Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean Part 12

What was necessary of course in the galley was many oars and many hands to use them; the vessel was most skilfully constructed for this purpose so as to get the fullest power from her human engines; the result was that men were crowded on board of her to such an extent that there was scarcely room to breathe, such a craft as the one of which the dimensions have been given having on board some four hundred men.

Barras de la Penne, a French officer who in 1713 first went on board a galley, thus describes what he saw:

"Those who see a galley for the first time are astonished to see so many persons; there are an infinite number of villages in Europe which do not contain an equal number of inhabitants; however, this is not the princ.i.p.al cause of one's surprise, but that so many men can be a.s.sembled in so small a s.p.a.ce. It is truth that many of them have not room to sleep at full length, for they put seven men on one bench; that is to say, on a s.p.a.ce about ten feet long and four broad; at the bows one sees some thirty sailors who have for their lodging the floor s.p.a.ce of the rambades (this is the platform at the prow of the galley) which consists of a rectangular s.p.a.ce ten feet long by eight in width. The captain and officers who live on the p.o.o.p are scarcely better lodged, and one is tempted to compare their grandeur with that of Diogenes in his tub.

"When the unpitying Libyan Sea surprises these galleys upon the Roman coasts, when the Norther lashes to foam the Gulf of Lyons, when the humid east wind of Syria is driving them off sh.o.r.e, everything combines to make life on board a modern galley a h.e.l.l of misery and discomfort.

The creaking of the blocks and cordage, the loud cries of the sailors, the horrible maledictions of the galley slaves, the groaning of the timbers, mingled with the clank of chains and the bellowings of the tempest, produce sentiments of affright in the most intrepid b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The rain, the hail, the lightning, habitual accompaniments of these terrific storms, the waves which dash over the vessel, all add to the horror of the situation, and although devotion is not as a rule very strongly marked on board a galley, you will hear these folk praying to G.o.d, and others making vows to the Saints; these would do much better not to forget G.o.d and his Saints when the danger is past.

"Calm itself has also its inconveniences, as the evil smells which arise from the galley are then so strong that one cannot get away from them in spite of the tobacco with which one is obliged to plug one's nostrils from morning till night."

The gallant officer here goes into further details concerning the vermin on board which it will be as well to spare the reader.

Jean Marteille de Bergeraq, who died at Culenbourg in 1777, was condemned to serve on board the galleys in 1707 "in his quality of Protestant"; he must indeed have been a man of iron const.i.tution as he lived to the age of ninety-five. This is his description of the life of a _forcat_:

"They are chained six to a bench; the benches are four feet wide covered with sacking stuffed with wool over which are thrown sheepskins which reach to the floor. The officer who is master of the galley slaves remains aft with the captain to receive his orders; there are two under officers, one amids.h.i.+ps and one at the prow; all of these are armed with whips, with which they flog the absolutely naked bodies of the slaves. When the captain gives the order to row, the officer gives the signal with a silver whistle which hangs on a cord round his neck; the signal is repeated by the under officers and very soon all the fifty oars strike the water as one. Imagine six men chained to a bench as naked as they were born, one foot on the stretcher the other raised and placed on the bench in front of them, holding in their hands an oar of enormous weight, stretching their bodies towards the after part of the galley with arms extended to push the loom of the oar clear of the backs of those in front of them who are in the same att.i.tude. They plunge the blades of the oars into the water and throw themselves back, falling on to the seat which bends beneath their weight. Sometimes the galley slaves row thus ten, twelve, even twenty hours at a stretch, without the slightest relapse or rest, and on these occasions the officer will go round putting into the mouths of the wretched rowers pieces of bread soaked in wine to prevent them from fainting. Then the captain will call upon the officers to redouble their blows, and if one of the slaves falls fainting upon his oar, which is a common occurrence, he is flogged until he appears to be dead and is then flung overboard without ceremony."

