 | Galley: Encyclopedia II - Galley - Ancient galleys
Galley - Ancient galleys
Galley - The first galleys
Galleys travelled the Mediterranean from perhaps 3000 BC. The Greeks and Phoenicians built and operated the first known ships to navigate the Mediterranean: merchant vessels with square-rigged sails. The first military vessels, as described in the works of Homer and represented in paintings, had a single row of oarsmen along each side (in addition to the sail) to provide speed and manoeuvrability.
Early sailors had very little in the way of navigational tools. Compasses did not come in to use for navigation until the 13th century AD, and the development of sextants, octants and accurate chronometers, together with the mathematics required to determine longitude and latitude, had to wait until considerably later. Ancient sailors navigated by means of the sun and of the prevailing wind. By the first millennium BC they had started using the stars to navigate at night. But if blown out of sight of land then they became lost. The implications for ship design meant that manoeuvrability remained paramount for coast-hugging and threading through archipelagos, while reliable (non-wind-based) speed became a sine qua non for daylight expeditions across open water. Massed oars provided the optimal technological solution to the problems.
Galley - Penteconters
The development of the ram in about 800 BC changed the nature of naval warfare, which had until that point involved boarding and hand-to-hand fighting. Now a more manoeuvrable ship could render a slower ship useless by staving in its sides. Some doubt exists as to whether the winners in naval encounters usually sank defeated galleys. The Greek word for "sunk" can also mean "waterlogged", and reports survive of victorious galleys towing the defeated ship away after a battle. The paucity of archaeological remains of sunken ships, in comparison with the abundance of galleys according to the writings of contemporaries, provides further evidence that victors may not have commonly sunk defeated ships.
Building an efficient galley posed difficult technical problems. A ship travelling at high speed creates a bow-wave and has to expend considerable energy climbing this wave instead of increasing its speed. The longer the ship, the faster it can travel before this effect hampers it, but the available technology in the ancient Mediterranean made long ships difficult to construct. Through a process of trial and error, the monoreme — a galley with one row of oars on each side — reached the peak of its development in the penteconter, about 38 m long, with 25 oarsmen on each side. Historians believe that it could reach speeds of about 9 knots (18 km/h), only a knot or so slower than modern rowed racing-boats. The penteconter's size required that its builders stretch cables between the bow and stern to distribute the stress evenly.
Galley - Triremes
Main article: Trireme
Around the 7th or 6th century BC the design of galleys changed. Shipbuilders added a second row of oars above the first, and then very soon afterwards, a third. These new galleys became known as trieres, meaning "three-fitted"; the Romans called this design the triremis (in English, "trireme"). The origin of the design remains uncertain; Thucydides attributes the innovation to the boat-builder Aminocles of Corinth in about 700 BC, but some scholars distrust this and suggest that the design came from Phoenicia. Herodotus (484 BC - ca. 425 BC)provides the first mention of triremes in action: he mentions that Polycrates, tyrant of Samos from 535 BC to 515 BC, had triremes in his fleet in 539 BC.
The early 5th century BC saw a conflict between the city-states of Greece and the expansionist Persian Empire under Darius (reigned 521 - 485 BC) and Xerxes (reigned 485 - 465 BC), who hired ships from their Phoenician satrapies.
The Atheians defeated the first invasion force on land at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, but saw the waging of land battles against the more numerous Persians as hopeless in the long term. When news came that Xerxes had started to amass an enormous invasion force in Asia Minor, the Greek cities expanded their navies: in 482 BC the Athenian ruler Themistocles started a programme for the construction of 200 triremes. The project must have met with considerable success, as 150 Athenian triremes reputedly saw action in the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC and participated in the defeat of Xerxes' invasion fleet there.
Triremes fought in the naval battles of the Peloponnesian War (431 - 404 BC), including the Battle of Aegospotami in 405 BC, which sealed the defeat of the Athenian Empire by Sparta and her allies.
Galley - Quinqueremes and polyremes
Main article: Quinquereme
In the 4th century BC, after the Peloponnesian War, navies experienced a shortage of oarsmen of sufficient skill to man large numbers of triremes. The search for designs of galley that would allow oarsmen to use muscle-power instead of skill led Dionysius of Syracuse (ruled 405 - 367 BC) to build tetreres (quadriremes) and penteres (quinqueremes).
