Nao Victoria
This was the second of the Nao Victoria Foundation's replica ships that we were lucky enough to see this year. The first was of course the Nao Santa Maria, which was bigger than the Nao Victoria despite it being the smaller Carrack ship.
We again ended up in Chatham for the second weekend in a row in order to view this beautiful piece of Spanish history, and this time we were dogless so were able to experience it together rather than in turns!
The Nao Victoria is a replica of the first ship to successfully circumnavigate the globe. The ship, christened in the name of the original vessel, even recreated the original voyage in 2004 and it took 2 years to complete! Since then the ship has been touring ports around the world as a travelling museum to show off its history.
The original Victoria took 3 years to do the same journey under Juan Sebastian Elecano from Seville, and was lost at sea in the 1570s, considering it went around the globe between 1519 and 1522 and was the only one of the five ships of the 'Spice Army' to do so, we think being lost to history 50 years later was a decent yet sad feat.
The replica was built in 1991 in Spain and took off in 2004 on it's global voyage to follow the footsteps of its inspiration, however it did take a slightly different route. The journey was completed in 2006. It followed the drawings of the original and faithfully recreated the dimensions, but it is actually one of two replicas made by the foundation, the other became a permanent exhibit next to the Torre del Oro.
The Nao Victoria is a Carrack not a Galleon. It is interesting to note that the Galleon later superseded the Carrack in the 17th century as the trades ship of choice, but the Carrack is an ocean sailing ship typically with three to four masts and enough cargo space to have services the trading of the time. Interestingly, the Nao Santa Maria is also portrayed as a Carrack and not a Galleon at times, although this did seem to be an armed cargo ship and the Carracks were not armed which is why they were left in their era. It looks as though in modern times the terms Nao, Galleon, and Carrack are all interchangeable, but for arguments sakes these are smaller Galleon replicas.
Much like the other Spanish Tallship we saw in Gravesend, this isn't really a museum in the traditional sense. In fact, as this is smaller than the ship we'd seen previously there wasn't really much room to roam the deck quite to the length we did on the other one. Below deck there wasn't as much space or replicas of days on the sea to view, and above deck you couldn't stand on the very top like on the Santa Maria. We couldn't see into the Captain's cabin either as a crew member had opted to take her break there so had shut the door. It wasn't the most successful of nautical trips, but it was interesting to see the difference between the two ships. The Nao Victoria was far more narrow than the Nao Santa Maria and there wasn't much room on any of the decks so how this managed to carry much cargo to Europe we don't know. We enjoyed it though, and considering we had already arranged to see the Galeon Andalucia when it docked at Dover, we needed to complete the trilogy of Nao Victoria Foundation's replica ships.
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