Spanish Galleon 1530–1690 by Angus Konstam

[Osmosis]

Has anyone read this? Since I am building the San Francisco cross section I thought it might be worth a look.

[Roger Pellett]

I have not looked at or read the book in question but I have one of his books: Sovereign:  The Search for the Renaissance Battleship.  It is clearly aimed at a general reader with little or no specialized knowledge.

 

I do have some ideas for future research.

 

Was the San Francisco a real ship?  If so was she built in the Basque region of Spain?  Many Spanish ships of the period were.  If so, archeological excavations have yielded some distinguishing characteristics of Basque shipbuilding.  First, these ships do not have the typical keel rabbit and garboard strake construction.  Instead the keel is flanged and thedge of this flange butts against the first strake of planking.  Second, floor timbers lap first futtocks and the lap is joined by a dovetail carved into the adjoining timbers.

 

The “gold standard” cache of information on Basque shipbuilding is the Archeology report for the “Red Bay Galleon.”  This ship was discovered sunk in Red Bay in Labrador.  The ship was completely excavated by divers, every part was measured, documented and a model was built.  The five volume report was published by Parks Canada and can be ordered from Amazon.

 

There is quite a bit of information on Spanish wrecks that have been explored on the Texas A&M Nautical Archeology website.

 

Third, I recommend The Spanish Armada by Colin Maudie.  Maudie has explored the wreck sites of a number of Armada wrecks and has drawn a number of interesting about the ships, the weapons that they carried and how these factors affected the conduct of the battle.

 

Roger

[Baker]

 

On 10/15/2018 at 11:02 PM, Osmosis said:

Has anyone read this? Since I am building the San Francisco cross section I thought it might be worth a look.

Yes,