According to modern historians, the numbers used to describe these larger galleys counted the number of rows of men on each side, and not the numbers of oars. Thus quadriremes had three possible designs: one row of oars with four men on each oar, two rows of oars with two men on each oar or three rows of oars with two men pulling the top oars on each side. Probably galleys of all three designs existed. Scholars believe that quinqueremes had three rows of oars, with two men pulling each of the top two oars.
Along with the change in galley design came an increased reliance on tactics such as boarding and as using warships as platforms for artillery. In the wars of the Diadochi (322 - 281 BC), the successors to the empire of Alexander the Great built bigger and bigger galleys. Macedon in 340 BC built sexiremes (probably with two men on each of three oars) and in 315 BC septiremes, which saw action at the Battle of Salamis in Cyprus (306 BC). Demetrius I of Macedon (reigned 294 - 288 BC), involved in a naval war with Ptolemy of Egypt (reigned 323 - 283 BC), built eights (octeres), nines, tens, twelves and finally sixteens!
Triremes and smaller vessels continued in use, however. Light versions called liburnians served as auxiliary vessels, and proved quite effective against the heavier ships thanks to their greater manoeuvrability. In the last great naval battle of the ancient world, at Actium in 31 BC, Octavian's lighter and more manoeuvrable ships defeated Antony's heavy fleet. After that, with the Roman Empire in charge of the entire Mediterranean, large fighting navies became redundant. By AD 325 no more galleys with multiple rows of oars existed.
Other related archives1263, 1350, 13th century, 14th century, 1500, 1532, 1561, 1564, 1588, 15th century, 1624, 1748, 1770, 1776, 1790, 19th century, 3000 BC, 31 BC, 315 BC, 340 BC, 405 BC, 425 BC, 480 BC, 482 BC, 484 BC, 490 BC, 4th century, 4th century BC, 515 BC, 535 BC, 539 BC, 5th century BC, 6th century BC, 7 October, 700 BC, 7th, 800 BC, AD 325, Actium, Alexander the Great, Ancient Roman military technology, Antony, Antrim, Anvers, Athenian Empire, Baltic Sea, Battle of Aegospotami, Battle of Chesma, Battle of Lepanto, Battle of Lepanto (1571), Battle of Marathon, Battle of Salamis, Battle of Salamis in Cyprus (306 BC), Battle of Valcour Island, Brest, Byzantine Empire, Carthage, Charles IX of France, Cherbourg, Civitavecchia, Compasses, Constantinople, Corinth, Corporal punishments, Darius, Demetrius I of Macedon, Diadochi, Dionysius of Syracuse, Edict of Nantes, European, French Guyana, French Navy, French Revolution, Greece, Greeks, Hebrides, Henry IV, Herodotus, Homer, Huguenots, Human powered vehicles, Ireland, Isle of Man, La Spezia, Le Havre, Lords of the Isles, Lorient, Louis XIV, Louis XIV of France, Macedon, Marseille, Mediterranean, Muslim, Nice, Nimes, Octavian, Oliver Goldsmith, Peloponnesian War, Persia, Persian Empire, Phoenicians, Polycrates, Ptolemy of Egypt, Quinquereme, Rochefort, Roman Empire, Romans, Rome, Russo-Swedish War, Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, Samos, Scottish Highlands, Ship types, Skye, Sleat, Spain, Spanish Armada, Sparta, Themistocles, Thucydides, Toulon, Trireme, Venice, Viking, Xerxes, aftcastle, arsenal, artillery, birlinn, bow-wave, brand, cannon, chronometers, clinker, death penalty, dining car, fall of the Roman Empire, feudal, first millennium BC, forecastle, hulks, kitchen, knaars, latitude, liburnians, longitude, longships, man of war, man-of-war, naval battles, navigational, oars, octants, penal servitude, penteconter, printing, prisoners-of-war, publishers, ram, satrapies, sextants, ship, signature, square-rigged, steam propulsion, triremes, tyrant
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Ancient galleys", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
