Spanish galleon to visit

Tack over, shipmates; big brother is coming to town.

The Fundación Nao Victoria's El Galeón comes to St. Augustine May 23 - June 3 as a major state-supported Viva Florida 500 signature event.

Big is understatement. El Galeón is 170 feet long, nearly three times the size of those caravels. It's an authentic wooden replica of a galleon that was part of Spain's West Indies fleet.

The 12-day stay at St. Augustine caps a 49-day visit to Florida's east coast with stops at Miami, Cape Canaveral and Fort Lauderdale as Fundación Nao Victoria and Viva Florida 500 highlight Juan Ponce de Leon's discovery of Florida.

Visit the websites for Viva Florida 500 and Fundación Nao Victoria. And climb aboard El Galeón here.

 

 

   In the mid-eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for arriving and departing vessels at St. Augustine to be obliged to wait between one to two weeks in order to have the necessary conditions of wind and tide to cross the bar.

   A quick passage over the bar could go a long way to making a voyage profitable. The crew of a vessel required to wait two weeks without the bar would consume a great deal of provisions, thus adding to the cost of the voyage. If the same vessel was obliged to wait two weeks before leaving on its outbound leg that would make a total of one month's additional provisions for the entire crew.   

   In cases where profit margins were close, such waits could be very detrimental to a vessel's financial bottom line.

   One traveler, Johann Schopf, a German surgeon serving with British forces during the Revolutionary War, described the bar and its channels and some of the prevailing conditions at the time.

   "Ordinarily there are but 3, often only 2 channels where it can be crossed, and these at ebb-tide with only 4-4 1/2 ft. of water, and at high tide with not more than 8-9.

   "These channels which of themselves admit nothing but small and light vessels, are besides narrow and crooked, and what is worse they shift so generally after stormy weather, on account of the quick-sand which forms the bar, that a seaman, quite familiar with them, after a brief absence from Augustine cannot without risk take the old course to which he had been used.

   "The pilots therefore, as often as they come out to bring in a ship, must examine the passage anew. ... It has become so common at St. Augustine to see ships aground on this bar and this coast generally, that disasters of the sort have almost ceased to arouse sympathy or wonder."

   Toward the end of the British Period in 1782, after the fall of Savannah and then Charleston to Patriot forces, a great many vessels bearing loyal British refugees made for the loyal colony of St. Augustine.

   In a number of cases vessels had to wait offshore for the weather to improve before attempting to cross the dangerous bar into the harbor, and often vessels were cast away when they neglected to take on board competent pilots.

   In one particularly horrendous case, nine transports were lost on the St. Augustine bar in late December, 1782. The traveler Johann Schopf reported in his journal that following the fall of Charleston over one two-day period no less than sixteen vessels bearing Loyalists went to pieces on the bar with a significant loss of life.

    Image: Sloop in St. Augustine harbor, ca. 1750, from the St. Augustine Historical Society.