Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Introductory Chapters By the late Professor York Powell - III. The Wicking Fleets
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were principally moved by sails. Cæsar describes
them as made wholly of timber and strongly built,
with iron bolts and iron cables, and leather sails.
He says they were more flat-bottomed than the
Roman ships for the convenience of the light draught
of water, that they had tall prows, and a quarter deck
consequently rather high. He describes them as good
sea boats, able to withstand even the shock of being
rammed, hard to grapple with or board, because of
the height of their fighting deck, but not so fast as
the Roman row-galley.
The Scandinavians worked out the problem of
building a boat, handy, fast, safe, and suited to their
own coasts and seas, in their own way, having seen
from the Roman galleys that, under Drusus and other
Roman commanders, operated in the North Seas in
the first century, possibilities of better craft than
those they had hitherto had. The sail-less, seam-sewn,
paddled canoe gives way to the ribbed and
keeled clinker-built boat with mast, yard, sail, side-rudder
and oars.
The Roman galley may be described as a long, low,
narrow hull, like that of a modern canal-barge, with
a pair of light, long boxes fitted to the uppermost
timbers on each side. In the hull were the stores
and ballast; in it was stepped a mast fitted with a
yard and square sail; fore and aft were half decks,
joined by a narrow platform running between. The
rudder, a broad oar fixed to the starboard quarter,
was steered from the quarter-deck. In the side boxes
the oarsmen sat and pulled the long narrow-bladed
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