SHIPS AND SEAMEN 



and scouting it was a great advance on anything that he possessed, 

 although one may safely guess that its inventors used it for a rather less 

 reputable purpose. Sail, hull, and the clothes of the crew are reported 

 to have been coloured blue to make it less conspicuous, and for speed 

 the hull was covered with a coating of wax. 

 The Galleys. 



Although in the early days all ships were propelled with oars a 

 galley is a type which belonged essentially to the Mediterranean, just 

 as it did for several centuries afterwards. Generally it was a long 

 narrow vessel, from five to ten beams to the length, and its exact con- 

 struction has been the subject of endless argument. There is reason to 

 believe that the earliest galleys were paddled instead of rowed and 

 from this the natural development is the single-bank galley, somewhat 

 after the same fashion as the Viking ships. There are records, how- 

 ever, of galleys with an extraordinary number of banks and it has always 

 been a problem as to how they fitted them in. Ptolemy Philopator, for 

 instance, is reported by Athena^us to have possessed the wonderful 

 galley already mentioned, over 400 feet long, rowed by 4,000 oarsmen, 

 but how they were fitted in has never been satisfactorily explained. 

 Triremes were the most popular type of man-of-war galley, analogous 

 to the 74-gun ships of later days, but there were also numbers of quin- 

 queremes with five banks of oars. Perhaps the most likely arrangement 

 of these rowers is that given by Lindsay and reproduced herewith. 



TRANSVERSE MIDSHIP SECTION OF A QUINQUEREME. 



(From Lindsay's " History of Merchant Shipping." By courtesy of Messrs. Sampson Low &■ Co.) 



The Vikings rowed standing up, but in the Mediterranean the men 

 probably remained seated in the small galleys, although in the bigger 

 ones they had to rise, move forward as far as possible, and then throw 

 themselves back into their seats as regularly as they could. The 

 regularity was obtained by either vocal or instrumental music, and here 

 we have the beginning of the shanties which became so universal in sail- 

 ing ships. It is recorded that some of these galley slaves would row 

 for twenty hours at a stretch, having bread soaked in wine pushed into 



their mouths as they continued their work. 



169 



