Part 12 (2/2)
and very deep in the waist; she had three masts, the foremast carrying one square sail, the mainmast having both mainsail and main-topsail, the mizzen was rigged with a lateen sail, on the mainsail was painted the Maltese and on the foresail the Papal cross, and on deck she carried a brick-built cooking galley. A most beautiful model of this vessel is to be seen in the Science and Art Department of the South Kensington Museum.
The nef in its later manifestations became a much more seaworthy vessel than this, with four masts, the two foremost ones square-rigged and carrying courses and topsails, the two after ones carrying lateen sails; the latter from their small size and their proximity to one another could not have had much effect on the sailing qualities of the s.h.i.+p. The nefs in the fleet of Don John of Austria in 1571 were rigged in this fas.h.i.+on and comprised vessels of eight hundred, nine hundred, and even one thousand tons, while a contemporary English vessel, the _Great Harry_ or _Henri Grace a Dieu_, was as much as fifteen hundred tons, and carried no less than one hundred and eighty-four pieces of ordnance. It was from the nef and the galea.s.se that the sailing man-of-war arrived by the process of evolution. The galley in the first instance was the vessel of men who fought hand to hand, the men in whom personal strength and desperate valour were blended, who desired nothing so much as to come to close grips with their enemy. Such rude engines of war as the pierriers, or short cannons which discharged some forty or fifty pounds of broken stone upon the enemy, were first mounted in the galley; these were followed by improved artillery as time went on. But although the galleys eventually carried quite big guns, as instanced by the forty-eight pounder in the galleys of the Knights of St. John, still it soon became apparent that the limit was reached by guns of this weight; the galley was essentially a light vessel and was not built to withstand those rude shocks caused by firing heavy charges of powder.
The galea.s.se was the connecting link between the navy of oars and the navy of sails. The navy of oars was in its generation apt for warlike purposes; but it was in its essence a force a.n.a.logous to the light cavalry of the land; useful for a raid, a sudden dash, but without that great strength and solidity which came in later years to the building of the sailing line of battles.h.i.+p.
The galea.s.se was really a magnified galley, one which used both sails and oars, on board of which the rowers were under cover; she was built with a forecastle and a sterncastle which were elevated some six feet above the benches of the rowers, and her very long and immensely heavy oars were of course proportionate to the size of the vessel. The description of a galea.s.se of nearly one thousand tons burden is set forth as follows by Jurien de la Graviere:
”Her draught of water was about 18 feet 6 inches, she was propelled by 52 oars, 48 feet in length, each oar being worked by 9 men. Her crew consisted of 452 rowers, 350 soldiers, 60 marines, 12 steersmen, 40 ordinary seamen, 86 cannoneers, 12 petty officers, 4 boatswains' mates, 3 pilots, 2 sub-pilots, 4 counsellors, 2 surgeons, 4 writers, 2 sergeants, 2 carpenters, 2 caulkers, 2 coopers, 2 bakers, 10 servants, a captain, a lieutenant, a purser. In all some thousand men, or about the same number as the crew of a three-decker of a later date.”
The fleet of the ”Holy League” at the battle of Lepanto had in it six galea.s.ses from the a.r.s.enal of Venice; and whereas an average galley carried 110 soldiers and 222 galley slaves, the crews of these galea.s.ses comprised 270 soldiers, 130 sailors, and 300 galley slaves.
The speed of the galley was calculated by the French engineer Forfait to be in the most favourable circ.u.mstances, that is to say in a flat calm, but four and a half knots for the first hour, and two and a quarter to one and a half miles per hour for subsequent hours; the exhaustion of the rowers consequent on their arduous toil would not admit of a greater speed than this. The studies of Forfait were made when the invasion of England by rowing boats was a topic of burning interest. It is evident from this that long voyages, trusting to the oar alone, could not be undertaken; but as we have seen, the galley was also provided with motive power in the shape of two masts carrying the lateen sail, which may be still seen in so many Mediterranean craft.
That the galley was no vessel in which to embark in bad weather is instanced for us by the disasters which befell a Spanish fleet of these craft in 1567 under the Grand Commander of Castile, Don Luiz de Requesens.
A revolt of the Moors in Granada had caused Philip the Second to wish to withdraw a certain number of Spanish troops from Italy. Requesens was sent to Genoa with twenty-four galleys to embark a detachment of an army corps then stationed in Piedmont. Each galley embarked one hundred and fifty soldiers; they then got under way and reached the island of Hyeres, where they anch.o.r.ed, the weather being too bad to proceed. At the end of their eighth day in port a number of vessels were seen flying to the eastward before the wind; it was a squadron of Genoese.
