Famous Sea Fights, from Salamis to Tsu-Shima

by A. Hilliard Atteridge

Here, as on other occasions, the very numbers of the Persian fleet proved a source of danger to it. The harbours that could give shelter to this multitude of ships were very few and far between, nor was it an easy matter to find that other refuge of the ancient navigator—a beach of easy slope and sufficiently wide extent to enable the ships to be dragged out of the water and placed high and dry beyond the reach of the angriest waves. The fact that ships were beached and hauled up the shore during bad weather, and in winter, limited their size, and in both the Persian and the Greek fleets there probably was not a ship much bigger than the barges we see on our canals, or as big as some of the largest sea-going barges.

The typical warship of the period of the Persian War was probably not more than eighty or a hundred feet long, narrow, and nearly flat-bottomed. At the bow and stern there was a strongly built deck. Between this poop and forecastle a lighter deck ran fore and aft, and under this were the stations of the rowers. The bow was strengthened with plates of iron or brass, and beams of oak, to enable it to be used as a ram, and the stem rose above the deck level and was carved into the head of some bird or beast. There was a light mast which could be rigged up when the wind served, and carried a cross-yard and a square sail. Mast and yard were taken down before going into action.

The Greeks called their war galleys triēres, the Romans triremes, and these names are generally explained as meaning that the ships were propelled by three banks or rows of oars placed one above the other on either side. The widely accepted theory of how they were worked is that the seats of the rowers were placed, not directly above each other, but that those who worked the lowest and shortest oars were close to the side of the ship, the men for the middle range of oars a little above them and further inboard, and the upper tier of rowers still higher and near the centre-line of the ship. An endless amount of erudition and research has been expended on this question; but most of those who have dealt with it have been classical scholars possessing little or no practical acquaintance with seafaring conditions, and none of their proposed arrangements of three banks of oars looks at all likely to be workable and effective. A practical test of the theory was made by Napoleon III when his "History of Julius Cæsar" was being prepared. He had a trireme constructed and tried upon the Seine. There were three banks of oars, but though the fitting and arrangement was changed again and again under the joint advice of classical experts and practical seamen, no satisfactory method of working the superposed banks of oars could be devised.

The probability is that no such method of working was ever generally employed, and that the belief in the existence of old-world navies made up of ships with tier on tier of oars on either side is the outcome of a misunderstanding as to the meaning of a word. Triēres and trireme seems at first glance to mean triple-oared, in the sense of the oars being triplicated; but there are strong arguments for the view that it was not the oars but the oarsmen, who were arranged in "threes." If this view is correct, the ancient warship was a galley with a single row of long oars on either side, and three men pulling together each heavy oar. We know that in the old navies of the Papal States and the Republics of Venice and Genoa in the Middle Ages and the days of the Renaissance, and in the royal galleys of the old French monarchy, there were no ships with superposed banks of oars, but there were galleys known as "triremes," "quadriremes," and "pentaremes," driven by long oars each worked by three, four, or five rowers. It is at least very likely that this was the method adopted in the warships of still earlier times.

A trireme of the days of the Persian War with fifty or sixty oars would thus have a crew of 150 or 180 rowers. Add to this some fifty or sixty fighting men and we have a total crew of over two hundred. In the Persian navies the rowers were mostly slaves, like the galley slaves of later times. They were chained to their oars, and kept in order or roused to exertion by the whip of their taskmasters. To train them to work together effectively required a long apprenticeship, and in rough water their work was especially difficult. To miss the regular time of the stroke was dangerous, for the long oars projecting far inboard would knock down and injure the nearest rowers, unless all swung accurately together. The flat-bottomed galleys rolled badly in a heavy sea, and in rough weather rowing was fatiguing and even perilous work.

Some two hundred men in a small ship meant crowded quarters, and lack of room everywhere except on the fighting deck. But as the fleets hugged the shore, and generally lay up for the night, the crews could mostly land to cook, eat, and sleep. In the Persian ships belonging to many nations, and some of them to the Greek cities of Asia, Xerxes took the precaution of having at least thirty picked Persian warriors in each crew. Their presence was intended to secure the fidelity of the rest.

In the Greek fleet the rowers were partly slaves, partly freemen impressed or hired for the work. Then there were a few seamen, fishermen, or men who in the days of peace manned the local coasting craft. The chiefs of this navigating party were the keleustes, who presided over the rowers and gave the signal for each stroke, and the pilot, who was supposed to have a knowledge of the local waters and of wind and weather, and who acted as steersman, handling alone, or with the help of his assistants, the long stern oar that served as a rudder. The fighting men were not sailors, but soldiers embarked to fight afloat, and their military chief commanded the ship, with the help of the pilot. For more than two thousand years this division between the sailor and the fighting element in navies continued throughout the world. The fighting commander and the sailing-master were two different men, and the captain of a man-of-war was often a landsman.

In the Greek fleet which lay sheltered in the narrows, behind the long island of Eubœa while the Persians were battling with the tempest off Cape Sepias, the Admiral was the Spartan Eurybiades, a veteran General, who knew more about forming a phalanx of spearmen than directing the movements of a fleet. The military reputation of his race had secured for him the chief command, though of the whole fleet of between three and four hundred triremes, less than a third had been provided by Sparta and her allies, and half of the armada was formed of the well-equipped Athenian fleet, commanded by Themistocles in person. As the storm abated the fleets faced each other in the strait north of Eubœa. In the Persian armada the best ships were five long galleys commanded by an Amazon queen, Artemisia of Halicarnassus, a Greek fighting against Greeks. She scored the first success, swooping down with her squadron on a Greek galley that had ventured to scout along the Persian front in the grey of the morning. Attacked by the five the ship was taken, and the victors celebrated their success by hanging the commander over the prow of his ship, cutting his throat and letting his blood flow into the sea, an offering to the gods of the deep. The cruel deed was something that inspired no particular sense of horror in those days of heathen war. It was probably not on account of this piece of barbarity, but out of their anger at being opposed by a woman, and a Greek woman, that the allied leaders of Greece set a price on the head of the Amazon queen; but no one ever succeeded in qualifying to claim it.

The Persians, hoping to gain an advantage from their superior numbers, now detached a squadron which was to coast along the eastern shores of Eubœa, enter the strait at its southern end, and fall on the rear of the Greeks, while the main body attacked them in front. Eurybiades and Themistocles had early intelligence of this movement, but were not alarmed by it. Shortly before sunset the Greeks bore down on the Persians, attacked them in the narrow waters where their numbers could not tell, sank some thirty ships by ramming them, and then drew off as the night came on.

It was a wild night. The Greeks had hardly regained their sheltered anchorage when the wind rose, lightning played round the mountain crests on either hand, the thunder rolled and the rain came down in torrents. The main Persian fleet, in a less sheltered position, found it difficult to avoid disaster, and the crews were horrified at seeing as the lightning lit up the sea masses of debris and swollen corpses of drowned men drifting amongst them as the currents brought the wreckage of the earlier storm floating down from beyond Cape Sepias. The hundred ships detached to round the south point of Eubœa were still slowly making their way along its rocky eastern coast. Caught in the midnight storm most of them drove ashore and were dashed to pieces.