Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/520

 512 ENGLISH GALLEYS October as occasion shalbe ofEered. Theis shalbe therfore to require you to cause them forthwith to be placed in the new gallies, and fast tied with chaines in such suer sorte as they maie not by anie means escape, allowing them for their diet under the ordinary allowaunce for som time, and in anie case not to sufEer them to be delivered without the privitie of me, the Lord Admiral of England. Herof you must have special care.^ On the other hand, we have direct evidence that on two of the rare occasions during the reign of Queen Elizabeth when a, galley actually put to sea, it was manned by free labour. In May 1586 Hawkyns and Baeshe drew up an estimate for the cost of maintaining the Bonavolia at sea for three months, and this included wages for all her 250 men — mariners and rowers alike — at 14s. the man per month, the same rate as the sailors on the Bull or the Signet were getting ; ^ and among the charges to be met for the two months' service of the Bonavolia in 1588 is the sum of £350 Os. Od., being sea wages for 200 rowers and 50 seamen at the uniform rate of 14s. the man per month. ^ Regular wages would not have been paid to criminals, war prisoners, or slaves. On the whole, then, it would probably be safe to say that, while the government was always prepared to commit persons to the galleys as slaves, yet in the main these vessels were rowed by free labour. It is even just possible that the change in name of Elizabeth's galley from Eleanor to Bonavolia may be evidence of this, for rematori di bona voglia was the technical Italian term for men who had voluntarily enlisted for the benches. ^ The employment of these galleys in the sixteenth century marks an interesting, if somewhat isolated and fruitless episode in English naval history : it was due to foreign influences, and especially to the use of a French galley fleet from Toulon in the English Channel and ofif the coast of Scotland, and it was doomed to failure by the local conditions which were wholly unsuited to galleys, by the distrust with which English seamen regarded them almost from the beginning, and, above all, by the fact that much of the best naval opinion of the day was committed to a policy of armament and naval construction to which galleys could not be adapted, and which was to evolve a type of ship that, in the hands of Drake and his successors, administered the deathblow to the Mediterranean galley as a weapon of naval offence. E. R. Adair. ' Acts of the Privy Council, xxiv. 486-7. the Bonavolia really put to sea on this occasion. ' State Papers, Dom., Eliz., ccix. 85, 12 April 1588.
 * State Papers, Dom., Eliz., clxxxix. 40, 25 May 1586 ; it seems probable that
 * Corbett, i. 385.