There were two sorts of vessels used in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries also belonging to the numerous and varied family of the galley—the fuste and the frégate, both smaller examples of the galéasse. A galley was termed galéasse (Fig. 72) when it was of large size, powerfully armed, and propelled by such long and heavy oars that it took six or seven men to work one of them.
Fig. 71.—The Bucentaure, State Barge used for the Marriage of the Doge of Venice with the Sea.—From the Model preserved in the Arsenal of Venice.
We have not by any means exhausted the number of long vessels propelled by oars, but we will now turn to those which only used sails, and which were termed nefs, or round vessels.
In the tenth century the Venetians employed these large heavy vessels, which they had adopted from the Saracens, and which were termed cumbaries (from the Latin cymba), or gombaries. To the same class belonged the coque (Fig. 73), which, according to an old chronicler, had a round stem and stern, a high freeboard, and drew very little water. This style of vessel, which from its shape was considered insubmersable, was largely used both for warlike and commercial purposes, from the twelfth to the close of the fifteenth century.
The coque, so frequently employed in the Middle Ages, doubtless suggested the construction of another large vessel of the same sort, called by the Venetians buzo, by the Genoese panzono, and busse by the Provençaux, three words having a similar signification.[4] These various names plainly indicate the character of this kind of vessel, namely, that it was a broad-beamed, slow-sailing craft, but one capable of carrying large and heavy cargoes.
Fig. 72.—Sketch of a Galley of the Sixteenth Century, painted in distemper on the door of a cupboard preserved in the Doria Palace, Genoa.
Such names, however, as gombaries, coques, and busses, are nowadays as completely forgotten as the ships to which they were applied, while such terms as carraque and galliot still convey a meaning understood by everybody. Indeed, they immediately call up in the mind the memory of the numerous Spanish galleons which, according to popular tradition, were constantly returning home laden with Peruvian gold, and of those gigantic caracks which, hailing from the French ports on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, invested the navy of France, in the reigns of Louis XII. and Francis I., with such a splendid and imposing renown.
