HAMILCAR’S “STAIRWAY OF THE GALLEYS,” AT CARTHAGE.
The stem was often carried up into a curving ornament called the acrostolion, beneath which was a stout-walled deck-space for sailors or the fighting-men to do their work; and the stern-post similarly supported a lofty, richly ornamented structure (aplustron), arching over the officers’ quarters.
Platforms extended up and down the center of the ship between the rowers; and over their heads was a deck having walls or bulwarks where the fighting-men and their various “engines” stood. In addition to this an external defended gallery for soldiers and boarders usually ran along the outside of the bulwarks above the oars; and awnings of rawhide were stretched over all to ward off grappling-irons.
It must not be forgotten, however, that these galleys also had three pole-masts, and certain sails—probably a huge split lug, with possibly a square topsail on the mainmast, while the fore- and mizzenmasts carried lateens. At the top of each stick was a round, protected cage filled with archers and slingers—the prototype of our “military mast.”
Nor are the size and force of these Greek and Roman men-of-war to be despised. The ordinary trireme had a crew of 200 to 225 men in all, 174 of whom were rowers. The space for cabins and stowage must have been little, but this was of small account, since the war-galleys rarely undertook long cruises, their tactics being a rush and a sharp fight, and then a quick return to harbor, where it was the practice to draw the lighter galleys up on shore each night. The transportation of the ships across the isthmus of Corinth was not, then, so astonishing a feat as it is sometimes called.
Rome’s experience, however, gained in war and in suppressing the Levantine pirates, taught her to abandon the heavy, many-banked, unwieldy vessels she had at first developed from Greek and Carthaginian models, and to trust to a much lighter, swifter, and more manageable style, with far less upper structure and rigging, and having only two banks of oars. These were called Liburnian galleys. With this change came naturally one of tactics, capture by chase and boarding taking the place of the earlier attempt to crush by ramming and overriding the antagonist.
The armament comprised not only as many soldiers with bows and javelins as could find room in action, but various machines of offense and defense, such as catapults hurling huge stones or marble grape-shot, spearheaded rams or huge knives that could be run out against an enemy’s hull or rigging, arrangements for smashing the enemy’s decks, caldrons swung at yard-arms, holding burning pitch or oil to be poured upon the foe, and often cranes (corvi), provided with grapples that, if one could be made fast, would lift an adversary out of water, and turn him upside down. No more vivid picture of the life in cruise and battle of a Roman man-of-war’s man is known to me than that penned by General Lew Wallace in “Ben Hur,” but I cannot, of course, transfer all of it to my pages, as I should like to do, and an extract here and there would only spoil the pleasure in store for you in re-reading it all.
Of medieval naval warfare in the Mediterranean, the struggles between the weak “principalities and powers” that followed the decay of Rome and lasted for a dozen centuries, we know very little. There is more obscurity here than even elsewhere in the dim history of the dark ages. It is evident, however, that not much change took place in naval architecture. The Byzantine empire succeeded to Rome as mistress of the seas, and we know that in the ninth century the Byzantine emperors were still building biremes (then called dromones) armed with tubes for spouting Greek fire. It should be noted that boats having only a single bank of oars came now to be called galleys; and this is the first and proper use of the word, though popularly it is now (or until recently was) applied to any large many-oared boat.