few years fourteen great line-of -battle-ships were launched. New activities sprang up and Ferrol was employing 2,000 workmen constantly on its foundries, now in full operation. A School of Naval Engineers was established where 40 pupils were learning the scientific principles of their profession, under a competent staff of instructors bred in England and France. So successful in bringing the worlds most advanced technologies was the administration of the Marquis de Molina, Spanish Minister for Naval affairs, that by 1858 the Royal Dockyards of Ferrol was launching Spain's first steam propelled ship which was the first iron-hulled too. The second half of the 19th century brought to the Royal Dockyards of Ferrol not just plenty of work but social and political tensions which ended up in the failed republican uprising of 1872. Steamers between Ferrol and the port of Havana in Spanish Cuba were operating frequently, back then, so, shipyard workers who got themselves into trouble with the local authorities in Ferrol, for one reason or another always thought of the Spanish Main as a possibility. During this period, same as it is nowadays, and just like it was in the days of the Armada, the Bay of Ferrol always attracted and still attracts numerous ships seeking repairs or refuge after meeting with disaster or rough waters trying to cross the Bay of Biscay on bad weather. Such was the case of Cleopatra, carrying one of the two Cleopatra Needles, the one standing today on the Thames Embankment in London, UK. It arrived in Ferrol on 19 October 1877 after tragedy and almost sinking off the west coast of France five days earlier. There is a plaque commemorating the event and those who died to be seen at the base of the Needle in London. Ten years after the Spanish–American War of 1898, in which Spain lost Cuba and the Philippines, the Antonio Maura Government, in an attempt to restore the Spanish Navy and Spanish shipbuilding industry, hired the Spanish Society for Naval Construction, whose major investors were a British-Spanish-Association taking contracts In the following proportions: 40% Vickers Sons and Maxim, 30% Marquis of Comillas of the Spanish Transatlantic Company, 30% Biscay Furnace Company, all the previously state owned shipbuilding yards, workshops, foundries and dry docks at Ferrol were handed over to the technical expertise of some of finest British shipbuilders: John Brown, Vickers and Armstrong now in charge of