Nor did the word “galleon” necessarily denote a Spanish ship. It is perfectly true that the Spanish Armada contained a number of cumbrous galleons, but it must not be inferred from this that a galleon was necessarily clumsy. In point of fact, Spain was the last of the great maritime nations to adopt the galleon. In England the galleon denoted a vessel built expressly for war, as distinguished from the adapted merchantmen. She was essentially a ship built with finer lines, and in every way smarter than the ordinary vessel. The type had been first introduced into the English service by Henry VIII. long before Spain had adopted it, although, as we mentioned earlier, there was considerable confusion as to the actual names. Thus Henry VIII.’s ships were classed as “great ships,” “galleasses,” and “galleys,” while for a long time, both in England and France, the galleon was called indifferently “galleon,” “galleasse,” “galley,” and “galliot.” By the outbreak of the Spanish war practically all the men-of-war in our country were galleons, and were thus described by foreigners. Nevertheless, as Mr. Corbett points out,[85] English seamen never took kindly to the word galleon. They continued to confuse “galleasse” and “galleon” in describing the ships of foreigners. But for all that English shipwrights understood perfectly the technical characteristics, and in official building programmes after the middle of Elizabeth’s reign the three terms “galleon,” “galleasse,” and “galley” appear correctly. The galleon, as Mr. Masefield well describes her, was roughly the prototype of the ship of the line, the galleasse the prototype of the frigate, and the pinnace of the sloop or corvette. The galleon was low in the waist with a square forecastle and a high quarter-deck just abaft the mainmast, rising to a poop above the quarter-deck. Reckoning upwards, the two decks, according to Manwayring, were called lower orlop or first orlop, and the next the second orlop. But if a ship had three decks they never called the uppermost—the third—by the name of orlop, but simply “upper deck.” The wooden bulkheads that separated the stern from the waist were pierced with holes for small quick-firing guns.