John Hawkins and the race-built galleon

John Hawkins and builders including Richard Chapman, Peter Pett, and Matthew Baker reduced the high castles of the traditional galleon and treated the hull more deliberately as an artillery platform. They lengthened the hull and even drew analogies from the shapes of fish while working without modern hydrodynamic modeling. The resulting ships could sail closer to the wind and dictate distance against Spanish vessels whose strength lay in closing for boarding. Their success in 1588 illustrates both the payoff and the risk of designing an entire fleet around maneuver rather than a standing close-range fight.