The Real Arsenal of Havana
The dockyard that built a hundred and nine vessels for the Spanish navy in a Caribbean city, including the largest warship of the age of sail. This entry works from a Havana imprint of 1813 that prints the yard's own list of ships and, on another page, the inscription over the city gate recording the two hundred and twenty enslaved people of the king put to the royal works in 1730.
Why this wins its question: Havana's dockyard is usually met in English either as a line in an article about the Santisima Trinidad or as a sentence about Cuban mahogany. This entry goes to a Havana imprint of 1813 and takes four things from it that the general accounts drop: the yard's own printed list of vessels with its arithmetic totals, the technical argument that Caribbean-built hulls were preferred because they splintered less under fire, the water-driven sawmill fed from the zanja real, and the inscription over the city gate in which the government itself counts the two hundred and twenty enslaved people it had put to the royal works - the achievement and its cost taken from the same book.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The witness used here is a Havana book of 1813, not a modern naval history. Antonio J. Valdes published his "Historia de la isla de Cuba, y en especial de la Habana" at Havana from the Oficina de la Cena in that year, in two volumes, under a Cicero epigraph he prints in Latin and in Spanish - that the first law of history is not to write lies, the second not to conceal the truth, the third not to make oneself suspect of friendship or enmity. In his proemio he calls the work a simple ensayo written from short knowledge and from the wish to give his patria the history it lacks. He is a resident advocate of the city he describes, and the claims below are weighted accordingly.
The port's advantages for building and careening warships, Valdes writes, must have been known from the beginning of its discovery, both for the excellence of its timbers and for a thousand other proportions that are hidden from nobody - yet neither the king nor private persons wished or were able to profit by them until about the year 1626, or a little before, when the king ordered some vessels built for the armada de Barlovento established to guard the coasts of these islands. This is a compiler writing at nearly two centuries' distance, and the date is carried as his.
The first phase of building was private and it provoked a restriction. Valdes records that captain Juan Perez de Oporto and some merchants afterwards built several galleons and pataches to run in the carrera de Indias with known profits, and that from this, it appears, came the prohibition from the court that no timber be cut in the neighbouring woods except what was strictly necessary for building and repairing the houses of the city.
The royal project has a paper trail and a technical argument behind it. At the beginning of 1713 Agustin de Arriola went to court to urge how much such yards would matter to the monarchy; the project drawn up that same year by Bernardo Tinagero, secretary of the Council of the Indies, was, as Uztariz writes, examined and approved by Antonio de Gaztaneta. It proposed the construction of ten ships in this port to escort the fleets and galleons, and argued that ships built with these timbers were preferable to those of Europe not only for their durability but for the advantage in naval combat of being free of the splinters that harm the crew even more than the ball that causes them.
The yard as an establishment dates from the 1720s. Notwithstanding those considerations, Valdes writes, the object was not achieved until 1724 or 1725, by royal order, and construction was then carried on between the Fuerza and the Contaduria; because that place was found cramped and inconvenient, the Arsenal was moved to the site it occupied in his own day, west of the city at the southern end, continuing from the wall, occupying perhaps a mile in circumference and holding the timber stores and other materials for building ships.
Havana became the base as well as the builder. The improvements and the excellence of the port, Valdes records, brought the armada de Barlovento to Havana in 1748; until then it had anchored at Veracruz, an unsheltered and most dangerous port because of the north winds that blow there strongly and do lamentable damage. He then lists the comandantes generales who commanded at the station from that year, beginning with lieutenant general Rodrigo de Torres and ending with Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, first chief of sea and land.
The launching technique changed twice, and Valdes describes both changes. The first ships put into the water at the station cost immense labour because building on slipways was not yet practised: many yokes of oxen were used, boats under oar and sail, and the thrust of iron jacks, so that each vessel took five or six days to float. Afterwards they were built on gradas, and although they went into the water in an instant, it was observed that they broke on falling in, perhaps from the great inclination; and in their place docks were formed - great hollows from which the water is drawn off through gates while the ship is built, the gates being opened once it is finished so that she comes out without the least injury.
The yard was mechanised in one operation at least. In a footnote to the same chapter Valdes describes the water-driven sawmill, which he says has a name outside the island: a machine governed by an axle carrying a great wheel turned by a channel of water from the zanja real which enters the Arsenal, with several irons that saw a number of logs at once with no personal labour beyond bringing them and setting them in place. He calls the mechanism very simple and its usefulness well known.
The output is a printed list with a printed total. Valdes reproduces the "Razon de los buques construidos en el Arsenal de la Habana" as it appeared in the Diario del Gobierno de la Habana of 28 February 1813, giving name, guns and year for each vessel. It opens with the navio San Juan of 50 guns in 1724 and closes with the frigate Santa Ursula, la Anfitrite, of 44 guns in 1796, and the totals printed under it are 49 navios, 22 frigates, 7 packets, 9 brigs, 14 schooners, 4 ganguiles and 4 pontoons - 109 vessels in all.
The list contains the largest warship of the age of sail and several near it. Against the year 1769 it prints "Navio la Santisima Trinidad ... 112" guns, alongside the navio San Francisco de Paula of 70 and the navio San Jose of 70 in the same year; against 1786 the navio San Hipolito, alias el Mexicano, and the navio Conde de Regla, both of 114; and against 1787 the Real Carlos, also of 114. The Santisima Trinidad, later rebuilt and lost at Trafalgar, was built in the Caribbean, not in Europe.
The cost of the works is on the record in the government's own lettering, which is why it can be quoted rather than inferred. Valdes copies the inscription over the inner face of the Puerta de la Punta, which recites the works done under governor Dionisio Martinez de la Vega in the reign of Philip V - vaults, magazine, terrepleins and wall as far as San Telmo, the wall and bastions from the Angel to the Puerta de Tierra, the artillery put in state, the causeway made, and in the Real Astillero warships and three packets with other lesser works - and ends: and it continues so in March of 1730 with 220 slaves of His Majesty whom he has by his own decision put into the royal works.
The timber that made the ships good was taken under a jurisdiction that bore on the countryside. In a footnote Valdes explains that the naval jurisdiction on the island had been wider before the recent sovereign determinations on registers, woods and plantations: as to timber it extended to knowing which trees were to be felled, which had to be with prior licence, and all wood cut without that requirement was confiscated by the ministers of marine and by the watchmen the naval administration kept in the countryside.
The same book records the yard in decline. The footnote describing the Arsenal says that in his own day not even careening is done there beyond what is strictly necessary - written in 1813, seventeen years after the last vessel in the printed list. The launch of a ship, by contrast, he remembers as a public event: the concourse was always extraordinary, the director of naval engineers ordinarily directed the operation, and the joy of the crowd at seeing that great mass launched from land to sea moved the most insensible spirit.
What this entry deliberately does not assert. The pages read give no figure for the total workforce of the Arsenal in any year, no breakdown of enslaved, free black, and salaried white workers, and no tonnage or cost for any vessel; the 220 of the 1730 inscription is a count of the king's slaves at the fortification and shipbuilding works of that moment and is not a workforce total. The printed list is a newspaper table of 1813 reproduced by a partisan of the city, and one of its entries carries the printer's own note that the name of the vessel could not be made out in the manuscript original. No archival series, no Cuban modern scholarship and no naval architectural study was reachable from this container.