Oar-driven galleys ruled Mediterranean seas for over two thousand years
Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans all fought in long, slim rowing ships, and the design refused to die. Galleys carried pilgrims, guarded precious cargo, pioneered ship-killing cannon and fought their last major campaigns in the eighteenth-century Baltic. Their secret was simple: oars kept moving when the wind dropped.
A galley is a vessel built primarily for rowing, with a long narrow hull, shallow draught and usually low sides. Most also carried sails for favourable winds, square rigs at first and later triangular lateen sails, but oars let them travel regardless of wind or current and gave them control in battle. The English word appears around 1300, derived from Medieval Greek galea, a smaller cousin of the Byzantine dromon warship; its deeper origin is uncertain, though it may relate to galeos, the Greek word for a dogfish shark.
Ancient galleys typically had 15 to 30 pairs of oars, from single-banked monoremes to triremes with three tiers, and some giant polyremes placed several rowers on each oar and hundreds aboard. Early shipwrights built the hull first, joining planks with mortise and tenon, until the cheaper frame-first carvel method took over in the Middle Ages. Rowing systems simplified as well. In the alla sensile arrangement up to three skilled professionals shared a bench, each pulling his own oar; the later a scaloccio system put several men, sometimes seven or more, on one huge oar, a method suited to galley slaves and convicts.
In combat galleys carried rams and sometimes catapults in antiquity, Greek fire in the early Middle Ages and cannon from the fifteenth century, yet boarding by their big crews remained the main tactic. They were the first ships to use heavy guns effectively against other vessels and coastal forts; early sixteenth-century designs mounted big bow guns aimed by turning the entire ship. Those large crews also made galleys among the safest ways to travel, favoured by Christian pilgrims and for high-value trade until the end of the Middle Ages.
Their weaknesses eventually told. Galleys fared badly in rough weather and on open ocean far from supply bases, and full-rigged ships firing broadsides outgunned them, while oar-and-sail hybrids such as the xebec took over patrol work. Prestige and chivalric associations kept them in Mediterranean service until the end of the eighteenth century.
Source: Galley
