Spanish Vessels

This representation of the vessels of the early Spanish navigators is a fac-simile of a cut in Medina’s Arte de navegar, Vallodolid, 1545, which was re-engraved in the Venice edition of 1555. In the variety of changes in methods of measurement it is not easy to find the equivalent in tonnage of the present day for the ships of Columbus’ time. Those constituting his little fleet seem to have been liht and swift vessels of the class called caravels. One had a deck amidships, with high forecastle and two were without this deck, though high, and covered at the ends. Captaing G. V. Fox has given what he supposes were the dimensions of the larger one,- a heavier craft and duller sailer than the others. He calculates for a hundred tons, -makes her sixty-three feet over all, fifty-one feet keel, twenty feet beam, and ten and a half feet draft of water. She carried the kind of gun termed lombards, and a crew of fifty men.

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