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00:30In the middle of the 18th century, under the rule of King Fernando VI, a major reform of the state begins.
00:39The navy is the key to the Spanish colonial rule, and it needs a technological renovation in order to compete against England.
00:47The struggle for global hegemony is disputed in the seas.
01:00The Gulf of Roses, two centuries later.
01:23An archaeological expedition is aimed at studying the vestiges of a great ship found in its waters.
01:29The Gulf of Roses
01:41Thetis, the boat from the Center for Underwater Archaeology of Catalonia, is the base of operations for the excavation.
01:52This time, it is very close to the coast, in front of the beach of San Pera Pescador, in the site that could be that of the Triumfante.
02:02A Spanish ship of the line that sank at the end of the 18th century.
02:06The Gulf of Roses
02:16The Gulf of Roses
02:18The Gulf of Roses
02:20The Gulf of Roses
02:32The excavation of the Triompante was carried out during the years 2008, 2009 and 2010.
02:59The goal was to carry out a study of naval architecture.
03:02We knew that the ship was built using the system of Jorge Juan and we wanted to study, through archaeology, this constructive system.
03:09It had never been done before and we had the fortune of having a boat built with this system sunk in the Gulf of Roses.
03:29If this is actually the Triompante, it will be the first study of a ship built following the ground-breaking designs of one of the most important ship designers of the 18th century.
03:39The memory of the existence of the Triompante was present among the fishermen and divers from the Gulf of Roses.
03:46But the archaeological institutions began to be aware of this archaeological site in the beginning of the 1980s when some local divers communicated it to the Centre for Underwater Archaeology of Catalonia.
03:59However, many years before communicating the presence of the ship to the archaeologists, local fishermen were already aware of its existence in the Gulf of Roses.
04:06Three friends from Roses had a leading role in its discovery.
04:13Salvador Guerra, Paco Falcor, and Carlos Páramo.
04:17However, many years before communicating the presence of the ship to the archaeologists,
04:24local fishermen were already aware of its existence in the Gulf of Roses.
04:30Three friends from Roses had a leading role in its discovery, Salvador Guerra, Paco Falcó
04:37and Carlos Paramo.
04:40In the 1950s, my father talked with the fishermen from Roses in order to point out all the sunken
04:52ships in the bay, which they knew because of the hooks.
04:57And then a fisherman from San Pere Pescador told him about the Triunfante.
05:02He already knew that the ship was the Triunfante and gave the signs to my father.
05:07Then we started to check history books and my father realised that the Triunfante was
05:11a very important ship, belonging to the Admiral Gravina.
05:22With the help of a colleague from Roses, the son of a historian and collector, he found
05:29plans and objects at home.
05:32And after discussing it with his father, he told me that it was possible that an important
05:37ship from the Spanish Navy was sunken there, on the beach.
05:43So one day we took a small plane and we examined the entire bay.
05:46And then, over the beach, we saw a large dark patch and we thought that it could be the Triunfante.
05:54At that time, fishermen or divers like myself had no GPS or similar devices, so we had to
06:00use signs on the ground.
06:03We took some signs from the small plane and then we went to sea with one of my fishing
06:08boats.
06:09And we were stunned by what we saw there.
06:15There were plenty of cannons.
06:16We counted about fourteen.
06:19There was even one that was stuck vertical.
06:21And I said, this will be useful to moor the boats.
06:29The first news I had of the Triunfante is related to my long-standing friendship with
06:34Sabador Guerra.
06:35His father, Esteve Guerra, had documented all the hooks that the fishermen were reporting
06:41as elements that hindered the tasks of trawling and setting the nets and fishing lines on the
06:47sea bottom.
06:54Miquel Oliva y Prat, official archaeologist of the Diputación de Girona, asked Salvador to
07:00take photographs of the elements from the plane.
07:06One element was the country house, Mas Castilla, in Pontos, where the excavations had discovered
07:11some important Iberian archaeological remains.
07:15And the other element was a ship, the Triunfante, in front of San Marti d'Ampurias, which could
07:21be exactly located from the plane, as before that time we didn't know for sure where it was
07:26located.
