High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Dreadnought was a 41-gun galleon of the English Navy Royal, built by Mathew Baker and launched in 1573. Like HMS Dreadnought of 1906, she was a radical innovation over contemporary ships. When John Hawkins became Treasurer of the Navy in 1577, he had sailed all over the world, and his ideas contributed to the production of a new race-built series of galleons - of which the Dreadnought was the second (following the Foresight of 1570) - without the fore- and after-castles prevalent in other contemporary ships; these "marvels of marine design" could reputedly "run circles around the clumsier Spanish competition."