Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/540

 another galley we also give by that author, the original sketch of which is in the famous MS. of Virgil in the Riccardi Library at Venice.

RICCARDI GALLEY, WITH THE EAGLES.

But though varying very much in class, size, and form, as well as in name, ships were then generally distinguished, like the vessels of the ancient Greeks and Phœnicians, as the "long ships" of war, and the "round ships" of the mercantile marine, both being propelled, to a greater or less extent, by oars. The Venetians likewise possessed the Dromond and the Draker, vessels almost exclusively employed on short voyages for the purposes of commerce. They had also a small trading vessel called the Galleon, not unlike the galliot of the present day; and the Pamphyle, which, in the ninth century, was worked with two banks of oars, but, in the fourteenth, had no oars, and during the fifteenth century must have disappeared altogether, as no mention is made of her after that period. Fom time immemorial they have had their gondolas, still to be seen upon the canals of that once gay and beautiful city. Though the following is the representation of the modern gondola, time has made little if any change in its form.

Beyond the galleys already named, the Italian