The manner in which the galley should engage is thus contained in an answer to a question of Don John of Austria, the victor of Lepanto. He wrote to Garcia de Toledo, fourth Marquis of Villafranca, and General of the Galleys of Sicily, to ask his opinion as to what distance it was most efficacious to open fire in a naval action. Toledo replied that “one cannot fire more than twice before the galleys close. I should therefore recommend that the arquebussiers should hold their fire until they are so close to the enemy that his blood will leap into the face of him who discharges his piece. I have always heard it said, and this by captains who are well skilled in the art of war, that the last discharge of the cannon should be coincident with the noise made by the breaking of the spurs carried in the prows of the galleys; in fact that the two noises should be as one; some propose to fire before the enemy does: this is by no means my advice.”
Artillery, it will be seen from this, played a comparatively unimportant part in the combats between galley and galley; that in these craft men still relied on the strength of their right arm and the edge of their swords; there was still a certain contempt for villainous saltpetre, which was looked upon as a somewhat cowardly substance, preventing the warrior from settling his disputes in the good old fashion of his forbears. In any case, when you practically had to push the muzzle of your gun against your enemy’s body in order to hit him, it was not a weapon upon which much reliance was to be placed.
There were, in addition to the galley, the nef and the galeasse; the former of these was a sailing vessel pure and simple like those remarkable caravels in which Columbus discovered America.
What these caravels were exactly like it was the good fortune of the writer to see in the year 1893. This was the date of the great exhibition of Chicago, and the American Government were most anxious to have, and to exhibit if possible, an exact replica of these historic craft. They accordingly communicated with the Spanish Government and inquired if by any chance they possessed the plans and specifications of the caravels of Columbus? Search was made in the archives of Cadiz Dockyard and these priceless documents were discovered. From them the ships were built in every respect the same as the wonderful originals and then towed across the Atlantic by the United States cruiser Lancaster. On their way they were brought to Gibraltar, where the writer’s ship was then stationed, and were anchored inside the New Mole. The Santa Maria, the flagship of Columbus, was a three-masted vessel with a very high “forecastle” and “sterncastle” and very deep in the waist; she had three masts, the foremast carrying one square sail, the mainmast having both mainsail and main-topsail, the mizzen was rigged with a lateen sail, on the mainsail was painted the Maltese and on the foresail the Papal cross, and on deck she carried a brick-built cooking galley. A most beautiful model of this vessel is to be seen in the Science and Art Department of the South Kensington Museum.
The nef in its later manifestations became a much more seaworthy vessel than this, with four masts, the two foremost ones square-rigged and carrying courses and topsails, the two after ones carrying lateen sails; the latter from their small size and their proximity to one another could not have had much effect on the sailing qualities of the ship. The nefs in the fleet of Don John of Austria in 1571 were rigged in this fashion and comprised vessels of eight hundred, nine hundred, and even one thousand tons, while a contemporary English vessel, the Great Harry or Henri Grace à Dieu, was as much as fifteen hundred tons, and carried no less than one hundred and eighty-four pieces of ordnance. It was from the nef and the galeasse that the sailing man-of-war arrived by the process of evolution. The galley in the first instance was the vessel of men who fought hand to hand, the men in whom personal strength and desperate valour were blended, who desired nothing so much as to come to close grips with their enemy. Such rude engines of war as the pierriers, or short cannons which discharged some forty or fifty pounds of broken stone upon the enemy, were first mounted in the galley; these were followed by improved artillery as time went on. But although the galleys eventually carried quite big guns, as instanced by the forty-eight pounder in the galleys of the Knights of St. John, still it soon became apparent that the limit was reached by guns of this weight; the galley was essentially a light vessel and was not built to withstand those rude shocks caused by firing heavy charges of powder.
The galeasse was the connecting link between the navy of oars and the navy of sails. The navy of oars was in its generation apt for warlike purposes; but it was in its essence a force analogous to the light cavalry of the land; useful for a raid, a sudden dash, but without that great strength and solidity which came in later years to the building of the sailing line of battleship.
The galeasse was really a magnified galley, one which used both sails and oars, on board of which the rowers were under cover; she was built with a forecastle and a sterncastle which were elevated some six feet above the benches of the rowers, and her very long and immensely heavy oars were of course proportionate to the size of the vessel. The description of a galeasse of nearly one thousand tons burden is set forth as follows by Jurien de la Gravière:
“Her draught of water was about 18 feet 6 inches, she was propelled by 52 oars, 48 feet in length, each oar being worked by 9 men. Her crew consisted of 452 rowers, 350 soldiers, 60 marines, 12 steersmen, 40 ordinary seamen, 86 cannoneers, 12 petty officers, 4 boatswains’ mates, 3 pilots, 2 sub-pilots, 4 counsellors, 2 surgeons, 4 writers, 2 sergeants, 2 carpenters, 2 caulkers, 2 coopers, 2 bakers, 10 servants, a captain, a lieutenant, a purser. In all some thousand men, or about the same number as the crew of a three-decker of a later date.”
The fleet of the “Holy League” at the battle of Lepanto had in it six galeasses from the arsenal of Venice; and whereas an average galley carried 110 soldiers and 222 galley slaves, the crews of these galeasses comprised 270 soldiers, 130 sailors, and 300 galley slaves.
The speed of the galley was calculated by the French engineer Forfait to be in the most favourable circumstances, that is to say in a flat calm, but four and a half knots for the first hour, and two and a quarter to one and a half miles per hour for subsequent hours; the exhaustion of the rowers consequent on their arduous toil would not admit of a greater speed than this. The studies of Forfait were made when the invasion of England by rowing boats was a topic of burning interest. It is evident from this that long voyages, trusting to the oar alone, could not be undertaken; but as we have seen, the galley was also provided with motive power in the shape of two masts carrying the lateen sail, which may be still seen in so many Mediterranean craft.