Naval warfare, properly speaking, begins with the battle of Salamis, 480 B. C., when the Greek fleet, under the guidance of Themistocles, destroyed or put to flight a horde of twelve hundred Persian vessels, and saved Athens, to become the foundation of a strong nation.
Of these ships at Salamis we know very little, except that they were large, open, or partly open, rowboats, having platforms at the stern and prow, and perhaps amidships in some cases, where soldiers might stand and discharge their arrows out of the way of the rowers beneath them, or leap aboard the enemy’s boats whenever they could be reached. They were, in short, early types of the galleys which subsequently became vessels of war as powerful and serviceable, under the conditions they were intended to meet, as are our battle-ships to-day, and probably safer as a fighting-place for their crews.
That from rowboats rather than from sail-boats should have been developed the highest type of Mediterranean war-vessel of ancient times is not surprising when one remembers the light and variable winds of that region, the usually smooth seas, the abundance of harbors, and, above all, the need of having the vessels under complete control when all fighting had to be done at short range—chiefly by ramming and boarding, in fact. It must be remembered, too, that labor was cheap; and it was considered that the most proper and economical—not to say humane—use to which prisoners of war could be put was to make them rowers in public ships, while enough remained to be sold as slaves to the owners of private yachts and privateering galleys. One may imagine a worse fate than this.
The earliest war-vessels of the eastern Mediterranean—those of Homer’s time, for instance—seem to have been long and rather narrow rowboats, the best of which had two tiers of oars, one above the other, the lower, shorter tier working through oval holes in the side, and the upper in notches or thole-pins on the gunwale. This left the upper rowers exposed, and hence such vessels were called aphract, or “unfenced”; and it was not until the Greeks began to become prominent that the bulwarks were raised high enough to protect all the rowers, and war-vessels generally became cataphract, or “fenced.”
It appears that in very early times war-ships (biremes) with not only two tiers or banks of oars, but even those (triremes) with three banks, were used; and the trireme became the type of the most numerous and effective vessels of the Greek and Roman navies in their prime. And as weight and power gradually increased, the crushing power of collision began to be utilized, and ramming came in as a more and more important feature in naval tactics. As the Greeks seem to have first applied these new ideas, it is quite likely that their success at Salamis was due to these improvements. The arrangement was this:
From the side of the vessel (inside) projected three rows of benches, a yard apart, horizontally supported at their inner ends by timbers that slanted toward the stern at such an angle that the top seat of each row was exactly above the bottom seat of the row behind it. The oars of the top tier (thranite) were about fourteen feet long, those of the middle tier (zygite) about ten and one half feet, and the lowermost one (thalamite) seven and one half feet. Each oar was so nearly balanced in its oar-port as to work in the easiest manner, tied there by a thong and surrounded by a loose sleeve of leather which kept out the water. Each one of the lowermost oars was worked by a single man, the middle ones by two, and those of the third tier by three or four, as they were of great length.
In later times larger vessels were invented for special purposes—four-banked (quadriremes), five-banked (quinquiremes), and so on, even up to one of forty banks; but as we are unable to understand how it was possible for more than five or six tiers of oars to be operated, we may leave these extraordinary galleys to special students.[4]
The structure of these vessels gave them the greatest strength combined with lightness. They had very strong keels and stems, the latter peculiarly braced; and along their sides ran waling-pieces, or fore-and-aft bracing timbers, the lowermost curving inward forward, until they met in front of the stem at the water-line, where they were braced by massive timbers, and prolonged into a sharp three-toothed spur, of which the middle tooth was the longest, reaching out perhaps ten feet. This was covered with metal, usually bronze, and formed the beak.
“Above it, but projecting less beyond the stem-post, was the procmbolion, or second beak, in which the prolongation of the upper set of waling-pieces met. This was generally fashioned into the figure of a ram’s head, also covered with metal.... These bosses, when a vessel was rammed, completed the work of destruction begun by the sharp beak at the water-level, giving a racking blow which caused it to heel over and so eased it off the beak, releasing the latter before the weight of the sinking vessel could come upon it.”