WARSHIPS IN THE AGE OF SAIL

The warships of the world prior to the advent of steam power relied upon either the wind or on the muscles of oarsmen to power them forward. Within the relatively sheltered confines of the Mediterranean Sea, the war galley, propelled by banks of rowers, was the arbiter of naval battles during the ancient and medieval periods. The invasion of Greece by the Persians was halted by the Greek triumph at Salamis in 480 BCE, a fight between hundreds of trireme galleys on both sides. The trireme’s larger derivative, the quinquereme, was the workhorse warship of both the Roman and Carthaginian fleets during the Punic Wars. Elsewhere, in East Asia, a rowed warship, the turtle ship, would help save Korea from Japanese conquest in the last decade of the 16th century.

The war galley would also dominate the naval wars of the Middle Ages, appearing in various guises in Mediterranean navies. The Byzantine dromon would be the ancestral model for Italian war galleys of the later Middles Ages. With the coming of bigger warships in the 16th century, such as the heavily armed carrack and the galleon, both carrying quantities of heavy cannons that the cramped galley could not match – its heyday