atasses" and "zabras" | 22 | 1,121 | 91 | 479 | 574 | 1,093
(small craft) | | | | | |
Neapolitan galleasses | 4 | -- | 200 | 773 | 468 | 1,341
Galleys | 4 | -- | 20 | -- | 362 | 362
------------------------+--------+-------+------+----------+--------+----------
| 130 |57,868 |2,431 | 19,295 | 8,050 | 27,365
Rowers (in galleasses and galleys) | | | | 2,088
| | | | ------
Grand total, soldiers, sailors and rowers| | | | 29,453
-----------------------------------------+------+----------+--------+----------

The first point to note about the Armada is that it was almost entirely a
fleet of sailing-ships. The new period of naval war had begun. There had
been hundreds of galleys at Lepanto, seventeen years earlier, but there
were only four in the Armada, and none of these reached the Channel. The
long, low, oar-driven warship, that for two thousand years had done so much
fighting in the Mediterranean, proved useless in the long waves of the
Atlantic.[7] The only oared ships that really took part in the campaign
were the four galleasses, and in these the oar was only auxiliary to the
spread of sail on their three full-rigged masts. The galleasse has been
described in the story of Lepanto. It was an intermediate or transition
type of ship. It seems to have so impressed the English onlookers that the
four galleasses are given quite an unmerited importance in some of the
popular narratives of the war.

[7] Galleys were used in the land-locked Mediterranean and
Baltic up to the first years of the nineteenth century, but the
only sailors who ever ventured to take galleys into the wild
weather of the Atlantic were the Norse Vikings.

But the day of sails had come, and the really effective strength of the
Armada lay in the tall galleons of the six "armadas" or squadrons of
Portugal, the Spanish provinces, and the Levantine traders. The galleon was
a large sailing-ship, but even as to the size of the galleons the popular
tradition of history is full of exaggeration. Built primarily for commerce,
not for war, they carried fewer guns than the galleasses, though many of
them were of heavier tonnage. In those days every large trader carried a
ce