The Italian captain, Pantero Pantera, of the _Santa Lucia_ galley, in his work on "L'Armata Navale" published in 1614, gives it as his opinion that although soldiers and sailors could be obtained for service in the galleys if good pay were given, still no money could tempt any free man to adventure himself as a rower for any length of time owing to the intolerable sufferings which the "gallerian" was called upon to endure. As, however, in the opinion of the captain it was most necessary that the galleys should be manned, he thought that all judges should in future send criminals aboard; those who had committed murder as "lifers," those who had committed lesser crimes _pro rata_. Those who by the n.o.bility of their birth or their physical incompetence were unable to handle the oar should be called upon to pay for subst.i.tutes to act for them; these were called "Buone-Voglie."

There was not much difference after all between the methods used by the seventeenth-century Italian to those actually in force in England at a much later date when the Press Gang swept the honest and the dishonest into its net in its midnight raids.

"The galley slaves," observes Pantera, "cherish repose and sincerely wish to avoid fatigue; in order to incite them to do their duty it is necessary to use the whip as well as the whistle; by using it with severity the officers will find that they are better obeyed, and it will in consequence be good for the service, for fear of the whip is the princ.i.p.al cause of good behaviour among the gallerians." Further on he observes that it is well not to flog them too severely and without reason, "for this irritates the gallerians, as I have frequently observed: this may cause them to despair and to wish for death as the only sure way out of their troubles."

The excellent Pantera a little later on even says that he cannot agree that the attempt to cure a sick gallerian "is all nonsense, as is maintained by some persons," as sick men are a source of danger on board. He apparently was not prepared to throw them overboard alive, but urges that the best way to avoid such pestilences among them as killed forty thousand Venetians at the port of Zara in 1570 is to embark sound and good victuals.

It is interesting to have a contemporary view of the correct treatment of the galley slave from those who had to do with him. In the case of the corsairs and their adversaries the gallerians were as a rule prisoners of war, but as time went on and wars became less frequent than they were throughout the sixteenth century, another source of supply was tapped by sending to the galleys the criminals of any country which desired to fill up the rowers' benches. In consequence there was always one thing which was feared above all others on board a galley, and that was a rising of the slaves.

If they were not your enemies officially, they were a set of desperate criminals ripe for any mischief should they get loose, and chained, starved, beaten, frozen with the cold, baked by the summer heats, tortured, murdered, they had nothing earthly for which to hope except escape. If in the heat of battle there should occur a rising of the slaves, then their masters knew that victory would declare itself surely on the side of the enemy. Therefore that they should be securely chained was the first and most important thing to which the boatswain of a galley and his mates had to see. If by a bold stroke they once freed themselves from their shackles it was a fight to the death for those who erstwhile had been in command, as the gallerians, outnumbering them and caring nought for their lives in comparison to their liberties, were far the most formidable foes that they could be called upon to encounter. When men are so treated that their daily life is one long martyrdom they become the most dangerous force in existence, and on the occasions which sometimes happened that the slaves got the upper hand, there were none left of the fighting men of the galley to tell the tale of their discomfiture.

In time of battle the gallerians were of course equally exposed to death and wounds from the projectiles of the enemy as were the orthodox fighting men; but to them came no rejoicing at the sound of victory; rather they prayed for the defeat of their masters, as it frequently happened that those against whom they were arrayed were their own countrymen and friends by whom they hoped for release. Thus at Lepanto, the Christian slaves, seeing the right wing of the Turkish fleet thrown into disorder by the galleys of the Allies, broke out into furious mutiny, succeeded in shattering their fetters and chains, attacked their masters the Turks in the rear with incredible energy with any weapons upon which they could lay their hands, and thus contributed in no small measure to the ultimate triumph of the Christian arms.

The Captain Pantero Pantera and Barras de la Peine have written exhaustively on the galley, her crew, her armament, her manner of provisioning, her masts, sails, rigging, etc., and Admiral Jurien de la Graviere has given a most painstaking exposition concerning the technicalities of these craft. But to enter into too much detail would be to weary the reader unnecessarily, who, it is apprehended, merely desires that a general idea should be given of the way in which these vessels were handled and fought.

