CARLOS III AND SEA POWER Carlos III's appreciation of naval power was born of bitter personal experience. In 1744, whilst he was King of Naples, he suffered the humiliation of having to submit to a one hour ultimatum from a British squadron drawn up off Naples and withdraw a 20,000 strong army campaigning against Britain's Austrian allies. This classic demonstration of the influence of sea power on land operations impressed itself deeply on him and after he succeeded to the Spanish throne in 1759 he resolved to strengthen the Spanish Navy. NAVAL EXPENDITURE Carlos III inherited peacetime peninsular naval spending (a better guide to long term policy emphasis than extraordinary wartime expenditure) running at 14.9% of the total spending of the Spanish Treasury in the first four peactime years of his reign. However, by the last four peacetime years of his reign it had consistently grown to an average of 24.7%. During the Seven Years War, American War of Independence and 1793-4 war with France it had naturally risen even further, peaking at 33.9%, 32.7% and 38.8% respectively. His investment in the navy not only boosted its numbers so that it briefly surpassed the French to become second in size only to that of Britain, but led to advances in Spanish warship design such that even their British opponents came to regard Spanish navios as arguably the finest in the world. However, set against this were a number of factors that ensured Spanish defeat or failure in every fleet action and most single ship engagements throughout the period. MANPOWER The severest problem of the Spanish navy was a lack of trained seamen which stemmed from the relatively small number of Spaniards engaged in civil maritime occupations. This in turn was due to the restrictive trading policies so long pursued by Spain, which until 1765 allowed only Sevilla or Cadiz to trade with the colonies. This manpower problem led the Spanish to develop very efficient legislation by contemporary standards, the Matricula de Mar, to make the most of scarce human resources. This registered all those who made their living from the sea as eligible for naval duty. By contrast the British managed their more extensive maritime manpower resources far less efficiently through the use of more arbitrary press gangs. At Carlos III's accession the Matricula de Mar held the names of 26,004 men, a mobilisable total insufficient to man all the naval vessels available even by bringing all commercial maritime activity to a complete standstill. Carlos III's introduction of internal free trade significantly increased the number of Spaniards earning their living from the sea. From 1765 nine Spanish ports were allowed to trade freely with Spain's Caribbean islands only. Thereafter free trade was conceded successively to Luisian-a in 1768, Yucatan and Campeche in 1770, Chile, Per~i, La Plata and seven further Spanish ports in 1778, Venezuela in 1788 and Nueva Espana in 1789. Nevertheless, in the 1790s 3/4 of all sailings still left from Cadiz. This was accompanied by a judicious series of reforms in the Matricula de Mar which extended its catchment, and by 1786 those registered had doubled to a respectable 51,381. However, the fleet continued to outgrow the matricula and by the mid-1790s the 53,147 matriculados were still well short of the 89,350 men needed to fully man the fleet inherited from Carlos III. (Caution should be observed in comparing these last figures as the matricula raised only sailors, whereas a full Spanish crew included about 25% Tropas and Artilleros de Marina). By contrast Britain was reckoned to have about 300 ,000 coastal and high seas sailors in 1805 but required only some 120,000 to man its fleet. The Spanish were additionally disadvantaged by the fact that their European home ports were prone to yellow fever epidemics, which the British home ports were not. Furthermore, again unlike the British, they had no effective way of preventing scurvy in the late 18th Century and so suffered heavier crew losses on long voyages. However, probably even more problematical than the quantity of Spanish seamen raised was their quality. The overwhelming majority of matriculados were normally engaged in short haul coastal trade, domestic fishing or riverine activiti es, whereas it was experienced ocean going sailors that the navy required. Although Carlos III's liberalisation of trade did raise their numbers, no more than 5,800 sailors appear to have engaged annually in commerce on the high seas in the peak years 1781-1792. Thus barely 11% of matriculados were fully fitted to the needs of the fleet and they represented an even lower proportion of its requirements. At Trafalgar in 1805 the percentage of experienced sailors in Spanish vessels was less than 10% compared with 75% in the British fleet. In order to make up for their shortage of able seamen Spanish vessels had necessarily to carry larger crews than their British equivalents, further aggrevating manpower shortages. These