Introduction

Spain has had a long and distinguished history of seafaring, but its political culture has been shaped largely by its hinterland. Throughout history, inland Castile held most of the country's arable land and the bulk of its people, and most Spaniards did not identify with the sea. In the Habsburg period (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), though shipping lanes bound Spain's empire together, government neglected the navy when financial exigencies diverted funds to more pressing needs.

The Royal Navy (Real Armada) was not founded until 1714, after Spain had lost its dominant position in Europe. The Bourbons streamlined the complex organization that had defined royal maritime affairs and succeeded in defending and even expanding the empire in the eighteenth century. After most of Spain's colonies broke away in the early nineteenth century, there was less need for a navy and less commerce to occupy the merchant marine. When the final remnants of empire were stripped away at the end of the nineteenth century, the days of Spain's maritime prominence were already long past.

Given these circumstances, modern Spain might have neglected its maritime history, yet it has not. The Revista General de Marina, founded in 1877, has published nearly 11,000 articles in its long career. Although most have concerned the military history of the sea (naval history), that does not define the filli range of topics covered. Articles also deal regularly with the merchant marine and the fishing industry. The Revista de Historia Naval, founded in 1983, created a venue for more focused naval history, but there seems to be little antagonism among scholars who study various maritime topics. Instead, they seem to agree with a nineteenth-century merchant marine captain who wrote that “the merchant marine and the navy have identical interests to promote, and instead of divorcing themselves they complement one another. They are like two bodies with a single soul.” Such sentiments were undoubtedly more common when multipurpose vessels dominated the world's sea lanes, and that tradition may have lasted longer in Spain than elsewhere. A wide range of books on maritime matters has also appeared in the past century, and the pace of publications in all aspects of maritime history has increased notably in recent years.