Galley

Galley

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For other uses, see Galley (disambiguation).

A French galley and Dutch men-of-war off a port by Abraham Willaerts, painted 17th century

 

A galley (from Greek γαλ?α - galea) is an ancient ship which can be propelled entirely by human oarsmen, used for warfare and trade. Oars are known from at least the time of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Many galleys had masts and sails for use when the winds were favourable.

 

Various types of galleys dominated naval warfare in the Mediterranean Sea from the time of Homer to the development of effective naval gunnery around the 15th and 16th centuries. Galleys fought in the wars of ancient Persia, Greece, Carthage and Rome until the 4th century. After the fall of the Roman Empire galleys remained in use to a lesser extent by the Byzantine Navy and other successors of the Roman Empire, and by new Muslim states. Medieval Mediterranean states, notably the Italian maritime republics including Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, used galleys until the ocean-going man-of-war made them obsolete. The Battle of Lepanto (1571) was one of the largest naval battles in which galleys played the principal part. Galleys continued in mainstream use until the introduction of broadside sailing ships of war into the Mediterranean in the 17th Century, and continued to be used in minor roles until the advent of steam propulsion.

Ancient galleys

The first galleys

Galleys traversed the Mediterranean from around 3000 BC. The Phoenicians and the Greeks built and operated the first known ships to navigate the Mediterranean: merchant vessels with square-rigged sails. The first military vessels, as described in the works of Homer and represented in paintings, had a single row of oarsmen along each side (in addition to the sail) to provide speed and maneuverability.

 

Early sailors had few navigational tools. Most ancient and medieval shipping remained in sight of the coast for ease of navigation, the availability of trading opportunities, and coastal currents and winds that could be used to work against and around prevailing winds. It was more important for galleys than sailing ships to remain near the coast because they needed more frequent re-supply of fresh water for their large, sweating, crews and were more vulnerable to storms. Unlike sailing ships they could use small bays and beaches as harbors, travel up rivers, operate in water only a meter or so deep, and be dragged overland to be launched on lakes, or other branches of the sea. This made them suitable for launching attacks on land. In antiquity the most famous portage was the diolkos of Corinth. At least as early as 429 BC (Thucydides 2.56.2), but probably earlier (Herodotus 6.48.2, 7.21.2, 7.97), galleys were adapted to carry horses to provide cavalry support to troops also landed by galley.

 

The compass did not come into use for navigation until the 13th century AD, and sextants, octants, accurate marine chronometers, and the mathematics required to determine longitude and latitude were developed much later. Ancient sailors navigated by the sun and the prevailing wind^{[citation needed]}. By the first millennium BC they had started using the stars to navigate at night. By 500 BC they had the sounding lead (Herodotus 2.5).

 

As ships hugged the coast and threaded through archipelagos rather than risking the open sea, they had to be designed for maneuverability. The ability to travel without regard to the direction or strength of the wind daylight expeditions across open water. Massed oars provided maneuverability and reliable propulsion.

Penteconters

The development of the ram in about 800 BC changed the nature of naval warfare, which had until that point involved boarding and hand-to-hand fighting. Now a more maneuverable ship could render a slower ship useless by staving in its sides. We do not know for sure if the winners of naval battles usually actually sank their opponents; the same Greek word can mean "sunk" or "waterlogged", and reports survive of victorious galleys towing the defeated ship away after a battle. The few archaeological remains of sunken ships compared to the many galleys in use according to the writings of contemporaries suggests that victors may not usually have sunk the vanquished. The most famous part of any galley to survive in the sea, from antiquity, is the Athlit bronze ram. [1]. The only other parts of ancient galleys to survive are parts of two Punic biremes off western Sicily (see Basch & Frost, & Frost). These Punic galleys are estimated to have been 35 m long, 4.80 m wide, with a displacement tonnage of 120 tonnes. These biremes had evidence of an easily breakable pointed ram, more like the Assyrian image than the Athlit ram. This type of ram may have been designed to break off to protect the ramming vessel from damaging itself.

 

Galleys were hauled out of the water whenever possible to keep them dry, light and fast and free from worm, rot and seaweed. Galleys were usually overwintered in ship sheds which leave distinctive archeological remains. [2] There is evidence that the hulls of the Punic wrecks were sheathed in lead.

 

Building an efficient galley posed difficult technical problems. A ship traveling at high speed creates a bow-wave and has to expend considerable energy climbing this wave instead of increasing its speed. The longer the ship, the faster it can travel before this effect hampers it, but the available technology in the ancient Mediterranean made long ships difficult to construct. Through a process of trial and error, the monoreme ? a galley with one row of oars on each side ? reached the peak of its development in the penteconter, about 38 m long, with 25 oarsmen on each side. Historians believe that it could reach speeds of about 9 knots (18 km/h), only a knot or so slower than modern rowed racing-boats. To maintain the strength of such a long craft tensioned cables were fitted from the bow to the stern; this provided rigidity without adding weight. This technique also kept the joints of the hull under compression - tighter, and more waterproof. The tension in the modern trireme replica anti-hogging cables was 300 kNewtons (Morrison p198).

