The Evolution of the War Galley

Hello Steemit!! Today I was reading about ancient marines and I saw a passage on ancient galleys and warships that intrigued me. After looking up on it, I decided to create a Steemit post about it.

One of the biggest factors In seagoing warfare was generating enough thrust to ram through an opposing warship. This was achieved by oars, rather than sails. The Egyptians had had oared warships as early as 1600 B.C. Since it was the most effective way to sink an enemy warship, most Mediterranean navies had long, sleek rearming craft, monoremes, by Sixth Century B.C. These monoremes were driven by about fifty oars. Although lengthening the ship did indeed improve the overall propulsion, it exacted a great cost in maneuverability. The use of the monoreme was to ram the enemy warship at top speed and then reverse speed to avoid getting boarded.

Then an inspired Phoenician or Greek shipwrite decided to take another approach, placing oarsmen on two levels. The success of this new two banked warship was called the bireme. It's oarsmen worked on two levels, with the lower bank rowing through port holes in the hull and the upper bank through the gunwales. It also usually carried a sail that was lowered during battle.

The creation of the bireme inevitably led to the success of the trireme. Supposedly it happened in the Greek state of Corinth, where naval architects found a way to fit a third bank of oarsmen into the galley by adding an outtrigger to the hull, producing the triple owned trireme, the most effective warship of the age.

The classic Greek trireme became a 120 foot long, waterborne juggernaut with a multi pronged ram. The ram was so big that it was salvaged from the old warships to avoid extra expenses. The trireme was twelve feet wide, flaring to sixteen feet at the outtrigger gunwale that held its upper most bank of rowers. With a total of 170 oarsmen, the trireme could puncture an enmities hull with tremendous force and reverse its momentum to break free in almost three seconds. Trireme were the most important warships of the time at about 480 B.C., and, despite best efforts, it remained the workhorse of the Mediterranean for seven centuries.

Although the trireme had indeed reached its maximum size, it had not, however, reached its maximum strength. Shipwrites soon began to put multiple people on each oar, adding speed and thrust. These ships began to be known as fivers, seveners, teners, and up. These terms designated the number of men on each set of oars in a vertical line from top to bottom banks. A fiver might have two men on top, two men on the middle, and one man on the bottom.

In the Third Century B.C., Ptolemy IV of Egypt built a twin hulled forty, which proved to be two clumsy for battle. Ptolemy's 'unseaworthy forty' could only be used for show. It stretched 420 feet from its 79 foot stern to its four Rams. The deck held more than 3,000 men, including a crew for catapults at the rails (in my opinion, this ship is the forerunner of modern carrier ships). With more than 4,000 oarsmen, the ship carried a total of 7,000 people.

By First Century B.C., builders realized that they had finally exceeded the efficient size for a warship, and the trireme, with more men at each oar, became the basic war galley for three more centuries.

If you liked this post, please upvote and provide feed back. If you have any questions, post them in the comment section below and I'll do my best to answer them.

Cheerio!