A History of Sea Power

Civilization and sea power arose from the Mediterranean, and the progress of recent archeological research has shown that civilizations and empires had been reared in the Mediterranean on sea power long before the dawn of history. Since the records of Egypt are far better preserved than those of any other nation of antiquity, and the discovery of the Rosetta stone has made it possible to read them, we know most about the beginnings of civilization in Egypt. We know, for instance, that an Egyptian king some 2000 years before Christ possessed a fleet of 400 fighting ships.

But it appears now that long before this time the island of Crete was a great naval and commercial power, that in the earliest dynasties of Egypt Cretan fleets were carrying on a commerce with the Nile valley. Indeed, the Cretans may have taught the Egyptians something of the art of building sea-going ships for trade and war.[1] At all events, Crete may be regarded as the first great sea power of history, an island empire like Great Britain to-day, extending its influence from Sicily to Palestine and dominating the eastern Mediterranean for many centuries. From recent excavations of the ancient capital we get an interesting light on the old Greek legends of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, going back to the time when the island kingdom levied tribute, human as well as monetary, on its subject cities throughout the ?gean.

[Footnote 1: It is interesting to note that the earliest empires, Assyria and Egypt, were not naval powers, because they arose in rich river valleys abundantly capable of sustaining their inhabitants. They did not need to command the sea.]

On this sea power Crete reared an astonishingly advanced civilization. Until recent times, for instance, the Ph?nicians had been credited with the invention of the alphabet. We know now that 1000 years before the Ph?nicians began to write the Cretans had evolved a system of written characters-as yet undeciphered-and a decimal system for numbers. A correspondingly high stage of excellence had been reached in engineering, architecture, and the fine arts, and even in decay Crete left to Greece the tradition of mastery in laws and government.

From Torr, Ancient Ships.

EGYPTIAN SHIP

The power of Crete was already in its decline centuries before the Trojan War, but during a thousand years it had spread its own and Egyptian culture over the shores of the ?gean. The destruction of the island empire in about 1400 B.C. apparently was due to some great disaster that destroyed her fleet and left her open to invasion by a conquering race-probably the Greeks-who ravaged her cities by sword and fire. On account of her commanding position in the Mediterranean, Crete might again have risen to sea power but for the endless civil wars that marked her subsequent history.

The successor to Crete as mistress of the sea was Ph?nicia. The Ph?nicians, oddly enough, were a Semitic people, a nomadic race with no traditions of the sea whatever. When, however, they migrated to the coast and settled, they found themselves in a narrow strip of coast between a range of mountains and the sea. The city of Tyre itself was erected on an island. Consequently these descendants of herdsmen were compelled to find their livelihood upon the sea-as were the Venetians and the Dutch in later ages-and for several hundred years they maintained their control of the ocean highways.

The Ph?nicians were not literary, scientific, or artistic; they were commercial. Everything they did was with an eye to business. They explored the Mediterranean and beyond for the sake of tapping new sources of wealth, they planted colonies for the sake of having trading posts on their routes, and they developed fighting ships for the sake of preserving their trade monopolies. Moreover, Ph?nicia lay at the end of the Asiatic caravan routes. Hence Ph?nician ships received the wealth of the Nile valley and Mesopotamia and distributed it along the shores of the Mediterranean. Ph?nician ships also uncovered the wealth of Spain and the North African coast, and, venturing into the Atlantic, drew metals from the British Isles. According to Herodotus, a Ph?nician squadron circumnavigated Africa at the beginning of the seventh century before Christ, completing the voyage in three years. We should know far more now of the extent of the explorations made by these master mariners of antiquity were it not for the fact that they kept their trade routes secret as far as possible in order to preserve their trade monopoly.

In developing and organizing these trade routes the Ph?nicians planted colonies on the islands of the Mediterranean,-Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Malta. They held both shores of the Straits of Gibraltar, and on the Atlantic shores of Spain established posts at Cadiz and Tarshish, the latter commonly supposed to have been situated just north of Cadiz at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. Cadiz was their distributing point for the metals of northern Spain and the British Isles. The most famous colony was Carthage, situated near the present city of Tunis. Carthage was founded during the first half of the ninth century before Christ, and on the decay of the parent state became in turn mistress of the western Mediterranean, holding sway until crushed by Rome in the Punic Wars.

