During the early years of Elizabeth there was a tendency to neglect the Royal Navy. The country was so strong in privateers and merchant craft available for war, and so devoid were her possible antagonists, France and Spain, of true naval power, that little was done. But about 1570 the news of Menendez’s untiring efforts brought about a new shipbuilding programme under the direction of John Hawkins, who in 1569 became Treasurer of the Navy. Several new ships were built under his supervision, and were the most formidable fighting engines that had yet appeared on the seas. They were of moderate size, but very seaworthy, heavily armed, and almost entirely lacking the high fore-and-stern castles which had encumbered the earlier vessels. In 1574 a Spanish agent, reporting to his Government, noted their great fighting value. The word ‘galleon’ has been frequently misinterpreted. The galleon was a ship fit for ocean work, built with something of the fine lines of a galley--hence its name. The very long, narrow, lightly-built galley was useless in the Atlantic; on the other hand, the short, broad, oceanic trading vessels were too slow and unwieldy to be of use in war. Trimming between these two extremes, the French shipwrights evolved a vessel at once seaworthy and comparatively fast, and the model was adopted by England and the Peninsular States. Its essential characteristics were that it was three beams or more long, with a draft two-fifths of its beam. By an extraordinary series of misconceptions the galleon has come to be regarded as a heavy, clumsy vessel peculiar to Spain. As a fact, Spain was perhaps the last of the great Powers of the sixteenth century to adopt it. This conclusion has been very convincingly set forth by Mr. Julian Corbett in his ‘Drake and the Tudor Navy.’ [Illustration: AN ELIZABETHAN MIDDLE-RATE GALLEON OR BATTLESHIP. She has one covered gun-deck, and shows the low forecastle as against the high ‘cageworks’ of contemporary Spanish vessels. (_From a contemporary drawing by Visscher._)]