It would appear that during the whole time that oar-propelled vessels were used as wars.h.i.+ps their form did not differ to any material extent, as certain limitations of size were obviously imposed on them by the mere fact that they had to be moved by so finite and feeble a force as human muscles, hearts, and lungs. No cruelty, however ghastly, could extract from the gallerians more than a certain amount of work, and the Captain Pantero Pantera, as we have seen, even advocates that a certain minimum of consideration should be shown to them in order that better work might be obtained. It was probable, however, that in the case of the Christian slaves captured by the corsairs even this minimum was to seek, as the numbers swept off by them were so enormous that they could be used up and replaced without inconveniencing these rovers of the sea, to whom compa.s.sion for suffering was absolutely unknown.

The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, or the Knights of Malta as they were also called, used the galley in their unceasing warfare with the Moslem.

The General of the Galleys was a Grand Cross of the Order; the captains were knights, and the second officer, or first lieutenant, was known as the Patron. The crew of a galley of the knights had twenty-six rowing benches and carried two hundred and eighty rowers and two hundred and eighty combatants; the armament consisted of one bow cannon which discharged a forty-eight pound ball, four other small guns, eight pounders, and fourteen others which discharged stones.

"The Religion," as the Knights were in the habit of describing themselves, had certain definite stations a.s.signed to each knight, seaman, or officer during action. It is to be imagined, however, that these were merely for the preliminary stages of the fight, as it was seldom that time allowed for more than one discharge, or at the most two, of the artillery, before the opposing galleys met in a hand-to-hand conflict which must have immediately become an indiscriminate melee.

The manner in which the galley should engage is thus contained in an answer to a question of Don John of Austria, the victor of Lepanto. He wrote to Garcia de Toledo, fourth Marquis of Villafranca, and General of the Galleys of Sicily, to ask his opinion as to what distance it was most efficacious to open fire in a naval action. Toledo replied that "one cannot fire more than twice before the galleys close. I should therefore recommend that the arquebussiers should hold their fire until they are so close to the enemy that his blood will leap into the face of him who discharges his piece.

have always heard it said, and this by captains who are well skilled in the art of war, that the last discharge of the cannon should be coincident with the noise made by the breaking of the spurs carried in the prows of the galleys; in fact that the two noises should be as one; some propose to fire before the enemy does: this is by no means my advice."

Artillery, it will be seen from this, played a comparatively unimportant part in the combats between galley and galley; that in these craft men still relied on the strength of their right arm and the edge of their swords; there was still a certain contempt for villainous saltpetre, which was looked upon as a somewhat cowardly substance, preventing the warrior from settling his disputes in the good old fas.h.i.+on of his forbears. In any case, when you practically had to push the muzzle of your gun against your enemy's body in order to hit him, it was not a weapon upon which much reliance was to be placed.

There were, in addition to the galley, the nef and the galea.s.se; the former of these was a sailing vessel pure and simple like those remarkable caravels in which Columbus discovered America.

What these caravels were exactly like it was the good fortune of the writer to see in the year 1893. This was the date of the great exhibition of Chicago, and the American Government were most anxious to have, and to exhibit if possible, an exact replica of these historic craft. They accordingly communicated with the Spanish Government and inquired if by any chance they possessed the plans and specifications of the caravels of Columbus? Search was made in the archives of Cadiz Dockyard and these priceless doc.u.ments were discovered. From them the s.h.i.+ps were built in every respect the same as the wonderful originals and then towed across the Atlantic by the United States cruiser _Lancaster_. On their way they were brought to Gibraltar, where the writer's s.h.i.+p was then stationed, and were anch.o.r.ed inside the New Mole. The _Santa Maria_, the flags.h.i.+p of Columbus, was a three-masted vessel with a very high "forecastle" and "sterncastle"

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.