Requesens, who was no seaman, was furious. Here were the Genoese at sea, and he wasting his time in harbour; if they could keep the sea why could not he, he demanded? He instantly ordered the anchors to be weighed. The commander of the Tuscan galleys, of which there were ten in the fleet, immediately went on board the galley in which Requesens was embarked and represented that the wind was foul and that should they leave their anchorage they could make no headway once they got clear of the land. But Requesens was obstinate: ”if others can go on their way it is shameful that I should not proceed on mine,” he protested. Alfonso d'Aragona argued with him in vain, representing that his master, the Duke of Tuscany, would hold the Grand Commander responsible for damage to his galleys. It was all in vain, as the Grand Commander was too arrogant and stupid to listen to advice from anybody. The fleet put to sea and struggled out a mile from the land; when they got thus far Requesens discovered his mistake and regretted that he had not taken the advice of the mariners; but it was now too late, they had drifted to leeward of their anchorage and could not get back again.
One galley, a new vessel, ran into another which was an old one, and sank her on the spot, carrying all her luckless crew to the bottom. The remaining vessels scattered far and wide; Alfonso d'Aragona found refuge in the Bay of Alghieri, two more of his galleys reached an anchorage in the Isle of St. Pierre, another sheltered in the Gulf of Oristano; three galleys were s.h.i.+pwrecked on the coast in this neighbourhood and lost many of their men; yet another, called the _Florence_, was twice nearly wrecked on the coast of Barbary, and eventually reached the Bay of Cagliari. A Genoese captain found himself as far afield as the Island of Pantellaria, two galleys were never heard of again, and the Grand Commander himself anch.o.r.ed eventually in the Bay of Palamos on the Spanish coast. Of the twenty-four galleys which left their anchorage twelve were lost and the twelve which remained were practically valueless until large sums had been spent in repairs.
It is small wonder in the light of these events that the seamen who ranged the Mediterranean in vessels propelled by oars regarded the winter as a close season and laid up their galleys in harbour. They were seaworthy enough for ordinary weather, but could not withstand such a tempest as the one in which Requesens put to sea. The whole story is only a further proof of the folly of putting supreme command of a sea-going venture in the hands of a man totally ignorant of the hazards he was called upon to encounter.
In the sixteenth and even in the seventeenth centuries this was done perpetually, and if no disaster occurred it was because no bad weather was encountered.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Brigantin donnant cha.s.se a une Felouque, et prest a la border. BRIGANTINE CHASING FELUCCA.]
As time went on the sailing s.h.i.+p became larger and larger and was able to mount more and more powerful ordnance; this had the effect of discounting the value of the galley as a fighting s.h.i.+p; in consequence she became practically obsolete, for the line of battle, after the combat at Lepanto.
In spite of this she was to linger on for many long years to come as the weapon of the corsairs who had established themselves on the coast of Africa. The ”long s.h.i.+p” was still to be the cause of many an awful sea tragedy, whether the actors therein were the pirates who hailed from the Barbary coast or their most capable imitators the notorious rovers of Sallee.
CHAPTER XV
DRAGUT-REIS
How he became Lieutenant to Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa--His capture by Jannetin Doria--His four years as a galley slave--His ransom by his old chief.
In character, in capability, in strategic insight, in tactical ability, not one of the predecessors or the successors of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa can be compared to him; he was the greatest and most outstanding figure of all those corsairs of whose deeds we hear so much during the sixteenth century, the man above all others who was feared and hated by his contemporaries in Christendom. He lived, as we have said, for another eight years after the battle of Prevesa, but his great age prevented him from pursuing a very active career. There were, however, other and younger men, trained in the terrible school of hards.h.i.+p in which his life had been pa.s.sed, who proved themselves to be his very worthy successors, even if they did not display the same genius in war and statecraft. The conditions of this period are somewhat remarkable when we come to consider them; Europe, which had been sunk in a rude and uncultured barbarism during the middle ages, was emerging under the influence of the Renaissance into a somewhat higher and n.o.bler conception of life. It is true that the awakening was slow, that morally the plane on which the peoples stood was far from being an elevated one, that altruism was far from being the note of the lives lived by the rulers of the so-called civilised nations. For all this they had emerged from that cimmerian darkness in which they had lived so long, and the dawn of better things, of more stable government, of some elementary recognition of the rights of those governed, was beginning to show above the murky horizon.
