San Bartolomé

Type

Galleon

Period

16th Century

Nation

Spain

Overview: San Bartolomé was one of the "Twelve Apostles," a series of newly designed Spanish royal galleons built in the late 1580s and early 1590s to rebuild Spain's naval strength after the 1588 Armada disaster; each ship in the class was named for an apostle, reflecting the propaganda and religious symbolism of Philip II's rebuilding program. Specifications: It was a 900-ton galleon built in Deusto, on the Ría de Bilbao (Biscay, Spain), between 1589 and 1591, by the shipwright Agustín de Ojeda. Modern estimates based on surviving measurement records put its length around 36.4 m and beam around 11.5 m, with three decks, typical of the large Biscayan-built galleons of this class. Service History: In 1596 the ship took part in an Armada sent to seize the port of Brest, but a storm scattered the fleet near Cape Finisterre. In October 1597 San Bartolomé sailed from La Coruña as part of a new Armada intended to invade England by seizing Falmouth, carrying 50,000 ducats to pay the troops; a storm off the English coast again scattered the fleet, and although the galleon made it back toward Spain, it sank on 13 November 1597 after a battered, days-long final passage along the Cantabrian coast that ended on the Mundaka sandbar. Notable Facts: For decades the wreck's location was disputed, with candidate sites proposed in the Isles of Scilly and at Viveiro in Galicia, until archival research in the General Archive of Simancas established the Mundaka sandbar as the true loss site, prompting a 2018 INA-sponsored magnetometer survey of the Urdaibai inlet. More than 300 of roughly 400 people aboard were lost and only about 40 survived, and the king's ducats went down with the ship; modelers should take care not to confuse this large "Apostle" galleon with an unrelated, much smaller ~200-ton galizabra of the same name built in Manila around 1600.