Of the methods of the Ph?nicians and their colonists in establishing trade with primitive peoples, we get an interesting picture from Herodotus,[1] who describes how the Carthaginians conducted business with barbarous tribes on the northern coast of Africa.

[Footnote 1: History, translated by Geo. Rawlinson, vol. III, p. 144.]

SCENE OF ANCIENT SEA POWER

"When they (the Carthaginian traders) arrive, forthwith they unload their wares, and having disposed them in orderly fashion on the beach, leave them, and returning aboard their ships, raise a great smoke. The natives, when they see the smoke, came dawn to the shore, and laying out to view so much gold as they think the wares to be worth, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians upon this come ashore and look. If they think the gold enough, they take it up and go their way; but if it does not seem sufficient they go aboard their ships once more and wait patiently. Then the others approach and add to the gold till the Carthaginians are satisfied. Neither party deals unfairly with the other; for the Carthaginians never touch the gold till it comes up to the estimated value of their goods, nor do the natives ever carry off the goads till the gold has been taken away."

In addition to the enormous profits of the carrying trade the Ph?nicians had a practical monopoly of the famous "Tyrian dyes," which were in great demand throughout the known world. These dyes were obtained from two kinds of shellfish together with an alkali prepared from seaweed. Ph?nicians were also pioneers in the art of making glass. It is not hard to understand, therefore, how Ph?nicia grew so extraordinarily rich as to rouse the envy of neighboring rulers, and to maintain themselves the traders of Tyre and Sidon had to develop fighting fleets as well as trading fleets.

Early in Egyptian history the distinction was made between the "round" ships of commerce and the "long" ships of war. The round ship, as the name suggests, was built for cargo capacity rather than for speed. It depended on sail, with the oars as auxiliaries. The long ship was designed for speed, depending on oars and using sail only as auxiliary. And while the round ship was of deep draft and rode to anchor, the shallow flat-bottomed long ships were drawn up on shore. The Ph?nicians took the Egyptian and Cretan models and improved them. They lowered the bows of the fighting ships, added to the blunt ram a beak near the water's edge, and strung the shields of the fighting men along the bulwarks to protect the rowers. To increase the driving force and the speed, they added a second and then a third bank of oars, thus producing the "bireme" and the "trireme." These were the types they handed down to the Greeks, and in fact there was little advance made beyond the Ph?nician war galley during all the subsequent centuries of the Age of the Oar.

About the beginning of the seventh century before Christ the Ph?nicians had reached the summit of their power on the seas. Their extraordinary wealth tempted the king of Assyria, in 725 B.C., to cross the mountain barrier with a great army. He had no difficulty in overrunning the country, but the inhabitants fled to their colonies. The great city of Tyre, being on an island, defied the invader, and finally the Assyrian king gave up and withdrew to his own country. Having realized at great cost that he could not subdue the Ph?nicians without a navy, he set about finding one. By means of bribes and threats he managed to seduce three Ph?nician cities to his side. These furnished him sixty ships officered by Ph?nicians, but manned by Assyrian crews.

With this fleet an attack was made on Tyre, but such was the contempt felt by the Tyrians for their enemy that they held only twelve ships for defense. These twelve went out against the sixty, utterly routed them, and took 500 prisoners. For five years longer the Assyrian king maintained a siege of Tyre from the mainland, attempting to keep the city from its source of fresh water, but as the Tyrians had free command of the sea, they had no difficulty in getting supplies of all kinds from their colonies. At the end of five years the Assyrians again returned home, defeated by the Ph?nician control of the sea. When, twenty years later, Ph?nicia was subjugated by Assyria, it was due to the lack of union among the scattered cities and colonies of the great sea empire. Widely separated, governed by their own princes, the individual colonies had too little sense of loyalty for the mother country. Each had its own fleets and its own interests; in consequence an Assyrian fleet was able to destroy the Ph?nician fleets in detail. From this point till the rise of Athens as a sea power, the fleets of Ph?nicia still controlled the sea, but they served the plans of conquest of alien rulers.

As a dependency of Persia, Ph?nicia enabled Cambyses to conquer Egypt. However, when the Ph?nician fleet was ordered to subjugate Carthage, already a strong power in the west, the Ph?nicians refused on the ground of the kinship between Carthage and Ph?nicia. And the help of Ph?nicia was so essential to the Persian monarch that he countermanded the order. Indeed the relation of Ph?nicia to Persia amounted to something more nearly like that of an ally than a conquered province, for it was to the interests of Persia to keep the Ph?nicians happy and loyal.

