Not too long ago at a symposium sponsored by the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, I heard intriguing questions about the Spanish navy of the eighteenth century. “How did the officers and men feel about their mission and themselves? Were they satisfied? Were they fulfilled? Did they accomplish their mission?” These are not simple questions. They need to be answered if we are ever to explain clearly why Spain at sea was not as successful as England, or even France. José Merino’s La armada española en el siglo xviii focuses on that large question, narrowing his view to the last fifty years of the century, and he produces answers. Some are solid, some intriguing, some simply provocative expressions of opinion difficult to sustain, or to deny. The work, a pioneering modern history of the Spanish navy, however, merits close attention for its description and analysis of the navy as an institution and dynamic force in the fortunes of Spain during the eighteenth century.
The book is divided into four chapters dedicated, each in turn, to the organization of the fleet, its personnel, finances, and construction. This last chapter, actually labeled “Materias primas,” forms the great bulk of the book and is indeed its heart. The navy’s struggle to maintain a viable position at sea after 1750 was eroded slowly, but inexorably, by a dwindling supply of naval stores absolutely necessary for the construction and maintenance of a wooden navy. Scarcities in trees, hemp, pitch, copper, and iron all became exaggerated after 1790, and by the turn of the century the shipbuilding industry was moribund. No sentence sums up this sad state better than “la escasez es máxima en todas partes, pero especialmente en Ferrol y La Habana, entre 1770 y 1775, hasta el extremo de que hay paralización de obras y no se cumplen los planes en varios casos” (p. 251).
The story is not one, however, of unending futility and despair. From the 1720s onward, the administration of the Spanish navy was marked by innovation, imitation (of English and French models), and recovery from the desperate straits of the late seventeenth century. English shipbuilders were brought into Spanish and American yards, the officer corps was professionalized, and new sources of materials—especially in the American colonies—were systematically explored. Havana became the most important shipyard of that century (p. 121), certainly testifying to the maturity of Spain’s colonies.
The crisis nonetheless unfurled with all the inevitability of the tragic sequences in a Greek drama. While logistics, materials, techniques, and technology are all considered at length, the author keeps returning to the matter of men, the nature of the Spanish naval will. In the final analysis, the Spanish ship and its industry are excused as the principal flaw. Spanish and French shipbuilders were indeed even emulated by the English. After capturing a classy 74-gun French frigate during the Seven Years’ War, the English employed her as a model for their own fleet. Enough Spanish and French successes during the American Revolution testified to the Gallic and Iberian ability at sea. But the trend, especially after 1790, was down. The failure of Spanish industry in general is described by the author. The Napoleonic Wars certainly were an important factor in the formula. The inabilities of Charles IV and his retinue also figured in the scenario. The English advantage, however, lay not in England’s ships, shipyards, great oak forests (themselves being severely depleted at this time as well). It lay with the training and esprit de corps of its officers and men. They possessed something Spain’s seamen lacked.
The last sentence of this book provides us with the clue. ‘“La guerra de V.M. ha de ser defensiva’; tras tres siglos de defensa, los españoles habían perdido la voluntad de vencer,” (p. 360). Yet, I am still left vaguely dissatisfied, still uncertain of the validity of this equation offered without proof. This reservation does not subtract one bit from my enthusiastic endorsement of La armada española. It is provocative fare for those interested in the dynamics of empire, especially as one struggled to maintain a dominance over a realm it had long since lost, except perhaps in its own mythology. This is a theme not without its modern reflections.
