San Salvador (Guipúzcoan squadron)
Ship in the Spanish Navy
San Salvador was a Spanish galleon of the Spanish Armada as part of the Guipúzcoan squadron of Miguel de Oquendo.
She was damaged and captured as a result of the first encounter of the Armada with the Royal Navy in 1588. San Salvador was lost at sea in the English Channel later that same year.
Capture
During the first encounter with the English fleet on 31 July 1588, during a lull in battle, San Salvador's gunpowder magazine exploded, lighting a portion of the ship on fire. The Spanish fleet was able to extinguish the flames and rescue some of the injured. 49 crew died as a result of this explosion and 23 had died previously due to combat.
On 1 August, San Salvador was ordered to be scuttled, but instead was simply set adrift.
The English dispatched an inspection party to San Salvador and found approximately fifty burnt bodies aboard. Golden Hind, a ship in the English fleet, then towed San Salvador to the English port at Weymouth.
Significance
San Salvador was one of the heaviest armed in the Spanish fleet.
“San Salvador (Guipúzcoan squadron)” enters the record as ship in the Spanish Navy. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Salvador, Guipúzcoan and squadron can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “San Salvador (Guipúzcoan squadron)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.