could only be made up by recruitment of landsmen and before Trafalgar Admiral Villeneuve characterised five- sixths of the Spanish crews as "herdsmen and beggars". To compensate further for the shortage of sailors the Spanish fleet developed a policy of carrying aboard an unusually high proportion of soldiers, the Tropas de Mar. A consequence of this was a forced reliance on boarding, in which their marines and more numerous crews might be used to advantage, at the expense of developing gunnery skills and equipment, fields in which the British were dominant. In another attempt to leave their few skilled sailors free to manage the vessels the Spanish Navy also raised a specialist corps of military gunners, the Artilleros de Mar, who were largely unfamiliar with the sea. On British vessels gunnery was performed by sailors accustomed to the element, giving them much greater flexibility and lower manning levels. The Spanish officer corps lacked the experience of the British but nevertheless it contained a number of outstanding sailors. For example, the Malaspina expedition's scientific circumnavigation of 1789-1794 bears comparison with the expeditions of Captain Cook. However, even the best Spanish officers were compromised by their unskilled crews and forced into adopting' inferior tactics. The Spanish Navy seems to have held an unusually high proportion of colonial officers. Certainly two, and according to one report four, of the fifteen Spanish navios at Trafalgar were commanded by criollos. It is probable that joining the navy was one of the few avenues for advancement for criollos outside their own colonies. In battle Spanish vessels were frequently outmanoeuvred by the more skilled British crews and so damaged by superior British gunnery technique that they were often reduced to impotence and forced to strike their colours without the opportunity for a boarding action ever presenting itself. Where boarding did take place it was likely to be at the initiative of the British who had a good chance of success against the inexperienced Spanish crews whose numbers and morale would have been severely weakened by the unequal terms of the preceding gunnery duel. However, it would be a mistake to perpetuate the myth that Spanish crews lacked physical courage. They often stoically suffered tremendous losses before surrendering, losses that British crews were seldom obliged to endure. NAVAL INTELLIGENCE Although small naval squadrons were maintained in the colonies in time of peace (see below), during war the bulk of the colonial fleet was expected to be provided from Spain. Ef.-Eective Spanish global naval deployments depended on accurate intelligence from London, firstly to predict the likely outbreak of war so that such overseas deployments could be initiated before the more powerful Royal Navy could interfere, and secondly to establish the specific targets of British expeditions so that such naval deployments were made in the right place. There is no doubt that Spanish intelligence was usually extremely good and that it repeatedly resulted in accurate strategic deployments. In 1740 the size of Anson's squadron and its targets of Panama and Callao was accurately predicted. Panama was reinforced by land across the Isthmus of Panama with a battalion detached from the force sent to Cartagena, and a more powerful Spanish squadron, bearing troops to reinforce Callao, was despatched simultaneously with Anson. However, Cape Horn drove most of its vessels back. At both Cartagena, successfully defended in 1741, and Havana, lost after a long siege in 1762, the British found that smaller Spanish naval squadrons had already preceded them and successfully landed army units to form the core of the stubborn army garrisons without which both ports would have fallen quickly. Unfortunately, although they considerably complicated the British sieges, in neither case were the naval squadrons strong enough to break the Royal Navy's blockade and all vessels were lost. Similarly a small squadron landing 400 troops to pre-empt the British at Trinidad in 1796 was overwhelmed. It is certainly true that the initial British seizure of Buenos Aires from Cape Town in 1806 caught Spain by surprise, but then it also caught London by surprise because the invasion had no official sanction! However, by then Trafalgar had ensured that there was little the Spanish navy could have done to reinforce La Plata and only a single corbeta was sent. For Spain the problem was not accurate anticipation but adequate preparation. More The Spanish Navy, 1762-1807 Introduction Carlos III and Sea Power Decline Under Godoy Major Spanish Warship Losses in the Caribbean: 1741-1796 Major Spanish Warship Types in Late 18th C. Back to Table of Contents -- El Dorado Vol V No. 4 Back to El Dorado List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by The South and Central American Military Historians Society This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com