Spanish American "Warpaint"

I hate correcting my own emails. The slate grey reference was for Spanish ships in Manila bay.

There is a universal problem in lack of accuracy of photographs. Trying to make photography represent accurate colors has forever been a problem, and it still isn't solved.
Looking at photographs in a printed book is even worse. Even if you had a perfect photograph, the printing press technology cannot print accurate color rendition of the original negative. So there are two weak links in the chain- the photographic process and the printing (as in printing press) process.
It is amazing seeing photographs of race cars of which I have seen the prototypes reproduced in various books. The colors vary tremendously from book to book.
To me the answer is to get it reasonable and let it go at that.
Further compounding the problem- even if you use color chips, these chips represent the color of the paint when first applied. Except for the latest paint technology, the color begins degrading and shifting as soon as that vehicle, be it ship, plane, or car, is exposed to oxygen in air and more importantly to sunlight, with its UV content. So even with a given paint, the color of the painted vehicle constantly shifts over time.

Ridley Scott has a nice answer for people who question details of his historical movies: "Oh, were you there?" If you know of a painting done by a war artist who was there, use his colors. Otherwise, my guess would be a mix of black and white paint, varied from ship to ship--bow to stern, for that matter.