Reading history of multiple eras raises questions about the Spanish Navy

The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards, Mr. Ellis, is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, ever ready.
-Jack Aubrey, in Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

That's a memorably funny declaration by a British warship captain before a battle in one of maritime fiction's greatest masterworks. It takes a little different connotation where I found it this week: as the dedication quote of Manila and Santiago: The New Steel Navy in the Spanish-American War, an otherwise-serious history book by Jim Leeke.

Using that quote is bold and perhaps a bit insensitive, but it isn't inaccurate when it comes to the Spanish-American War. Naval battles in that war were extremely lopsided, as the US Navy had finally figured out that their naval power was seriously declining about a decade before, and done something about it. The Spanish - and everyone else - discovered that their naval power was seriously declining the moment they ran it into the new US Navy.

The Spanish were unready on a large-scale, in that their ships were incapable of competing with up-to-date equipment. They were also unready on a small scale, as their gunners were unpracticed and their logistics were disastrous. This war was before anyone had reasonable accuracy at sea, but the Spanish truly couldn't hit anything; in the two major naval battles of the war their cannons killed as many people as heatstroke. (One each.) Meanwhile the Americans utterly destroyed both the Philippine and Caribbean Squadrons of the Spanish Navy, essentially crushing it entirely in a real-world lopsided conflict that would be more at home in a game of Civilization where you get to tanks before anyone else has gunpowder.

While O'Brian's books are set during the Napoleonic Wars, almost a hundred years earlier, he probably couldn't avoid thinking about the Spanish-American War when he wrote in that context. It was the peak of a trend in the Spanish Navy that held for centuries.

By itself this wouldn't have been fantastically interesting, but then I started reading a different book, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesiuts and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World by Noel Malcolm, in which a very different Spanish Navy is featured, though "Navy" at this point is a bit of an anachronism. This Spanish war fleet was composed of galleys and deployed against the Ottoman Empire as part of the Holy League of Spain, Venice, and the Papal States in the late 16th Century.

One thing they have in common with the 1898 fleet: they were never, ever ready. But in this case, at least as Malcolm presents it, this wasn't a matter of unawareness and incompetence, but political machinations. Philip II of Spain really didn't want the fleet to be too successful in the eastern Mediterranean, because any victories there would lead to long-term power expansion for Venice. On multiple occasions he instructed his fleet commander to prevaricate and delay, and sometimes even refuse to take his ships east, in hopes of sabotaging the operations and eventually getting the League expedition against North Africa that he truly wanted.

Because of this, at the time the Spanish gained a strong reputation with their allies of never being ready for battle, always delaying, and wanting to end campaigns and go home at the earliest possible moment. They did end up in one significant battle, a dramatic victory at Lepanto driven mostly by Venetian technological superiority. But their unwillingness to follow up that success made it essentially meaningless in the context of the war, and they completely scuttled naval campaigns in other years.

Malcolm very definitively presents this as conscious and intentional on the part of the Spanish authorities, but later trends in Spanish maritime practice make this at least a little bit suspicious. Just sixteen years after Lepanto, the Spanish sent a 130-ship armada to invade England, with well-known results. Although the Spanish unreadiness in that situation is frequently overstated, it was still a primary factor in their failure.

The reputation of Spanish unreadiness lasted through multiple major defeats in the War of the Quadruple Alliance in 1718, the Seven Years' War in 1762, and the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th Century, before the final crushing defeats of 1898. The modern Spanish Navy, rebuilt in the late 20th Century, is well-regarded if essentially untested.

It seems like any trend that lasts more than three hundred years is worth a little investigation. Is it true that the dithering against the Ottomans was purely political, as Malcolm supposes, or was there some element of cultural unreadiness already at play? Perhaps Philip's orders started a trend within Spanish naval culture, creating an expectation of unreadiness which was later self-fulfilling? Certainly an almost-unbroken history of major maritime losses would not have encouraged Spain's best men to join the Navy, nor promoted heavy government investment, so perhaps it simply spiraled out of control.

In any case this is something I'll be looking for in future reading.