Tools and Trades

Although we don't know who built the Santa Margarita, we do know more about its companion galleon, lost in the same hurricane. The Nuestra Señora de Atocha was built by the Master Shipwright Captain Alonso Ferrera. It took 4 years to build, and was launched in Havana, Cuba in 1620.

Alonso was assisted by a number of other craftsmen, such as:

Dockyards also employed night watchmen, storekeepers, clerks and even ratcatchers! Any Spanish royal dockyard was a busy place in the seventeenth century, with hundreds of people employed to build these galleons for the King of Spain.

Timber

To build a galleon, the Master shipbuilder needed hundreds of wagon loads of different types of timber. Each one probably used up over two and a half thousand fully grown trees before she was built (ships are always called "she"). Different trees were used for different parts of the ship:

Pine, used for making masts and spars

Cedar, a soft wood, used for the upper parts of the hull, and inside the ship

Oak, a hard wood, used for the main frames of the ship

Mahogany, another hard wood, used to plank the underwater part of the hull

Why do you think they used hard wood for the underwater part of the ship, and for the frames?

As well as using different types of trees for different parts of the ship, shipbuilders used different parts of the same tree for different shaped pieces of timber. For example, long straight sections of tree were used to make planks, while curved sections produced angled pieces of timber called "knees". Why did this help keep the cost of shipbuilding down? This way, no part of the tree trunk was wasted, so fewer trees were needed to build the ship.

Shipbuilding

Building a ship the size of the Santa Margarita or the Atocha was a long and complicated business. First the keel (the backbone of the ship) was laid out and the stem and stem posts built. Next, a floor of beams was added. A spine (keelson) was bolted to these, just above the keel. This means that the ship had a kind of double spine running along it. Next, the floor was built upwards as curved timbers (futtocks) were added to make the ribs (frames) of the ship, just like a skeleton. More frames and planking filled in the gaps, while huge wooden brackets (knees) held the deck planking in place.

Once she was launched, the galleon floated at anchor in the harbor. While here masts, guns and rigging were fitted. Parts and timbers came from all over Europe and the Americas. From start to finish, the typical galleon took two years to build.

A galleon like the Atocha weighed 500 tons, and was armed with 20 guns. She would have been around 110 feet long, 33 feet wide, and would carry over 200 sailors, soldiers, officers and ship's boys.