As befits a nation accustomed to ruling entire seas, the historical image of the Spanish Armada navigates to extremes. Aft or bow. Disaster or glory. Trafalgar or Blas de Lezo … With clubs in hand, there is no room for nuances, nor to explain the complex evolutions that the enlightened Navy experienced. The 18th century looks like a long shipwreck, but it was the opposite. «The maximum territorial extension of the Spanish Empire was reached in 1790, just when the Armada was at its peak and, on the other hand, when England had just lost a quarter of its empire and France more than half. Oysters with the Spanish decadence! », The historian ironizes Rafael
Torres Sánchez, author of ‘Story of a triumph‘(Wake up Ferro Editions). This monumental work, with an ocean of infographics and illustrations (130 buildings and 35 types of ships reconstructed with a meticulousness that borders on the pathological), shows the technological and professional level achieved by the Navy in the 18th century, while definitively overlapping the myth of inefficiency and chaos that was forged after the defeat of Trafalgar (1805).
The fleet that perished off the coast of Cádiz was heir to the golden age of this institution, but more so in the twelve years that followed the financial crisis of 1793. «The numerous documentation on Trafalgar it transmits an idea of the sailors without being paid, poorly dressed, a consequence of more than a decade of defaults, but that fixed image does not serve to define the entire previous century “, says Torres Sánchez about the deterioration caused by the economic problems of the reign by Carlos IV.
Until The financial crisis, the Navy had not stopped growing and increasing its benefits, so that it had become the second most powerful in the world after the Royal Navy. It was also the one in which its sailors suffered the least scurvy and the one with the fewest riots throughout the century. Even the seafarers at the bottom of the ladder were better fed, clothed, and paid than most of the population. “The data reveal a different story; it cannot be all coincidence “, the author says.
Decay was something else
Rafael Torres Sánchez has spent two decades studying the contribution of war to the construction of states and to national development. This is how this professor at the University of Navarra found a Navy in constant evolution. “Looking at the trajectory of the Spanish, French, English, Dutch and other nations, it is easy to deduce that the decline was something else. While countries that had once been great naval powers, such as the Netherlands, are going down in their logistics, technology and training, Spain does not stop growing in the number of ships, the quality of the officers and the ability to operate in any sea on the globe. ».
‘History of a Triumph’ is not a book intended to gloss over imperial victories, but rather to respond in a measured way to both pessimism that surrounds this period as the “exaggerated optimism” of recent years. «At times the pendulum is going to the other side, as in the cases of Bernardo de Gálvez or Blas de Lezo, to which hundreds of books have been dedicated in a decade. These characters are portrayed as individual heroes saving the honor of the Navy in tough situations, but that’s not true either. We are talking about a collective project », says the author of the book.
This team triumph began to be written with the arrival of the Bourbons in Spain. Although it did not start from scratch, the fleet left by the Habsburgs was in a situation «pretty sorryAfter two centuries of fighting a pack of enemies. “The great contribution of the new dynasty is an advanced management system that knows the needs of each ship and allows it to operate globally”, considers the naval specialist.
Throughout the century, almost 1,000 vessels entered service, being in the reign of Carlos III when more ships were launched, almost all built in the own shipyards of the Catholic Monarchy (only 7% of ships were bought abroad). «The Navy is imaginative and flexible when it comes to building its ships; for example, by setting up a shipyard in Havana, the largest built by a European power outside the continent, “says Torres Sánchez.
Despite the fact that the Army always received more money than the Navy, there was no shortage of funding to develop naval technology that at times surpassed that of its competitors. This was confirmed by the sailor and scientist Jorge Juan, sent to London as a spy to gain new knowledge. “As it is very romantic, it is not usually noticed that, despite his adventure as a spy, the designs he brings to build ships were worse than those used here,” says the naval historian.
The Achilles heel
In the thirties of that century the capture of the Princess, baptized by the British as HMS Princess, it forced London to halt its entire construction program to copy the design of this ship of the line. The myth of Spain’s technological backwardness does not hold up against these data, although it is equally undeniable that the Royal Navy was always one notch above the Navy. “Spain is getting closer to England, but the distance is insurmountable not because of a question of technology, but of a more centralized organization with a greater capacity for evolution”, Torres Sánchez points out.
The true Achilles heel of Spain was the lack of a strong commercial navy, which deprived him of a pool of pilots and officers paid with private money but available to serve in the Navy in urgent cases. «It is the great failure. There was money, talent, technology, institutional memory, but the fact that the commercial navy did not grow at the same level as the military caused many problems in the long term, “explains the professor.
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