07:27Salvador Guerra asked me if I could take photos of these two important elements with my camera.
07:34And so we did.
07:37This site was already known.
07:39We knew that there was a big sunken ship in front of San Pera Pescador.
07:43And thanks to the sign of Paco Falco and Salvador Guerra, we relocated the ship and started the
07:48excavation works.
07:50And there's a point where we take down the ship, the front of San Antonio and the front
08:06of the ship.
08:08and put it in the box where it is.
08:39Many of the sunken ships in the Costa Brava have been plundered.
08:44Tourism and lax legislation made these boats an easy prey until the 80s of the 20th century.
08:53El Triunfante, very close to the coast, is a paradigm of this plundering.
08:59When we located the ship again in 2008, we found a spectacular ship,
09:04a large vessel with all its building systems, but at the same time a very plundered ship.
09:11Just consider that it was a ship with 68 cannons
09:13and we have only been able to document a single cannon during the three excavation campaigns.
09:22The Triunfante has been the target of neighbours, tourists and above all, collectors from all over Europe,
09:29eager to get their hands on all of its objects.
09:31For years it suffered from plundering and despite the Board of Underwater Archaeology of Girona's Maritime Province
09:40requesting more surveillance and even applying for a licence for archaeological intervention at the site,
09:46the problem was not resolved. Amateur divers kept on plundering it.
09:50During the 60s and 70s, the wreck of the Triunfante suffered an intensive extraction of archaeological material by local fishermen and divers.
10:02In the early 80s, archaeological expeditions knew about the existence of this ship and the first prospecting was carried out using a new electronic device which had just been purchased,
10:16a magnetometer that allowed the ship to be located with precision.
10:20The first time Salvador and I touched the Triunfante with our hands, we were going through the beach with all the equipment and swimming from the shore to the ship in quite precarious conditions.
10:35When we dived there, we saw some sort of hole and we could touch some Roman numerals.
10:43We saw that it was evidently the prowl. In the same way, exploring the site with our limited equipment, we saw the stern.
10:50We saw a bronze piece finished in the shape of a sphere standing out of the sand.
10:57And later we learned that it was the stern's lunturn.
11:02Later on, in 1977, we carried out regular visits to check the state of the wreck.
11:11And we always found people, tourists, swimming over there.
11:16And we realized that the ship was being plundered.
11:25It was then that myself, Falcó, and several local divers decided to communicate it to the city council.
11:33We went there, recovered two cannons, and delivered them to the city council.
11:38The cannons are now in the Citadel of Roses.
11:40Every time we went there, we extracted one cannon.
11:45Well, we got four cannons in five, six or seven explorations.
11:51I don't know exactly.
11:53We often went there because we like to be there, in that environment.
11:57It is very exciting for a diver to be over a ship with cannons.
12:00We enjoyed that a lot.
12:01But we stopped taking cannons because we also noticed that no one in the town specified what had to be done with those cannons.
12:11And I said that they were going to get lost.
12:14I saw how some of them ended up in a public library, so I thought that maybe they were better conserved under the water and we could always go there to see them.
12:22Until the 1970s, a sunken ship was considered a deposit of archaeological material, and it was thought to belong to the discoverer.
12:36With the arrival of sport diving from the 1950s, a trafficking business of archaeological pieces began, and some of them were auctioned abroad.
12:46When you realize that a piece you've touched, and that you think it is very important and well protected by mud, by nature, has been auctioned in Germany, it generates a feeling of frustration, although it is a frustration already felt many years ago.
13:06The conscience that we were living in a very backward country, that authorities are indolent and don't take responsibility of protecting our heritage.
13:17It creates a feeling of helplessness.
13:19It is sad that our country does not care for what it's part of our history.
13:23The change of mentality took place at the end of the 70s, in the early 80s, when the sunken ship began to be seen as a historical document.
13:31Therefore, as a crucial and essential instrument in order to know our history and therefore our culture.
13:38And so, as a historical document, it's of public ownership.
13:44In 1974, the first official intervention in the ship was performed.
13:49The Navy Diving Centre brought the salvage vessel Poseidon in order to explore and evaluate the archaeological remains.
