of the line were galleons in the purely technical sense of the word, as opposed to naos, hulks, carracks, galleasses and what have you. The word "galleon" is IMHO usually reserved for the earlier specimens, say 1550-1625 more or less, while later variants of galleon have more specialized names like "great ship", "ship of the line", "frigate", "east indiaman" and so on. There were also the famous "Manila galleons" of course, but that was a description of the ship's function and not the ship as such.
On my website I refer to the San Juan Nepomuceno as a galleon. It recently attracted this comment from Xavier Corredor in Spain:'The "San Juan" was not a galleon... The "San Juan" was a "navío". I don't know what is the English word to describe it, perhaps is "ship of the line".
When they were introduced galleons were different from other ships of similar size in that they were long, narrow and low-built, and of course they had the galleon (beak-head) poking out in front. This was pretty much the default configuration of all major vessels for the next 300 years.
Anyway, there is little or no real technical difference between the armada galleons of 1588, Prince Royal of 1610, Wasa of 1628, Sovereign of the Seas of 1637 and the Victory of 1765, except that everything grew bigger and a lot of details were perfected over time of course. I guess the "galleon" term is rather like "internal combustion engine", a useful description when the contraptions were just invented but later on replaced in everyday use by more specific terms like "diesel engine", "petrol engine", "wankel engine", "gas turbine engine" and so on.
The San Juan would be called a "navio" by the Spanish as your correspondent
pointed out. This corresponds to the British term "ship of the line", in other
terms a battleship rather than a merchantman or a frigate. No rating is
indicated by this, just "battleship" in general; it would correspond to the
first to third rates of the British system more or less. I know the Danes did
it the same way, just differentiating between "battleship" and "frigate" rather
than having the British 6-tier ranking system.
{Ståle Sannerud}
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