All these dimensions are not to be despised even now, but, considering the small size of the ports and navigable highways of those days as well as their lack of depth, they must have been an impossibility. Furthermore, all these numerical data rest only on hypotheses, and cannot be exact.
The short, bluff merchant ship of the Ancients was certainly not longer than the vessel with oars and its average size does not seem to have exceeded that of a “tialque”.
The progress of shipbuilding was gradual throughout Western Europe, and as the same may be said of the Mediterranean, since the Middle Ages, what reason is there, then, for supposing that the vessels of Antiquity were of extraordinary dimensions?
In this order of ideas, the Prora of Samothrace, discovered in 1863 and dating from B. C. 306, gives an exact idea of the war ship of the Ancients and proves that this vessel differed little in shape and size from the ships of the Middle Ages.
The bottom was slightly curved near the middle and the hull was made slender toward the ends. The mean draught of water was one metre, while that of the largest vessels scarcely exceeded 1.50 m. (ASSMANN, Seewesen, p. 1597, etc.) The stem and the sternpost were ornamented with signs which are unimportant for this study.
Ships with oars of which the stern was rounded at the level of the water line, carried at the bow a ram, which was used to sink the enemy’s ships and to smash their oars. A heavy block of wood, ornamented with the head of a ram, prevented the ram from penetrating too far into the side of the ship which it attacked.
The arrangements of the ram varied a good deal as is shown by the figures, but the form of the vessel itself was not influenced thereby. This element was the emblem of power and was meant to inspire terror. There is nothing astonishing then that, in most of the old drawings, the draughtsman should have dwelt rather on this detail than on the ship itself, thus causing the shape of this latter to become an accessory.
The ram, which was already in use among the Phœnicians, did not appear among the Greeks until B. C. 536. (Dr. EM. LÜBECK, p. 13.) Whence it follows, and it cannot be repeated too often, that the art of shipbuilding had reached a higher degree of perfection with the Phœnicians than among the Greeks and that the former exercised a preponderating influence over the peoples dwelling along the shores of the Mediterranean.
Hence, the thesis of uniformity of the boats of the Mediterranean could be sustained, but this would not imply that each people had known but one type of vessel. Boats of sundry types existed at the same time; there were the short bluff merchant ships side by side with the long vessels driven by oars, and perfected types were crowded against the primitive.
History tells us, that Cæsar put to sea with a fleet thirty days after the cutting of the wood to be used in its construction. (NICOLAS WITSEN, p. 12, col. 1.) It would be hard to grant that the boats which composed this fleet were well finished ships moved by oars. They were, doubtless flat bottomed vessels, of the type which is still found in the Adriatic and which is so well reproduced in the “Rascona”. (PARIS, Vol. II, and Das Seewesen der Gr. und R. by Dr. EM. LÜBECK, p. 39.)