14:02Later on, in 1974, the Poseidon ship came and carried out the first campaign over the Triunfante.
14:10At that time, I used to have a Land Rover and I remember that I helped them providing materials from the beach because they had to use machines and many things had to be carried from the beach because the boat was close to it.
14:28The Poseidon was a tugboat with a depth of five metres and the Triunfante was four metres deep.
14:34And for this reason, Poseidon could not reach it, nor be placed over the site.
14:41I supported them by guiding them to the site, teaching them everything I had seen and then helping them with my fishing boats.
14:51Carrying people and objects that had to be moved from the small boat to the ship.
14:55And this was our support.
15:05Archaeology has clearly shown us the plundering that the ship has suffered over the years.
15:11We have to bear in mind that the entire prow was torn off.
15:15We could even document the nails that were used to fix it.
15:19The whole area of the mast was also torn off, probably to preserve materials of the compartment of explosives, which we were easily able to document.
15:30Archaeology showed the great harm that the wreck of the Triunfante has suffered.
15:36We were invited to be there. We thought we were privileged.
15:42We saw the entire operation as an absolutely professional occasion.
15:46And naturally, we felt the thrill of seeing a big piece emerging.
15:50We didn't know if they tore it off or if it was part of a loose piece.
15:55We had no idea. They extracted that piece in the same way that the cannons were extracted.
16:00It was a pity that the Stearns Langton was not extracted as well.
16:03After exhibiting the four-side stem and the rest of the pieces in Cartagena in June 1975, the Navy gave them to the Maritime Museum of Barcelona.
16:14But what was the Triunfante doing in Roses? What was the reason behind its tragic ending?
16:31January 1795. The War of the Convention between Spain and the Revolutionary France began one year ago.
16:47The French armies have occupied Figueras, and they are besieging the Citadel of Roses.
16:52The only support comes from the sea, where a naval squadron commanded by Lieutenant General Federico Gravina is trying to break the siege.
17:12For several weeks, the squadron has endured numerous storms and battles that have produced much damage on the ships.
17:21One of these ships is the Triunfante.
17:26The night of January the 5th to the 6th, 1795, they experienced the largest storm and the Triunfante loses its mooring lines and has to seek refuge in the open sea, since it doesn't have any anchor left.
17:39Its captain, Vincente Yanez, is not on board. He is in Federico Gravina's ship, and the captain in charge decides to seek refuge on the high seas.
17:50The wind and the storm push it along the coastline of the Gulf of Roses.
17:59And he finds that the course takes the ship towards the coast in Mont Gris, a rocky coastline where the ship and crew will almost inevitably be lost.
18:08Therefore, the solution is to run aground on the beach of San Pere Pescador.
18:15On the morning of January 6th, 1795, Gravina sees from Roses how the Triunfante has run aground on the beach of San Pere Pescador,
18:29and commands that everything must be disembarked from the ship, cannons, ammunition, etc.
18:36As the Triunfante was sinking, the army began to recover every possible thing. Vessels and carriages carried the objects and weapons were brought to Cartagena, and thus the ship was abandoned.
18:55With the abandonment of the ship, a process of degradation began. Storms, sea organisms, and the inhabitants of the area were the main causes.
19:08Slowly, the sea swallowed it.
19:25The ship suffered significant plundering during the 60s and 70s.
19:33Furthermore, this ship is 6 meters deep, run aground in the sand, and this means that the storms cover and uncover it with sand, which generates mechanical effect on the remains.
19:45The plundering and the mechanical effect left the ship in deplorable conditions in the details, but despite this fact,
19:53it preserved its entire structure, virtually its entire length and breadth.
20:06During the excavation, more precisely on December 26th of the year 2008, a very strong storm occurred along the entire coastline of Catalonia.
20:17And it moved all the sediment, all the sand of the seabed.
20:29In the year 2009, when we went to do the field work, we found that two meters of sand had settled over the site where we had worked the previous year.
20:38To get to the site and reach the archaeological level, we had to use some industrial dredgers in order to remove the great volume of sand,
20:48and to be able to document the ship, which had been so easy to work on the year before.