When, in 498 B.C., the Greeks of Asia and the neighboring islands revolted, it was due chiefly to the loyalty of the Ph?nicians that the Persian empire was saved. Thereafter, the Persian yoke was fastened on the Asiatic Greeks, and any prospect of a Greek civilization developing on the eastern shore of the ?gean was destroyed.

From Torr, Ancient Ships.

GREEK WAR GALLEY

But on the western shore lay flourishing Greek cities still independent of Persian rule. Moreover, the coastal towns like Corinth and Athens were developing considerable power on the sea, and it was evident that unless European Greece were subdued it would stand as a barrier between Persia and the western Mediterranean. Darius perceived the situation and prepared to destroy these Greek states before they should become too formidable. The story of this effort, ending at Salamis and Platea, and breaking for all time the power of Persia, belongs in the subsequent chapter that narrates the rise and fall of Athens as a sea power.

At this point, it is worth pausing to consider in detail the war galley which the Ph?nicians had developed and which they handed down to the Greeks at this turning point in the world's history. The bireme and the trireme were adopted by the Greeks, apparently without alteration, save that at Salamis the Greek galleys were said to have been more strongly built and to have presented a lower freeboard than those of the Ph?nicians. A hundred years later, about 330 B.C., the Greeks developed the four-banked ship, and Alexander of Macedon is said to have maintained on the Euphrates a squadron of seven-banked ships. In the following century the Macedonians had ships of sixteen banks of oars, and this was probably the limit for sea-going ships in antiquity. These multiple banked ships must have been most unhandy, for a reversal of policy set in till about the beginning of the Christian era the Romans had gone back to two-banked ships. In medieval times war galleys reverted to a single row of oars on each side, but required four or five men to every oar.

From Torr, Ancient Ships.

GREEK MERCHANT SHIP

At the time of the Persian war the trireme was the standard type of warship, as it had been for the hundred years before, and continued to be during the hundred years that followed. In fact, the name trireme was used loosely for all ships of war whether they had two banks of oars or three. But the fleets that fought in the Persian war and in the Peloponnesian war were composed of three-banked ships, and fortunately we have in the records of the Athenian dockyards accurate information as to structural detail.

The Athenian trireme was about 150 feet in length with a beam of 20 feet. The beam was therefore only 2/15 of the length. (A merchant ship of the same period was about 180 feet long with a beam of 1/4 its length.) The trireme was fitted with one mast and square sail, the latter being used only when the wind was fair, as auxiliary to the oars, especially when it needed to retire from battle. In fact, the phrase "hoist the sail" came to be used colloquially like our "turn tail" as a term for running away.

The triremes carried two sails, usually made of linen, a larger one used in cruising and a smaller one for emergency in battle. Before action it was customary to stow the larger sail on shore, and the mast itself was lowered to prevent its snapping under the shock of ramming.

The forward part of the trireme was constructed with a view to effectiveness in ramming. Massive catheads projected far enough to rip away the upper works of an enemy, while the bronze beak at the waterline drove into her hull. This beak, or ram, was constructed of a core of timber heavily sheathed with bronze, presenting three teeth. Although the ram was the prime weapon of the ship, it often became so badly wrenched in collision as to start the whole forward part of the vessel leaking.

The rowers were seated on benches fitted into a rectangular structure inside the hull. These benches were so compactly adjusted that the naval architects allowed only two feet of freeboard for every bank of oars. Thus the Roman quinquiremes of the Punic wars stood only about ten feet above water. The covering of this rectangular structure formed a sort of hurricane deck, standing about three feet above the gangway that ran around the ship at about the level of the bulwarks. This gangway and upper deck formed the platform for the fighting men in battle. Sometimes the open space between the hurricane deck and the gangway was fenced in with shields or screens to protect the rowers of the uppermost bank of oars from the arrows and javelins of the enemy.

The complement of a trireme amounted to about 200 men. The captain, or "trierarch," commanded implicit obedience. Under him were a sailing master, various petty officers, sailors, soldiers or marines, and oarsmen.

