Galleon
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Galleon. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a name given by the Spaniards to a very large kind of a vessel, with three masts and three or four decks, such as those used by them in their commerce with South America, to transport the precious metals. They were large clumsy, square-sterned vessels that could make only slow progress under the most favorable conditions. GALLEY. (1) A low, flat-built vessel with one or more rows or banks of oars, said to have been invented by the Corinthians in 700 b. c. The biremes, triremes, quinqueremes, etc., were galleys having so many banks three, five, etc. The oars in a single tier. ( 2) boat for ship's use, from long, and with a beam of its length. It is light and sharp, carrying from 10 to 12 oars, and is used for speedy rowing on expeditions. It usually has six alternate oars rowed by a picked crew. (3) An open boat used on the Thames by English custom house officers, river police, and formerly by press gangs, etc. (4) The cook house on board ship, which is on deck, or in a forward part of the vessel. In distilling, a gallery furnace. In printing, an oblong ceive composing-stick, and on which it is arranged in a column or page. The galley sometimes has a groove to admit a false bottom, called a galley slice.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a large, unwieldy sailing ship. It was formerly much used by the Spaniards. The galleon was an awkward ship of three or four decks, all capable of carrying guns and marines armed with dirk and cutlass. "The galleons," says Motley, "were huge, round-stemmed, clumsy vessels, with bulwarks three or four feet thick, and built up at stem and stern, like castles." The Spaniards employed the galleons especially as treasure-ships in their western commerce. A Spanish galleon laden with treasure of the New World was a prize worthy of Drake or Hawkins. See Drake ; Sir Francis
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts, following the Victorian historian Motley, treat the galleon as "huge, round-stemmed, clumsy" and able to "make only slow progress" y dash a view shaped by English accounts of the 1588 Armada. Naval historians now regard the galleon as one of the more successful ship designs of its age: the sleeker "race-built" English galleons of the 1570s were themselves galleons, and Spanish ships of the type crossed the Pacific on the Manila run for 250 years. What has really changed is that we can now examine them directly, since underwater archaeology barely existed when Aiton's wrote in 1910; Mel Fisher's team found the Nuestra Se tilde ora de Atocha off the Florida Keys in 1985, and the San Jos e, sunk in 1708, was located off Cartagena in 2015. The treasure that made a galleon "a prize worthy of Drake" is now the subject of litigation between states, salvors and Indigenous claimants rather than of privateering.
Written for this edition, 2026.