Biremes and Triremes

Main article: Trireme

Assyrian warship, a bireme with pointed bow. 700 BC

 

Around the 7th or 6th century BC the design of galleys changed. Shipbuilders, probably Phoenician (seafaring people who lived on the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean), added a second row of oars above the first, creating the biere or bireme (these terms were probably not used at the time). The idea was copied around the Mediterranean. Soon afterwards a third row of oars was added, by adding an outrigger to the hull of a bireme. These new galleys became known as trieres ("three-fitted";) in Greek; the Romans called this design the triremis (in English, "trireme"). The origin of these changes remains uncertain; Thucydides attributes the innovation to the boat-builder Aminocles of Corinth in about 700 BC, but some scholars distrust this and suggest that the design came from Phoenicia. Herodotus (484 BC - ca. 425 BC) provides the first mention of triremes in action: he mentions that Polycrates, tyrant of Samos from 535 BC to 515 BC, had triremes in his fleet in 539 BC.

In the early 5th century BC the city-states of Greece and the expansionist Persian Empire under Darius (reigned 521 - 485 BC) and Xerxes (reigned 485 - 465 BC) came into conflict.

 

The Persians hired ships from their Phoenician satrapies. The Athenians defeated the first invasion force on land at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, but saw the waging of land battles against the more numerous Persians as hopeless in the long term. When news came that Xerxes had started to amass an enormous invasion force in Asia Minor, the Greek cities expanded their navies: in 482 BC the Athenian leader Themistocles started a program for the construction of 200 triremes. The project must have met with considerable success, as 150 Athenian triremes are said to have fought in the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC and participated in the defeat of Xerxes' invasion fleet there.

 

Triremes fought in the naval battles of the Peloponnesian War (431 - 404 BC), including the Battle of Aegospotami in 405 BC, which sealed the defeat of the Athenian Empire by Sparta and her allies.

Quinqueremes and polyremes

Main article: Quinquereme

Considerable skill was required to row the ships used at the time of the Peloponnesian War, and there were not enough skilled oarsmen to man large numbers of triremes in the 4th century BC. The search for designs that would allow oarsmen to use muscle-power instead of skill led Dionysius of Syracuse (ruled 405 - 367 BC) to build tetreres (quadriremes) and penteres (quinqueremes).

 

According to modern historians, the numbers used to describe these larger galleys counted the number of rows of men on each side, and not the numbers of oars. Thus quadriremes had three possible designs: one row of oars with four men on each oar, two rows of oars with two men on each oar or three rows of oars with two men pulling the top oars on each side. Probably galleys of all three designs existed. Scholars believe that quinqueremes had three rows of oars, with two men pulling each of the top two oars.

 

Along with the change in galley design came an increased reliance on tactics such as boarding and using warships as platforms for artillery. In the wars of the Diadochi (322 - 281 BC), the successors to the empire of Alexander the Great built increasingly bigger and bigger galleys. Macedon in 340 BC built sexiremes (probably with two men on each of three oars) and in 315 BC septiremes, which saw action at the Battle of Salamis in Cyprus (306 BC). Demetrius I of Macedon (reigned 294 - 288 BC), involved in a naval war with Ptolemy of Egypt (reigned 323 - 283 BC), built eights (octeres), nines, tens, twelves and finally sixteens! Later Ptolemies continued this trend of expansion, creating twenties and thirties and, during the reign of Ptolemy IV, a monstrous forty over 400 feet long that was probably intended as a showpiece. According to a detailed description of the forty, the ship had two prows and two sterns, and this and other evidence has led some to believe that the forty, and probably the twenties and thirties, were constructed like huge catamarans with enough space between the hulls for the rowers in the middle to operate. The deck above them, stretching across the two hulls, could accommodate a couple of thousand marines.^{[citation needed]}

 

The political unification of the entire Mediterranean sea by the Roman Empire reduced the need for warships. By AD 79 the Roman navy probably had nothing larger than a quadrireme in service, as Pliny the Elder, commander of the fleet, investigated the eruption of Vesuvius in a quadrireme (Pliny the younger 6,16) which was presumably his flagship and the largest class of vessel in the fleet. We last hear of triremes, from Zosimus, in 324 when Constantine's son Crispus defeated Licinius in the battle of the Hellespont: allegedly 200 triremes were defeated by 80 30-oared vessels (Morrisson p8 who gives the wrong year). Galleys with two banks of oars were known in the 9th and 12th centuries but no continuity of development through the Dark Ages can be established. Ships in the ancient world, presumably including galleys, were constructed skin first, with the frame inserted later. Medieval ships, including galleys, were constructed frame first. For this intermediate period see the Roman Navy and Byzantine Navy articles.