His biography has large holes, but it seems Garay came from an medium-level aristocratic family with a military and naval tradition (he might have been loosely related to Francisco de Garay, the conquistador that rivaled Hernán Cortés, though not necessarily). He served in the royal navy and eventually earned the rank of captain before dedicating himself to inventing things as an autodidact engineer. After he sent letters to King Charles V proposing to implement many creative innovations, among them improved windmills, diving equipment, desalinators and the like, he was officially granted this job in 1539 and was stationed in the shipyards of Málaga for several years, where he worked until his death. It seems that he spent his last years asking for economical support while funding his projects of his own pocket, which caused him to die bitter and penniless.
Garay's magnum opus was a system of paddle wheels moved by crewmen to replace the less efficient rows, likely inspired by an earlier concept developed by the Roman Vitruvius and Roberto Valturio. He originally proved this propeller in a small vessel in 1539, and upon his success, King Charles proposed him to scale the thing up, leading to further proofs with bigger ships in 1542. Garay's side-wheelers, among which the largest model was a 300-ton carrack, performed excellently, outrunning a lighter galley in their tests and making two turning circles where the galley could only do one. The officers were reportedly impressed, but some complications in the performance (and likely the usual political enmities) led royal treasurer Alonso de Rávago to convince King Charles that the system was Awesome, but Impractical, and when Garay was getting ready for a naval revolution, he found his project forgotten forever in some desk drawer.
How did this admittedly remarkable invention become a steamer? In 1825, one generation after steamboats had been introduced to Spain, Tomás González Hernández, director of the Spanish royal archives, claimed to have found documentation proving that Garay's ships were powered by a steam boiler, as Rávago mentioned it by name among its specifications. Contemporaneous chroniclers were weirded out, some of them accepting it and some considering it improbable, but for most Spaniards, this was awesome enough that they gave the name Blasco de Garay to the first steamer in the Spanish navy. However, less impressionable authors like Modesto Lafuente discovered the most likely truth: the steam boiler Rávago mentioned was not the ship's engine, but a separate invention Garay had conceived as an additional commodity, which was not other than a desalinator to provide the ship with water.
The legend lives on, however, with many streets carrying his name in Spain.
In fiction
Literature- As mentioned, Honore de Balzac's Les Ressources de Quinola covers the incident, although with more than a bit of Anachronism Stew. This version places Garay forward in the timeline, after the disaster of the Spanish Armada, which served as his main motivation to build his ship.
- Luis Torrecilla's 2020 novel El maquinista del mar has Garay as its protagonist. This story includes a posterior scene with another great inventor of the time, Jerónimo de Ayanz.
