sailing boats and galley slaves....

[drivin_me_nuts]

Well sailing bods, I have a question...

Having watched the series Rome, I got to wonder how long it would have taken an average trading barge circa year 0000 to travel from Rome to Egypt. Any ideas boaty folkies?

[sherman]

Very much dependent on which way the wind was blowing.

[tank slapper]

Ships of that era were powerful and fast and mainly oar powered. A reconstruction of a Greek trireme did 9 knots with an inexperienced crew so chances are they were a bit faster than that. At that speed Rome to Egypt is about 4-5 days.

The largest ship had 4000 oarsmen, carried 2800 soldiers and was 425 feet long, which is about the same size as a modern Type 23 frigate. They weren't exactly the type of rowing boat you get at the local boating lake.

[Sam_68]

tank slapper said:

The largest ship had 4000 oarsmen, carried 2800 soldiers and was 425 feet long, which is about the same size as a modern Type 23 frigate. They weren't exactly the type of rowing boat you get at the local boating lake.

I know the source you're quoting here (Athenaeus), but I'd take that with a very, very large pinch of salt, if I were you. There is no historical evidence to support the existence of such large ships, they are generally believed to be well beyond the basic structural capabilities of the available materials at the time, and it seems likely that, as with the numbers of men involved in ancient battles or the wealth of great rulers, there was a ridiculous amount of exaggeration involved at times.

A clue is that Athenaeus wrote in the 2nd/3rd century AD. Ptolemy IV (who allegedly built this monster) lived in the 2nd century BC. There were 300+ years worth of rumour, myth and exaggeration between the two...

[AlexiusG55]

tank slapper said:

Ships of that era were powerful and fast and mainly oar powered. A reconstruction of a Greek trireme did 9 knots with an inexperienced crew so chances are they were a bit faster than that. At that speed Rome to Egypt is about 4-5 days.

The largest ship had 4000 oarsmen, carried 2800 soldiers and was 425 feet long, which is about the same size as a modern Type 23 frigate. They weren't exactly the type of rowing boat you get at the local boating lake.

I think 9 knots was sprint/ramming speed, not sustainable. After all:
The course record for the Tour du Lac Leman- the longest non-stop rowing race in the world- is a bit under 12 hours for a 160-km race. That's an average of 7.2 knots, and this is for a specialised racing boat (as opposed to a warship) with the benefit of 2,000 years of materials advances, not to mention outriggers and sliding seats which will make the boat massively faster, and the fact that the race is on flat water.

More importantly, ancient warships had no facilities for the crew to cook or sleep on board, and their navigation meant that they seldom went out of sight of land. They would beach the ship each night to sleep and cook ashore. There are records of warships rowing on through the night, but these were rare and heroic occurrences- the one I can remember off the top of my head, the ship was racing to countermand an order to exterminate an island's population before it was carried out!

The ships that went on longer voyages were merchant ships which usually sailed- as warships did- when the winds were favourable.

[tank slapper]

Sam_68 said:

I know the source you're quoting here (Athenaeus), but I'd take that with a very, very large pinch of salt, if I were you. There is no historical evidence to support the existence of such large ships, they are generally believed to be well beyond the basic structural capabilities of the available materials at the time, and it seems likely that, as with the numbers of men involved in ancient battles or the wealth of great rulers, there was a ridiculous amount of exaggeration involved at times.

A clue is that Athenaeus wrote in the 2nd/3rd century AD. Ptolemy IV (who allegedly built this monster) lived in the 2nd century BC. There were 300+ years worth of rumour, myth and exaggeration between the two...

That is possible, but Anthenaeus also says that it wasn't really a practical ship and was more for show, and it's also thought it was a catamaran of some sort. It would certainly be a demanding prospect to build such a ship, but I'm not sure about simply dismissing it out of hand. There were some remarkable engineers in the ancient world.

AlexiusG55 said:

I think 9 knots was sprint/ramming speed, not sustainable. After all:
The course record for the Tour du Lac Leman- the longest non-stop rowing race in the world- is a bit under 12 hours for a 160-km race. That's an average of 7.2 knots, and this is for a specialised racing boat (as opposed to a warship) with the benefit of 2,000 years of materials advances, not to mention outriggers and sliding seats which will make the boat massively faster, and the fact that the race is on flat water.

One thing to bear in mind is that as you increase the size of a boat, the increase in volume is much larger than the increase in power required to drive it. A large boat therefore proportionally much less power to reach a certain speed than a smaller one.

You might find this article interesting: http://www.mediafire.com/?2hhh0w7shns7ykl

There is footage of the Olympias on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7da52cJLwW8

[Sam_68]

tank slapper said:

There were some remarkable engineers in the ancient world.

Unless they had access to some very remarkable wood, I'm still very skeptical, I'm afraid: it just doesn't stack up against the basic structural properties of the materials they had to work with.