20:52The year before.
20:53The year before.
21:22In order to remove the vast amount of sand, the archaeologists used an industrial dredge adapted to archaeological work.
21:34In this way, they drew out the three meters of sediments and deposited them far from the site.
21:39It took nearly two weeks of digging to reach the remains of the ship.
21:42It took nearly two weeks of digging to reach the remains of the ship.
21:46Working six hours a day, two teams of four archaeologists collaborated to operate the dredge that had to extract all the sand from the site.
22:09When the first remains appeared, they began to work with suction hoses.
22:24These hoses enable the sediments that cover the architecture of the ship to be carefully removed in order to discover the archaeological objects.
22:32They are also necessary to keep the site free of the sand that the sea currents deposit.
22:53In terms of field work, this ship allowed us to perform a lot of teamwork, as it is a very big vessel.
23:00And what we did was to remove the sediments that covered the remains we wanted to study, as any archaeologist would do, and then document them.
23:13These two teams worked together, one removing the sediments and the other documenting the objects, since the size of the ship allowed us to do that.
23:21On up to the ground!
23:23This one we found thesekres'�.
23:24This is the one we found in the dead ship.
23:25Before the boat, this ship allowed us to do that.
23:26It never was to let us get back to the dead ship.
23:27This is something you guys said, after all we could be using the carnival of the ship.
23:29The ship has lost us in the air in the air in the air in the air.
23:30The ship will be withdrawn.
23:31The ship was made in the air in the air.
23:32The ship's with the ship is taken from the air.
23:33The ship was gathered together, and it's all to the space and the air.
23:35This is the ship's with the ship.
23:37This is a ship's with americana.
23:38The ship will take over the ship.
23:39It is to have as many miles.
23:40It is a ship's with the ship on the ship's and the ship.
23:41At the Centre for Underwater Archaeology of Catalonia, we work with suction hoses.
24:02The technique is very simple.
24:04From the ship Thetis, pressured air is sent to the working depth level.
24:09This air reaches the working depth level and reaches an expansion chamber.
24:20And this air, as you know, increases its volume when it loses depth.
24:26If we lock this ascending air inside a tube, we generate the stream of suction that we
24:34need to remove the sediment.
24:38The suction hose system runs this way.
24:42We need to direct this suction, and for that we use a flexible tube, which helps us to direct
24:49the suction and thus extract the sediment within the site.
24:57Now that you've seen how suction hoses work, let's see the Triunfante, the ship where
25:03we'll work today.
25:05We'll make two diving groups.
25:08The time in which Roberto, Quique and Paul will work.
25:13An hour and a half of work.
25:18And a second shift.
25:19Maria Jose, Adrià , Edu and me.
25:23Also an hour and a half of work.
25:24Also an hour and a half of work.
25:25Okay?
25:26We have two suction hoses.
25:30We'll put one at the junction between the frames and the oar-lock deck.
25:38They are, as you know, the original floor of the ship's hold.
25:50Then we'll unload the sediment far from the site, facing the port side.
25:55Okay?
25:56And another hose will clean the spaces between the frames.
26:07Here we must clean very carefully.
26:13As if we find archeological material, it will be precisely right here, in these spaces between
26:19the frames.
26:21Always start from the keel and work towards the ends of the boat.
26:26Okay?
26:31The Triunfante is a ship from the Enlightenment period.
26:36A ship that was launched in 1755, as a result of a new policy of the Spanish state,
26:42which was aware that the Spanish Armada had become obsolete.
26:46The renewal plan of the Navy minister, Marquez de la Ensenada, counted on the best scientists
26:55in the country.
26:56Among them, the most prominent was Jorge Juan y Santa Celia, known in Europe as the Spanish
27:04Sage.
27:05Jorge Juan was considered the most important Spanish scientist of the 18th century.
27:12Member of the Order of Malta and trained at the Academy of Marine Guards of Cadiz, he was
27:16an engineer, a mathematician and a great navigator.
27:21In the year 1749, Marquez de la Ensenada, Minister of Finance and the War of King Fernando VI, commissioned
27:29Jorge Juan, a delicate espionage mission in the British arsenals.
