Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/314

 conclusions on this, the most conflicting and intricate of all the problems connected with shipping which ancient authors have left for solution, is to trace the progress of the galleys themselves, from the single-banked craft or unireme upwards.

With the exception of the extraordinary Liburnian galleys, every account extant leads to the conviction that the single-banked galleys of the Venetians and Genoese resembled in many respects those of the Romans and ancient Greeks. Drawings of Venetian galleys, to which references will hereafter be made, have been preserved, but, as no detailed account of them exists, we are obliged to seek for information from a writer of a comparatively modern date.

In its leading features, a French galley, constructed somewhere about the close of the seventeenth century, would appear to have resembled those of Venice and of Rome of a similar class. She is described as having been one hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet broad; but there is evidently a mistake in the description of her width, as there is no record of any war galley, either ancient or modern, where the length was only three times the breadth of beam. They were invariably from five to ten times longer than they were wide. All writers on the ships of the ancients or of the middle ages are agreed upon this point; nor is there any account of a vessel propelled by oars of our own times, which