INTRODUCTION

The 19thcentury in Spain opened and closed with two calamitous naval defeats:at Trafalgar in 1805, at the hands of Great Britain, and at Santiago de Cuba and Cavite(Philippines), in 1898, against the United States. The latter naval debacles, widely labelled by the media as the “Disaster of 1898”, lost Spain her last colonies of Cuba, Porto Rico and Philippines, reducing her definitively to a secondrank maritime and global power. Spanish Prime Minister Francisco Silvela made it very clear in the autumn of 1898: “the first lesson to be learned from the ‘disaster’, although not the most popular, is that … to give up a navy is to abandon independence and a future in the world”.

Silvela's statement appeared in the prologue of a book by Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, which appeared a few months after the disaster, attempting to explain the influence of sea power upon Spanish history in accordance with Mahan's theory. According to Mahan, Spain had never been a significant sea power, ultimately because of her people's lack of maritime interest and expertise. This negative assessment of the relationship between the country and the sea became widespread among the media, the politicians and even the intellectuals of the time. Along with Sánchez de Toca, who became Navy Minister in 1902, his comrade in the Conservative Party, Antonio Maura, stated in 1899 that “for centuries Spain has launched fleet after fleet, and won with them nothing but defeat and disgrace”. Joaquín Costa, another politician leader of the “regenerative” movement, claimed in 1907 that “Spain has never exhibited the attitudes of a naval power”, and that this was one of the causes of Spanish decline.