But if the sun of European progress was slowly and painfully struggling through the clouds, the light which had shone brightly for over seven centuries of Moslem advance was certainly and surely dying. Beneath the mail-clad heel of the Christian warrior the torch of learning which had burned so brightly in Cordova and Granada had been extinguished and ground into the dust, and the descendants of the alumni of those universities were seeking their bread in the Mediterranean Sea in the guise of bloodthirsty and desperate pirates.
There were no longer among the Moors of Andalusia learned philosophers, expert mathematicians, wise astronomers, and practical agriculturists; there was among them but one art, one science, one means of gaining a livelihood--the practice of war--and their very existence depended on the spoils which could be reft from the hereditary enemy. The corsair who grew to man's estate, brought up in Algiers, Tunis, Tenes, Jerba, or any other of the lurking places in which the sea-wolves congregated, had as a rule no chance but to follow the sea, to exist as his father had existed before him; he must fight or starve, and in a fighting age no youngster was likely to be backward in taking to the life of wild excitement led by his elders.
Unless following in the train of one of the leaders, such as Barbarossa, the Moslems were apt to take to the sea in a private capacity; a certain number of them joining together to man a small craft which was known as a brigantine. As has been said in a previous chapter, this word must not be understood in the light of the terminology of the modern seaman: the brigantines of the Moslem corsairs were really large rowing boats, carrying fourteen to twenty-six oars, and made as seaworthy as the small size of such craft would allow. Should the venture of the crew of a brigantine prove successful, then the reis, or captain, might blossom out into the command of a galley, in which his oars would be manned by his slaves; but, in the first instance, he would man his brigantine with a crew of Moslem desperadoes working on the share system and dividing anything that they could pick up; in this manner most of those corsairs who became famous commenced their careers, and rose as we have seen from the thwart of a brigantine to the unstable eminence of a throne in Algiers, Tunis, or Tlemcen.
This life which they led made of them what they were, namely desperate swordsmen, efficient men at arms, incomparably skilful in the management of the craft in which they put to sea; but it did nothing else for them in the way of education; in consequence he who would rise to the top, who aspired to be a leader amongst them and not to remain a mere swash-buckling swordsman all his life, was bound to acquire that dominance necessary for control of the wild spirits of the age. Nor was this ascendancy by any means easy to obtain, as the rank and file led lives of incredible bitterness, almost inconceivable to modern ideas. What they suffered they alone knew, but it was compounded of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, sickness unrelieved by care or tending, wounds which festered for lack of medicaments, death which ever stared them in the face, and last, and worst of all, the risk of capture by some Christian foe, by whom they would be chained to the rowers' bench and taste of a bitterness absolutely unimaginable. As a set-off to this the man who aspired to lead must offer to his followers at least a record of success in small things; also he had to be something of an enthusiast, something of an orator, some one subtly persuasive. Against all the disagreeables of the strenuous life of the corsair he had to hold before the dazzled eyes of Selim, Ali, or Mahomet the promise of fat captures of the merchant vessels of the foe; when they had but to slit a few throats and to return with their brigantines laden to the gunwale with desirable plunder. Again he had to hearten them for possible encounters with Spaniards, with the terrible Doria, or worst of all with the dreaded Knights of St. John themselves; to point out that to die in conflict with the infidel was a sure pa.s.sport to heaven and its houris, and to invoke great names, such as that of Barbarossa to show to what dizzy heights the fighting Moslem could climb. In such an age and among such men as these it was no mean feat to become a leader by whom men swore and to whom they yielded a ready obedience.
Fas.h.i.+oned by the hammer of misfortune on the anvil of racial expropriation, such leaders arose among the Moslems, men of iron, before whom all who wors.h.i.+pped at the altars of Islam bowed the knee. These men, whose fame extended throughout all the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, taught to European rulers something of the value of that great force which is known to us under the modern name of ”Sea Power.”
Next in importance to Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa himself and in many ways his very worthy successor, was Dragut Reis. We have it on the authority of Messire Pierre de Bourdeille, the Seigneur de Brantome, that Dragut was born at a small village in Asia Minor called Charabulac, opposite to the island of Rhodes, and that his parents were Mahommedans. Being born within sight and sound of the sea, the youthful Dragut naturally graduated in the school of the brigantine and completed his education on board of a galley.
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