The galley is the type of all these vessels, and those who are curious about the minutest details of building and equipping galleys need only consult Master Joseph Furttenbach’s Architectura Navalis: Das ist, Von dem Schiff-Gebaw, auf dem Meer und Seekusten zu gebrauchen, printed in the town of Ulm, in the Holy Roman Empire, by Jonam Saurn, in 1629. Any one could construct a galley from the numerous plans and elevations and sections and finished views (some of which are here reproduced) in this interesting and precise work.[55] Furttenbach is an enthusiastic admirer of a ship’s beauties, and he had seen all varieties; for his trade took him to Venice, where he had a galleasse,[56] and he had doubtless viewed many [!-- illustration (Stages in Building a Galley) --] [!-- blank page --] [!-- illustration (Plan and Sections of a Galley) --] [!-- blank page --] [!-- illustration (Hold of a Galley) --] [!-- blank page --] a Corsair fleet, since he could remember the battle of Lepanto and the death of Ochiali. His zeal runs clean away with him when he describes a stolo, or great flagship (capitanea galea) of Malta in her pomp and dignity and lordliness, as she rides the seas to the rhythmical beat of her many oars, or “easies” with every blade suspended motionless above the waves like the wings of a poised falcon. A galley such as this is “a princely, nay, a royal and imperial vassello di remo,” and much the most suitable, he adds, for the uses of peace and of war in the Mediterranean Sea. A galley may be 180 or 190 spans long—Furttenbach measures a ship by palmi, which varied from nine to ten inches in different places in Italy,—say 150 feet, the length of an old seventy-four frigate, but with hardly a fifth of its cubit contents—and its greatest beam is 25 spans broad. The one engraved on p. [37] is evidently an admiral’s galley of the Knights of Malta. She carries two masts—the albero maestro or mainmast, and the trinchetto, or foremast, each with a great lateen sail. The Genoese and Venetians set the models of these vessels, and the Italian terms were generally used in all European navigation till the northern nations took the lead in sailing ships. These sails are often clewed up, however, for the mariner of the sixteenth century was ill-practised in the art of tacking, and very fearful of losing sight of land for long, so that unless he had a wind fair astern he preferred to trust to his oars. A short deck at the prow and poop serve, the one to carry the fighting-men and trumpeters and yardsmen, and to provide cover for the four guns, the other to accommodate the knights and gentlemen, and especially the admiral or captain, who sits at the stern under a red damask canopy embroidered with gold, surveying the crew, surrounded by the chivalry of “the Religion,” whose white cross waves on the taffety standard over their head, and shines upon various pennants and burgees aloft. Behind, overlooking the roof of the poop, stands the pilot who steers the ship by the tiller in his hand.
Between the two decks, in the ship’s waist, is the propelling power: fifty-four benches or banks, twenty-seven a side, support each four or five slaves, whose whole business in life is to tug at the fifty-four oars. This flagship is a Christian vessel, so the rowers are either Turkish and Moorish captives, or Christian convicts. If it were a Corsair, the rowers would all be Christian prisoners. In earlier days the galleys were rowed by freemen, and so late as 1500 the Moors of Algiers pulled their own brigantines to the attack of Spanish villages, but their boats were light, and a single man could pull the oar. Two or three were needed for a galleot, and as many sometimes as six for each oar of a large galley. It was impossible to induce freemen to toil at the oar, sweating close together, for hour after hour—not sitting, but leaping on the bench, in order to throw their whole weight on the oar. “Think of six men chained to a bench, naked as when they were born, one foot on the stretcher, the other on the bench in front, holding an immensely heavy oar [fifteen feet long], bending forwards to the stern with arms at full reach to clear the backs of the rowers in front, who bend likewise; and then having got forward, shoving up the oar’s end to let the blade catch the water, then throwing their bodies back on to the groaning bench. A galley oar sometimes pulls thus for ten, twelve, or even twenty hours without a moment’s rest. The boatswain, or other sailor, in such a stress, puts a piece of bread steeped in wine in the wretched rower’s mouth to stop fainting, and then the captain shouts the order to redouble the lash. If a slave falls exhausted upon his oar (which often chances) he is flogged till he is taken for dead, and then pitched unceremoniously into the sea.”[57]
“Those who have not seen a galley at sea, especially in chasing or being chased, cannot well conceive the shock such a spectacle must give to a heart capable of the least tincture of commiseration. To behold ranks and files of half-naked, half-starved, half-tanned meagre wretches, chained to a plank, from whence they remove not for months together (commonly half a year), urged on, even beyond human strength, with cruel and repeated blows on their bare flesh, to an incessant continuation of the most violent of all exercises; and this for whole days and nights successively, which often happens in a furious chase, when one party, like vultures, is hurried on almost as eagerly after their prey, as is the weaker party hurried away in hopes of preserving life and liberty.”[58]
Sometimes a galley-slave worked as long as twenty years, sometimes for all his miserable life, at this fearful calling. The poor creatures were chained so close together in their narrow bench—a sharp cut was the characteristic of the galley—that they could not sleep at full length. Sometimes seven men (on French galleys, too, in the last century), had to live and sleep in a space ten feet by four. The whole ship was a sea of hopeless faces. And between the two lines of rowers ran the bridge, and on it stood two boatswains (comiti) armed with long whips, which they laid on to the bare backs of the rowers with merciless severity. Furttenbach gives a picture of the two boatswains in grimly humorous verse: how they stand,
Beclad, belaced, betrimmed, with many knots bespick;
Embroidered, padded, tied; all feathers and all flap;
Curly and queued, equipped, curious of hood and cap:
and how they “ever stolidly smite” the crew with the bastinado,
Or give them a backward prod in the naked flesh as they ply,
With the point that pricks like a goad, when “powder and shot” is the cry;