27:34He sent scale models, drawings, books and machinery from London.
27:39But above all, he recruited 80 English and Irish technicians for the Spanish crown.
27:45These people with their families moved clandestinely to Spain in order to work in the new naval program.
27:51During his espionage mission in London, Jorge Juan adopted different identities.
28:00The first known identity is that of a French bookseller called Monsieur Soublevant.
28:06The second, that of a Sephardic Jew, Mr. Joshua.
28:11And the third would probably be that of a Menorcan sailor.
28:14And at that time, Menorca was under British rule.
28:23Jorge Juan introduces a new way of conceiving and building ships in Spain.
28:31And the Triumfante is one of the first vessels created with this new philosophy,
28:37with this new naval engineering knowledge, largely imported from England.
28:43So, it marks a milestone for shipbuilding in Spain.
29:04Jorge Juan's design of ships is his own design.
29:08But, in fact, one might speak of a hybridization of Spanish and English dimensions and shapes.
29:17It is the result of his espionage mission in England, but also of his dialogues with Ricardo Ruth.
29:25In order to develop his designs, Jorge Juan had the collaboration and experience of Richard Ruth.
29:33This important builder, recruited in London, became the director of naval construction in the shipyards of Ferrol.
29:40Jorge Juan.
29:41Jorge Juan conceived the Triumfante ship based on the English model, and this is the great contribution of this ship.
29:52However, the infighting and the political situation meant that later on this English project also adopted contributions from the French and Spanish naval tradition.
30:05There are details that are not reflected in the documentation.
30:12For example, the arrangement of the tree nails to attach the frames with the skin.
30:18Or, for example, the way the keel is built as archaeology documents it.
30:23The documentation of the Triumfante had two aspects.
30:30On one side, the documentation of a large ship, one of the biggest ships studied in the country.
30:36And at the same time, it had to be a very precise dossier, as we wanted to fully understand Jorge Juan's constructive system.
30:43And we need to keep in mind that this ship was built in 1755, but sank in 1795, and Jorge Juan's system was used for a short time, especially during the time of construction of the ship.
30:56So we had to research how the early system of the boat was.
31:00At the same time, during its active life, some parts of it were remanufactured at the dock of Cartagena.
31:07So we also had to document them archaeologically and separate them from Jorge Juan's constructive system.
31:15For the scale presentation, or planimetry, they first marked the parts of the ship.
31:22This marking allowed them to have a reference that identifies and distinguishes each of these pieces.
31:30A manual drawing method was chosen for planimetry.
31:45This was done using a drawing structure, a frame of 6 meters by 4 meters, which covers an area of 24 square meters.
31:53This allows the simultaneous work of two archaeologists, carrying out the floor plan.
32:18In the case of sections and elevations, which along with the floor plan, give us the three-dimensional information about the remains of the ship, we used an underwater laser system.
32:28This is a similar system to the one used on land, but applied to the aquatic environment.
32:41The main problem was the large size of this wreck.
32:45About 50 meters of preserved length by more than 10 meters breadth.
32:52This makes a study area of 670 square meters that required moving the drawing frame 28 times.
33:02Subsequently, all this documentation manually compiled in the field is digitized and vectorized, using a computer drawing program.
33:17This allows, later on, to study the naval architecture and to create three-dimensional reconstructions of the ship.
33:32Zenit photography was also used as a complement to the manual drawing method.
33:47We photographed all the vestiges of the ship with metric references.
33:51This enabled us to compose a photo mosaic of the entire site.
33:55In addition, detailed photographs of distinctive or characteristic items were also taken.
34:00Two hundred years later, some items still remain at the site.
34:09One of the challenges will be their recovery.
34:19Between the timbers of the hold's floor, one of the archaeologists has found the remains of a musket.
34:23A layer of build-up, produced by the interaction of iron's corrosion and sea organisms, covers the weapon and keeps it attached to the wood.
34:32It must be extracted very carefully.
34:41At the same time, the second group of archaeologists continues the planimetry of floor plans and sections.
