The ship was also purposefully designed to be more sail worthy then the carrack with its unwieldy forecastles. Unlike the cargo carrying carrack, galleon was purposely built to accommodate large number of artillery pieces onboard. The original ship model was built around 1600, today kept in the Museum of Maritime History in Stockholm. Galleons are a type of ship of 16th and 17th centuries that is closest we can have to a large sailing warship of the period. This ship model is a copy of the original made in 1950s. One of the oldest votive ships in the world. Possibly, you'd also have a ship's surgeon, if the voyage was considered risky enough. Votive ship hanging from the ceiling of the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas. They, therefore, could manage with a smaller guncrew to work them (often half the number of an equivalent weapon on a naval ship). The cannon of a merchant vessel were usually smaller, lighter and less powerful than their military equivalents. You'd need an experienced gunner for each gun and additional men to load and run out the guns. In wartime, it would carry additional men to serve the guns. With 500 tons of cargo capacity, a strong hull, and an ample number of guns, the medium galleon is an excellent choice for blue-water merchantmen that want or. For longer voyages, you'd also include a ship's carpenter and a sailmaker to aid repairs on the voyage. In peacetime, a skeleton crew could be the Captain (who would also serve as the ship's sailing master), a helmsman, sufficient seamen to work the sails, and possibly a few petty officers to oversee those sailors.

A Spanish treasure galleon would be larger, carry more guns and therefore have a much larger crew than a galleon carrying manufactured goods around Europe. The exact number of crew would be dependant on the size and nature of the vessel, the amount of sail carried, the number of guns carried and whether it was likely to need those guns (i.e. As the dimensions of ship varied greatly, there was no standard volume (.3 answers Top answer: The biggest were the Chinese treasure ship. Merchant vessels typically didn't carry much in the way of 'spare' crew because it didn't make much economic sense to carry people who weren't essential to the ship's operations. The weight of cargo which could be carried depended upon the dimensions of the ship. Galleons were less common in the 18th Century than they were in their heyday, a century or two before.

Galleon cargo size