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Colourised engraving of a French galley (27 pairs of oars) built according to the design that was standard in the Mediterranean from the early 17th century; Henri Sbonski de Passebon, 1690. A galley is a type of ship optimised for propulsion by oars. Galleys were historically used for warfare, trade, and piracy mostly in the seas surrounding ...
A carving of a birlinn from a sixteenth-century tombstone in MacDufie's Chapel, Oronsay, as engraved in 1772. The birlinn (Scottish Gaelic: bìrlinn) or West Highland galley was a wooden vessel propelled by sail and oar, used extensively in the Hebrides and West Highlands of Scotland from the Middle Ages on.
The name bireme comes from "bi-" meaning two and "-reme" meaning oar. It was typically about 80 feet (24 m) long with a maximum beam width of around 10 feet (3 m). It was modified from the penteconter, a ship that had only one set of oars on each side, the bireme having two sets of oars on each side. The bireme was twice the triaconter's length ...
A trireme (/ ˈ t r aɪ r iː m / TRY-reem; from Latin trirēmis [1] 'with three banks of oars'; cf. Ancient Greek: τριήρης, romanized: triḗrēs [2], lit. 'three-rower') was an ancient vessel and a type of galley that was used by the ancient maritime civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea, especially the Phoenicians, ancient Greeks and ...
A galley slave was a slave rowing in a galley, either a convicted criminal sentenced to work at the oar (French: galérien), or a kind of human chattel, sometimes a prisoner of war, assigned to the duty of rowing. [1] In the ancient Mediterranean, galley rowers were mostly free men, and slaves were used as rowers when manpower was in high demand.
Around the 8th century BC, ramming began to be employed as war galleys were equipped with heavy bronze rams. Records of the Persian Wars in the early 5th century BC by the Ancient historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC) show that by this time ramming tactics had evolved among the Greeks. The formations could either be in columns in line ahead ...
Classes of ship could differ in their configuration between regions and over time, but in no case did a "four" ship have four horizontal ranks of oars. [12] From galleys used in the 16th to 18th centuries AD, it is known that the maximum number of men that can operate a single oar efficiently is eight. [13]
Both are compounds featuring a prefix meaning "five": Latin quīnque, ancient Greek πέντε (pénte). The Roman suffix is from rēmus, "oar": [1] hence "five-oar". As the vessel cannot have had only five oars, the word must be a figure of speech meaning something else. There are a number of possibilities.