Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/542

 a peculiar description, and deriving her name from having an opening or large port in her poop, through which horses were shipped, for the conveyance of which these vessels seem to have been more especially designed. This large opening, when the Huissier had completed her loading, was securely closed and caulked, like the bow and stern ports in the ships of our own time employed in the timber trade.

In the list of ships engaged for the expedition against Crete ( 949) mention is made, not merely of Huissiers, Zelanders, and Pamphyles, but of vessels known as Zelander-Huissiers and Zelander-Pamphyles, or of a description embodying the qualities and advantages of both. "Cats," to which William of Tyre, speaking of an incident in 1121, calls attention, were sharp-beaked ships, larger than galleys, having one hundred oars, each of which was worked by two men, or "double banked" in the phraseology of our own time. The Saitie, or Sagette (arrow), was a small, fast-rowing vessel, or barge, propelled by oars, but considerably less than even the smallest class of galleys. In the twelfth century this description of craft had from ten to twelve oars on each side, and was employed during the five succeeding centuries for the same purposes as the Brigantine. The Galliot, the Furt, the Brigantine, and the Frigate became in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries diminutives of the galley, and were known as the Galeass, when large, broad, and heavily armed. The galeass had her oars ranged, either in threes upon a single bank, or had twenty-six oars on each side, in which case, the oar being larger and