35:02The archaeologists accurately hit the layer of build-up in order to separate the musket from the wood.
35:08A sudden movement could break it.
35:16Once detached, it is immobilized for transport.
35:27Using a lifting balloon, two archaeologists bring the musket to the surface.
35:31The marine
35:53So
36:23when it reaches the port one of the most delicate moments of the excavation
36:34begins the transport of archaeological material once extracted from the site to
36:41the pieces should be always kept in water
36:47momentarily for the transfer some objects can be removed from the water but they
36:51should be kept moist until their arrival at the laboratory
36:55and the heart of the local most people think that our archaeological work is
37:00mainly under water but in fact it's divided into three stages fieldwork when
37:07we indeed work under water which is 40% of the total archaeological work the
37:14laboratory work and then the library research and study of the pieces which
37:19completes the work put it upside down they're big on the top that's it
37:32the laboratory of the Center for underwater archaeology of Catalonia located in Girona
37:38is a model for the study and restoration of archaeological pieces here the
37:45restorers carry out different processes of restoration of the different objects
37:50found during the excavation campaigns
37:54at the triumfante we have found various objects from the crew weapons or objects belonging to the ship
38:17there are organic objects such as wood leather and ropes and non-organic objects such as iron bronze and lead
38:27archaeological objects arrive at the lab with different problems due to the long
38:37period of time that they have been submerged some are covered with a layer of very hard buildup or have
38:43encrustations of different intervertebrate organisms that cover its surface
38:47the terrain on our values one of these intervertebrates are mollusks that live in the wood and perforated
38:57creating large limestone galleries that destroy the structure of the ships
39:01the conservators carry out chemical and mechanical cleaning of the parts in order to remove the
39:13deposits on its surface they use different cleaning instruments from precision tools to household objects
39:23objects
39:30the pieces remain submerged for months in freshwater tanks where the conservators get information about the desalination
39:52about the desalinization process
39:55through regular checks of the salt concentration.
39:59The salt accumulated over so many years will slowly dissolve.
40:08Archaeological wood after centuries under the sea
40:11has lost all the cellulose
40:13that originally held its structure.
40:15Now only water retains the shape of the wood.
40:22Organic materials are preserved until the present time
40:27because they are saturated with water.
40:29If we remove them from the water,
40:31they suffer irreversible degradation.
40:34Using different techniques,
40:36the conservators perform a controlled drying
40:38in order to ensure the preservation of the piece
40:42and its subsequent exhibition in museums.
40:44One of the procedures for drying organic material
40:47such as wood is lyophilization.
40:49Archaeological pieces are frozen
40:54and later introduced into a vacuum chamber
40:56where the frozen water of the piece
40:58goes from the solid state to gaseous state
41:01through a sublimation process.
41:06This way, the shape of the object is preserved.
41:12Another conservation process is the PEG saturation.
41:16The pieces are immersed in a solution of water
41:19and synthetic wax, polyethylene glycol,
41:22to a temperature close to 60 degrees Celsius.
41:26The concentration of this wax will be increased gradually.
41:32Thus, the resulting solution replaces the water
41:34inside the wood and preserves the shape of the object.
41:38So, for the treatment of the ferrous materials
41:47of the Triumfante, they use electrolysis,
41:50which consists in applying low-voltage electricity
41:53through the piece in order to remove the layer of build-up
41:57and stop the oxidation process.
41:59Once the different processes of restoration
42:17and conservation are completed,
42:19the objects extracted from the Triumfante
42:22are ready to be exhibited.
42:23It's a preparation for the construction.
42:26П
42:40Its uniform is designed to create a new construction system
42:42based on the combination of the English building system
42:43and the French-Spanish building system.
42:45It's a different building system that takes the best of each technique and makes a revolution,
42:52creating different and better ships within the building tradition of the 18th century.
43:01The English construction details, breaking up with the Spanish tradition, are, on the one hand,
43:07the joints of the different pieces in the keel, changing its horizontal disposition into a vertical one.
43:15The addition of a great piece that goes from the prow to the stern on the top of the keel, which is called deadwood.
