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Rameses the Great, the Sesostris of the Greeks, had a fleet of four hundred vessels in the Arabian Gulf, and the rowers wore quilted helmets. His vessels had sails, which implies the weaving of flax and the twisting of heavy ropes; some of his war-galleys were propelled by forty-four oars, and were one hundred and twenty feet in length.
No defence was made, for, swarming to leeward, they tumbled, in mad affright, overboard; over the bows, through gun-ports, by aid of trailing halliards and stranded rigging, out of the channels, pell-mell by every loop-hole they went and then, such as could, swam like water-rats for the friendly shelter of the neighbouring war-galleys.
All their efforts were employed in keeping clear of one another, warding off a collision with long poles, amid a hubbub of curses and abuse. Into this huddled, swaying mass of war-galleys and merchant-craft mingled together now dashed the Athenian triremes, wrecking every vessel which they met.
Some sort of nucleus for this purpose was already furnished on the subjugation of Antium by the serviceable war-galleys which were carried off to the Roman docks; but the enactment at the same time, that the Antiates should abstain from all maritime traffic, is a very clear and distinct indication how weak the Romans then felt themselves at sea, and how completely their maritime policy was still summed up in the occupation of places on the coast.
The first was a permission originally given by the popes to levy six hundred thousand dollars a year upon ecclesiastical property for equipment of a hundred war-galleys against the Saracens, but which had more recently established itself as a regular tax to pay for naval hostilities against Dutch and English heretics a still more malignant species of unbelievers in the orthodox eyes of the period.
The first was a permission originally given by the popes to levy six hundred thousand dollars a year upon ecclesiastical property for equipment of a hundred war-galleys against the Saracens, but which had more recently established itself as a regular tax to pay for naval hostilities against Dutch and English heretics a still more malignant species of unbelievers in the orthodox eyes of the period.
With seventy-three war-galleys in the highest state of efficiency, and brilliantly equipped, with a force of five thousand picked men of the regular infantry of Athens and her allies, and a still larger number of bowmen, javelin-men, and slingers on board, Demosthenes rowed round the great harbor with loud cheers and martial music, as if in defiance of the Syracusans and their confederates.
The Romans not only succeeded in raising a considerable navy, but they proved themselves ingenious in the contrivance of novelties in their war-galleys. They erected towers on the decks, from the top of which their warriors fought as from the walls of a fortress.
Further on, some remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here the high base of an Acropolis, with the floating outline of a Parthenon; there traces of a quay, as if an ancient port had formerly abutted on the borders of the ocean, and disappeared with its merchant vessels and its war-galleys.
Thus the master of the greatest empire of the earth had at times no income at his disposal except the alma he could solicit from his poorest subjects to maintain his warfare against foreign miscreants, the levy on the Church for war-galleys; and the proceeds of his permission to eat meat on Fridays. This sounds like an epigram, but it is a plain, incontestable fact.
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