In December 1565, the Spanish galleon San Juan lay at anchor in the small harbor at Red Bay on Canada’s Labrador coast. Her hold held 1,000 barrels of whale oil from a successful hunting season, and she was preparing to sail back across the Atlantic to Spain and fortune.
But, a bitter winter storm picked up, the San Juan broke loose from her mooring, ran onto the rocky shore where the hull was holed and sank. She would lie there lost to the world for the next 405 years.
Flash forward to 1970, when marine archeologist Selma Barkham followed her years of research to Red Bay and discovered the wreck of the San Juan.
The wreck is considered one of the best preserved of its type and from that era so Parks Canada adopted the recovery process and collected and carefully documented all 3,000 pieced of the original hull.
Flash forward again in 2024 to a large covered workshop belonging on Spaniard Xabier Agote in the town of Pasaia on the Basque coast of Spain. Inside, teams of craftsmen are using hand tools modeled on those from the 16th century to shape huge wood frames and planks as they build a replica of an old galleon based on the meticulous work done by Barkham and Parks Canada.
“They gave us the gift of the secrets of the 16th-century Basque ship building technology that was so important back then,” said Agote.
But turning the vision of building a traditional wood galleon was not easy. Agote founded a school to teach traditional ship building techniques and got a UNESCO grant to fund the project.
The finished ship is scheduled to be launched in 2025 and, all going well, Agote and his team plan to sail the replica of the San Juan back to Canada in 2026. Read more.
