TRATEGIC RATIONALE FOR 17TH CENTURY SHIPS OF THE LINE
Written By Jim Bloom
P.02
Contemporary sources are consistent in referring to Sacramento as a galeão, a galleon; one source states that she had sixty guns. From this, we can deduce with certainty only that she was a purpose-built warship. While the term galeão can be associated with a particular type of warship in the 16th century (unlike the Spanish equivalent galeón, the term galeão was never applied to merchant vessels), the middle of the 17th century was a time of flux and rapid change in naval architecture, and we cannot say with precision what the term meant when Sacramento was launched. Very little is known about the design, construction, and armament of Portuguese warships in this period. The sixty-gun figure may have been an artificial "rating" rather- than an actual count; it probably included numbers of swivel pieces, boat guns, and so on, which we today would not count as broadside cannon. Perhaps she had as few as 36 broadside guns.
While a good deal is known about the design and armament of English, French, and Dutch warships of Sacramento's period, we cannot with confidence extrapolate our knowledge of them to Portuguese practice. This is in large part because much of the attention given to the development of warship design of the early to mid-1600s has focused on major ships-of-the-line, particularly massive, 100-gun behemoths such as Sovereign of the Seas, Prince, Soleil Royal, and Zeven Provinzien. These ships, like Santíssimo Sacramento, were considered the "best ships" of their time in their respective nations, but they were very different in concept and construction. They were also quite different from the English, Dutch, and French ships which contended with Sacramento and her sisters for the commerce and security of the Brazilian coast
The Sacramento, a smaller and less powerful warship, might seem unimpressive in comparison with the huge battleships noted above, hut we must consider the strategic and technological context. The massive 100-gun ships of the mid-1600s mustered great combat power, but they were not true transoceanic warships. Unlike their equivalents of a century and a half later —Victory and the Ville de Paris are among the better-known examples—they rarely ventured far from home port and usually campaigned only briefly and during the relatively calm months of late spring and summer. Enormously expensive to build and operate, they must be understood as the highly specialized craft they were; we must not read back into them the characteristics of the first-class ships-of-the-line of a later era.
In Sacramento's day, therefore, line-of-battle ships and genuine transoceanic warships were not identical. Ultimately, advances in naval architecture allowed the two functions to be performed by the same ship; the seventy-four-gun ships-of-the-line of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are the most notable and perhaps the most important examples of this. But Sacramento herself was a genuine transoceanic war-ship and not to be compared with ships-of-the-line of a later era.
It is therefore tempting to view Sacramento as a proto-frigate, a transoceanic cruiser which could either outfight or outrun any ship she was likely to meet as far away from home as the Brazilian coast. This is an intriguing hypothesis which is supported to a degree by the probable size of the galleon's gundeck and the weight of her ordnance.. All we can say with certainty, however, is that Sacramento's design was worked out according to the dictates of the peculiar tactical and strategic demands of the Companhia Geral do Comerçio do Brasil and within the bounds imposed by economic factors and the capabilities and limitations of the human resources available.
Frank Fox, Great Ships: The Battlefleet of King Charles II (Greenwich, 1980), contains a full treatment of the tactical dominance and lack of endurance and seaworthiness of the giant English three-deckers of the first and second rates and their Dutch and French equivalents. For example, see p. 95 for the tactically decisive role of the largest English ships in the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664-67) and p. 21 for their unwieldiness. The smaller "rates," which were on occasion employed far from home had two ordnance allowances: an augmented establishment "to be carried only during wartime...in home waters" (p. 187), which practically meant during the relatively calm months of late spring and summer, and a reduced allowance for peacetime cruising and for extended operations on overseas stations in wartime. It is plain from this that heavy firepower close to home and seakeeping capability on distant stations were incompatible at the time.