Spain planned to 'invade' Australia in the 1790s with 100-vessel armada | Hacker News Reader

Spain planned to 'invade' Australia in the 1790s with 100-vessel armada

telegraph.co.uk

48 pointsHooke19 comments

Quite incredible. Imagine Australia speaking Spanish instead of English.

Its an extremely stable state. I would be reluctant to think it would still be fought over today if Spain did try to take it.

It probably would have been taken by the US in the Spanish-American War, just like the Philippines were.

I wish they'd do it now. We need a new government.

The Spanish government has screwed the Spanish economy up. No thanks.

If this had transpired, maybe our idiot Prime Minister would've made Rafael Nadal a caballero on Australia Day this year.

Sounds like a pipe dream from the outset. 100 ships? Against a small colony on the other side of the world? As a sense of scale, the Spanish Armada, expected to take over England itself if it succeeded (albeit 200 years earlier) was 130 ships strong. And the first colonisation fleet sent by the British was only 11 ships. While not all ships are created equal, 100 ships is still an enormous undertaking, especially at the limits of your supply lines.

Yeah, just to take a tiny colony 100 ships makes no sense. The English colonists were frequently fighting with the Aborigines, so were fairly well armed and defended against them, but not against cannon. I would think at most a dozen frigates, and perhaps a half dozen support ships would be plenty, even carrying a strong contingent of marines. The colony was still new and small. Perhaps they expected the British navy to show up.

It was the style at the time.

The voyage from Spain to England's quite short. For a voyage from South America to Australia across the Pacific, you'd need a few ships purely to carry supplies, plus you'd have to account for a fair amount of losses of ships and men due to bad weather, disease etc.

And tkke on the world power of the English? I'm quite surprised!

Is it only an invasion if it's against white people?

Post of the day!

Cute. They couldn't even take Gibraltar then, and that was tiny and on their border.

How attacking a colonial settlement is "invading" Australia?.

In fact the British actually used to attack Spanish settlements at the time, and supported piracy against the Spanish Armada.

It has very little to do with actual Australia. It were the British who invaded Australia, killing most of the native population.

Go around Australia and see how many non whites there are. See who has all the wealth on the country.

Based on their record elsewhere, it isn't clear that the Spanish would have treated Aborigines any better than the British did. It sucks to be colonized.

"supported piracy against the Spanish Armada"

I wish your statement of fact on this issue had been as well placed as your sentiments.

It's semantics but just in case "Viewed from London, buccaneering was a low-budget way to wage war on England's rival, Spain. So, the English crown licensed buccaneers with letters of marque, legalizing their operations in return for a share of their profits." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buccaneer

Pretty much all the major European powers handed out letters of marque to privateers/mercenaries though and the practice predated buccaneers and the Spanish Main. However, the British probably exploited their usage more than any other nation against the Spanish from the 16th to the 18th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque

indeed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com