The trireme expanded in later centuries to the quinquereme: upper works were added and a second mast, but in essentials it was the same type of war vessel that dominated the Mediterranean for three thousand years-an oar driven craft that attempted to disable its enemy by ramming or breaking away the oars. After contact the fighting was of a hand to hand character such as prevailed in battles on land. These characteristics were as true of the galley of Lepanto (1571 A.D.) as of the trireme of Salamis (480 B.C.). Of the three cardinal virtues of the fighting ship, mobility, seaworthiness, and ability to keep the sea, or cruising radius, the oar-driven type possessed only the first. It was fast, it could hold position accurately, it could spin about almost on its own axis, but it was so frail that it had to run for shelter before a moderate wind and sea. In consequence naval operations were limited to the summer months. As to its cargo capacity, it was so small that it was unable to carry provisions to sustain its own crew for more than a few days. As a rule the trireme was beached at night, with the crew sleeping on shore, and as far as possible the meals were cooked and eaten on shore. In the battle of ?gospotami (405 B.C.), for example, the Spartans fell upon the Athenians when their ships were drawn up on the beach and the crews were cooking their dinner. Moreover, the factors of speed and distance were both limited by the physical fatigue of the oarsmen. In the language of to-day, therefore, the oar-driven man-of-war had a small "cruising radius."

This dependence on the land and this sensitiveness to weather are important facts in ancient naval history. It is fair to say that storms did far more to destroy fleets and naval expeditions than battles during the entire age of the oar. The opposite extreme was reached in Nelson's day. His lumbering ships of the line made wretched speed and straggling formations, but they were able to weather a hurricane and to keep the sea for an indefinite length of time.

As a final word on the beginnings of navies, emphasis should be laid on the enormous importance of these early mariners, such as the Cretans and the Ph?nicians, as builders of civilization. The venturesome explorer who brought his ship into some uncharted port not only opened up a new source of wealth but also established a reciprocal relation that quickened civilization at both ends of his route. The cargo ships that left the Nile delta distributed the arts of Egypt as well as its wheat, and the richest civilization of the ancient world, that of Greece, rose on foundation stones brought from Egypt, Assyria, and Ph?nicia. It may be said of Ph?nicia herself that she built-up her advanced culture on ideas borrowed almost wholly from her customers. But control of the seas for trade involved control of the seas for war, and behind the merchantman stood the trireme. It is significant and appropriate that a Ph?nician coin that has come down to us bears the relief of a ship of war.

In contrast with these early sea explorers and sea fighters stand the peoples of China and India. Having reached a high state of culture at an early period, they nevertheless, sought no contact with the world outside and became stagnant for thousands of years. Indeed, among the Hindus the crossing of the sea was a crime to be expiated only by the most agonizing penance. Hence these peoples of Asia, the most numerous in the world, exercised no influence on the development of civilization compared with a mere handful of people in Crete or the island city of Tyre. And for the same reason China and India ceased to progress and became for centuries mere backwaters of history.

It is worth noting also that the Mediterranean, leading westwards from the early developed nations of Asia Minor and Egypt, opened a westward course to the advance of discovery and colonization, and this trend continued as the Pillars of Hercules led to the Atlantic and eventually to the new world. For every nation that bordered the Mediterranean illimitable highways opened out for expansion, provided it possessed the stamina and the skill to win them. And in those days they were practically the only highways. Frail as the early ships were and great as were the perils they had to face, communications by water were far centuries faster and safer than communications by land. Hence civilization followed the path of the sea. Even in these early beginnings it is easy to see that sea-borne commerce leads to the founding of colonies and the formation of an empire whose parts are linked together by trade routes, and finally, that the preservation of such an empire depends an the naval control of sea. This was as true of Crete and Ph?nicia as it was later true of Venice, Holland, and England.

REFERENCES

The Sea Kings of Crete, J. Baikie, 1910.

Ph?nicia, Story of the Nations Series, George Rawlinson, 1895.

The Sailing Ship, E. Keble Chatterton, 1909.

Ships and Their Ways of Other Days, E. Keble Chatterton, 1913.

Ancient Ships, Cecil Torr, 1894.

Archeologie Navale, Auguste Jal, 1840.

The Prehistoric Naval Architecture of the North of Europe, G. H. Buhmer, in Report of the U. S. National Museum, 1893. This article contains a complete bibliography on the subject of ancient ships.

Sea Power and Freedom (chap. 2), Gerard Fiennes, 1918.