43:22The removal of the empty spaces between the frames, resulting in a much more solid and compact construction.
43:30And also of the spaces between the different elements of a frame.
43:35The addition of filler pieces that they call choques.
43:39Theoretically speaking, we can indeed see these big differences.
43:46But what we aim to do in our study of the Triunfante was to understand, archaeologically, at the practical level,
43:53how this construction system was implemented.
43:56Other construction details are the half timber in the prow and the stern, instead of floor timbers from the stern,
44:07big pieces in the shape of a V.
44:12And then, above all, the use of tree nails instead of iron nails to secure the sheathing of the hull,
44:19the most criticised object by Spanish builders.
44:25It was difficult to implement Jorge Juan's construction system in the Spanish shipyards.
44:33We should bear in mind that Jorge Juan brought a group of British shipbuilders from England,
44:38many of them Irish, who only spoke English or Gaelic,
44:42but not any language of the Iberian Peninsula.
44:50This made it very difficult to explain the methods of the new construction systems to the master builders,
44:56who were working on the ships with their own hand.
45:02This system mainly followed an English construction system.
45:12So it used tree nails to attach the pieces,
45:16and the master builders of the Spanish shipyards were used to working with nails.
45:23The union of wood with wood was not typical of the Iberian Peninsula.
45:27Originally, and following the English construction technique imported by Jorge Juan,
45:37the most important pieces of the Triunfante were attached by tree nails,
45:42and can still be found at the site.
45:47Political and technical changes caused the replacement of these tree nails
45:52with iron nails in some parts of the ship.
45:54The iron nails have disappeared due to oxidation,
45:59but regularly distributed holes allow us to detect them.
46:06To make the planimetry easier, we had to highlight them using marking elements.
46:11Jorge Juan's general design was not criticised.
46:30In principle, it was good.
46:32So the targets of the criticism were the English constructive details.
46:35Why?
46:36Because they break up with the Spanish tradition of construction.
46:40The maestranza, the union of the master builders,
46:44had to get used to a new way of building.
46:46The study of the vessel shows that the Triunfante was conceived using the English model,
47:03but also that throughout the construction process
47:06and during the 40 years of its life until the sinking in 1795,
47:11it underwent significant changes.
47:14Both, as I said, during the construction and hull shaping,
47:19as well as after the reforms made throughout its active life,
47:23some in Cartagena.
47:25For example, they added a copper sheathing.
47:29Important parts of the wooden sheathing were changed,
47:32as well as some structural parts.
47:34Archaeology shows this development,
47:36both regarding the concept and the maintenance of the ship.
47:38Why was a system that provided important technical innovations not consolidated?
47:47What happened?
47:48Why did it fall into disuse?
47:51In mid-1754, Marques de la Ensenada falls out of favour,
47:58and the critics of the minister and of the English construction system
48:02try to change this new structural tradition in Spain.
48:11Therefore, in 1755, the changes begin,
48:16a reversion back to the Spanish methods
48:19and an abandonment of some English practices.
48:22And above all, in the year 1763,
48:26François Gautier arrives from France to take charge of Spanish shipbuilding,
48:30and he removes all English practices
48:32and imposes the French methods of construction.
48:35With the fall of the Marquess,
48:39Jorge Juan and his naval programme will be progressively discarded.
48:44Faced with this situation,
48:45he decides to go back to Cadiz
48:47and resume his duties as the director of the Academy of the Marine Guard.
48:55The Triunfante is a failed project of the Enlightenment.
49:01It's a project that sought to build a new Spanish armada
49:06with completely new techniques,
49:10essentially imported from England.
49:13And that, however, was not accomplished
49:15because it became a hybrid work
49:18of French and Spanish systems of construction.
49:24Underwater archaeology identifies
49:26which of its parts belonged to each of these traditions.
49:29The problem of this construction system
49:33was its implementation.
49:36We have to consider that it was a progress
49:38that people of that time
49:39were probably not prepared to accept.
49:54Today, the Triunfante remains protected by sea sediments.
49:58Even so, there are still many sites to explore on our coast.
50:05Many ships.
50:07Many stories that are waiting to surface again someday.
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