[anonymous-user]

I'm struggling to imagine how you would fit 4000 oarsmen and 2800 soldiers on to a ship the size of a Type 23 frigate, regardless of the practicalities of building it.

[Marty63]

Inkyfingers said:

I'm struggling to imagine how you would fit 4000 oarsmen

Plus a bloke with a big drum

[AlexiusG55]

tank slapper said:

AlexiusG55 said:

I think 9 knots was sprint/ramming speed, not sustainable. After all:
The course record for the Tour du Lac Leman- the longest non-stop rowing race in the world- is a bit under 12 hours for a 160-km race. That's an average of 7.2 knots, and this is for a specialised racing boat (as opposed to a warship) with the benefit of 2,000 years of materials advances, not to mention outriggers and sliding seats which will make the boat massively faster, and the fact that the race is on flat water.

One thing to bear in mind is that as you increase the size of a boat, the increase in volume is much larger than the increase in power required to drive it. A large boat therefore proportionally much less power to reach a certain speed than a smaller one.

You might find this article interesting: http://www.mediafire.com/?2hhh0w7shns7ykl

There is footage of the Olympias on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7da52cJLwW8

Thanks for the SciAm article, but the first paragraph refers to "a cruising speed of 7.5 knots" for the dash from Athens to Mytilene that I think is the one I referred to in my post. Later on, based on amateur fixed-seat racing crews, they work out a top speed of 9.3 knots (and that's with the rudders out of the water), for a 25-minute burst.


Also, the fact remains that anything much longer than 24 hours would be limited by crew endurance and the need for food and sleep. Not all galley rowers were slaves- free crews were more skilled, and also provided a source of emergency manpower in a boarding action. In the Athenian citizen armed forces, the rowers were those citizens who couldn't afford the equipment of an infantryman as soldiers provided their own.

[drivin_me_nuts]

Interesting replies chaps. It must have been some sight to see, a galley in full war mode. Thanks.

[tank slapper]

There is a New Scientist article from 2007 that talks about that reconstruction. It was apparently recommissioned for the Olympics games in Athens. I can't link to it easily, but there are a few interesting points:

article said:

With Olympias back at sea and the latest crew well into their training, Rossiter and Rankov travelled to Piraeus to investigate the source of the discrepancy between ancient and modern performances. By measuring the metabolic rates of a group of oarsmen, they established how much energy each rower expended in powering the ship at different speeds. "After about 4 knots the values we came up with for the metabolic demands were very high," says Rossiter. "It was clear that a sustained 7 knots was outside the aerobic capacity of the modern oarsmen."

The measurements also showed that not all the power generated by the human engine went into propelling the ship -- at 7 knots, the loss is around 30 per cent. Some wastage is inevitable: friction or slippage of the oars, and even moving the oar through the air between strokes, all cost energy.

Minor alterations to the design of the ship could reduce the losses, says Rankov. One improvement would be to increase the length of each oar stroke, something that the ancient Athenians are likely to have known. New evidence has emerged since Olympias was built that suggests the ship is too short: it is 37 metres long, whereas a 4th-century trireme was probably closer to 40 metres. At the very least, the added length would increase the space between rowers, giving them an extra 9 centimetres of reach before they hit the man in front. If in addition the oarsmen's seats were skewed so they faced slightly outwards, the man in front would no longer be an obstacle and there would be no restriction on the length of their stroke.

"Our next project aims to establish whether a redesign of Olympias's oar system can free up some of the 'ineffective' power," says Rossiter. "But even if all the lost power were captured, that still wouldn't close the gap in performance completely. These men still had to have been exceptional athletes by modern-day standards." Rankov agrees. "Their endurance was extraordinary," he says. "In that respect, compared to anyone you could find today they were super-athletes."

What is astonishing is not that men of such athletic prowess existed in ancient Athens, but that the city could find so many of them: at one point it had 200 triremes, requiring 34,000 oarsmen. What makes their achievements still more impressive is that the men of that time were small, on average only about 168 centimetres tall. World-class rowers today tend to be 190 centimetres or taller.

It goes on to talk about the training of rowers, and how they worked full time, including organising races and rowing when they could otherwise sail to maintain peak fitness.

There haven't been any wrecks of triremes discovered so any reproduction is going to be conjectural. Seemingly small design details can make quite a large difference to a boat's performance, so whether it is possible to get to that level of performance is not something that is likely to be easy to resolve without a lot of experimentation.

[TTwiggy]

Marty63 said:

Inkyfingers said:

I'm struggling to imagine how you would fit 4000 oarsmen

Plus a bloke with a big drum

Indeed. HMS Victory, one of the big 'first rates' from the days of the 'wooden walls', and pretty much the peak of developmeent of the wooden sailing ship, would carry a compliment of around 800 men. That's 800 men, spread across a three-decker (with more space below the waterline) that is around 200ft long. And conditions were still very cramped, with sailors having 14 inches to sleep in, and sharing that 14 inches with another man, who would be on watch when the first one was sleeping.