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Could Ancient Ships Work to Windward?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

T. Rice Holmes
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Extract

When Caesar sailed to Britain in 55 b.c. he was obliged to leave behind eighteen transports which had his cavalry on board and had been prevented by adverse winds from joining the rest of the fleet. These vessels, like those which carried the infantry, were of native Gallic build, and were doubtless sailed by Gallic seamen, who were familiar with the conditions of navigation in the Channel. On the fourth day after Caesar landed in Britain they set sail with a light breeze. All went well until they were approaching the British coast and were descried from the Roman camp when, as Caesar says,

‘such a violent storm suddenly arose that none of them could keep their course, but some were carried back to the point from which they had started, while the others were swept down in great peril to the lower and more westerly part of the island. They anchored notwithstanding, but as they were becoming waterlogged, were forced to stand out to sea in the face of night, and make for the continent.’

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 1909 , pp. 26 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1909

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References

page 26 note 1 Tanta tempestas subito coorta est ut nulla earum cursum tenere posset, sed aliae eodem unde erant profectae referrentur, aliae ad inferiorem partem insulae, quae est propius solis occasum, deicerentur; quae tamen ancoris iactis cum fluctibus complerentur, necessario aduersa nocte in altum prouectae continentem petierunt.‘B.G. iv. 28, §§2–3. On the meaning of aduersa nocte see my Ancien, Britain, p. 598, n. 2.

page 26 note 2 See p. 32, infra.

page 26 note 3 Ancient Britain, p. 319

page 27 note 1 Ancient Britain, pp. 581–3, 593, 613, 639.

page 27 note 2 Ib.pp. 595–665.

page 27 note 3 Ib. pp. 581–3, 613, 624–5, 639, 643, 740–1.

page 27 note 4 B.G. Hi. 13.

page 27 note 5 The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 4th ed., 1880, p. viii.

page 27 note 6 Id. p. 75.

page 27 note 7 Fam. xiv. 5, § 1.

page 27 note 8 The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 1880, p. 215.

page 28 note 1 Id. pp. 190–206; Pliny, Nat. Hist. xix. I ( I ), § 5; C. Torr's Ancient Ships, 1894, pp. 89, 91, and his article—NAVIS—in Daremberg and Saglio's Diet, des ant. grecques et rom., 36e fasc, 1904, p. 38. Cf. Jahrbuch des Kaiserlich-Deutschen archäol. Instituts, vii. 1892 (1893), pp. 50–1.

page 28 note 2 Page 185 (A. Breusing, Die Nautik der Alten, p. 152).

page 28 note 3 M. Vars's book is described on the title-page as ‘d'après A. BREUSING (Die Nautik der Alten).’ In every passage to which I have referred I have compared the French with the German, and find that it is virtually a translation. I quote, however, from M. Vars's book (giving the references to Breusing in brackets) because many people who can read French easily do not know German.

page 28 note 4 ii. 47 (48), § 128.

page 28 note 5 C. Torr, Ancient Ships, p. 96, n. 206.

page 28 note 6 p. 125, note,

page 28 note 7 Nav. 9.

page 29 note 1 L'art nautique dans l'antiquitè, p. 186 (Breusing, p. 154). Prof. Sir W. M. Ramsay (St. Paul, the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, 1895, p. 319) asserts that ‘no ancient ship would have ventured to keep so much out to sea as to run intentionally from Egypt to Crete ⃛ but [he adds] it is probable that this [St. Paul's] Alexandrian ship had sailed direct to Myra across the Levant.’ The voyage to Myra was longer than to Crete, and, moreover, Caesar sailed direct from Asia or Rhodes to Alexandria B. C. iii. 106, § 1; Col. Stoffel, Hist, de Jules Cèsar,— Guerre civile, ii. 40–1, 255–6.

page 29 note 2 Nat. Hist. ii. 47 (48), § 127.

page 29 note 3 Laurie's Mediterranean Directory, ed. A. G. Findlay, 1856, p. 267.

page 29 note 4 Vol. iii. 1899, pp. 469–70.

page 30 note 1 De mundo, 4. Caesar (B. C. iii. 107, § I) states that the Etesian winds blew dead against ships bound from Alexandria to the province of Asia (etesiis ⃛ qui nauigantibus Alexandria jlant aduersissimi uenti), which suggests that they blew from the north-west or north.

page 30 note 2 ‘Il est complètement inadmissible que le capitaine d'alexandrie ait dû louvoyer deux mois, en prenant l'allure du plus près contre un vent du Nord-Est, et à l'occasion du Nord-Ouest, pour parvenir du cap Chélidonien à Athènes’ (L'art nautique, etc., pp. 167–8) [Breusing, p. 154]

page 30 note 3 signifie simplement qu'on présenta tantôt un bord, tantôt l'autre au vent; qu'on gouvernat a l'ouest par un vent du Nord et au Nord-Est par un vent du Nord-Ouest, et qu'apres un long va-et-vient on arriva à. Athènes’ (L'art nautique, etc., p. 188 [Breusing, pp. 184–5]).

page 30 note 4 See p. 28, supra.

page 30 note 5 See p. 27, supra.

page 30 note 6 Acts, xxvii.

page 31 note 1 The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 1880, pp. 111–3.

page 31 note 2 Ib. pp. 102, 113–5, 124–36, 142–3.

page 32 note 1 St. Paul, the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, p. 329.

page 32 note 2 L'art nautique, etc., pp. 224–31 (Breusing, pp. 178–82).

page 32 note 3 ‘The forepart of the hull below the upper works differed but little in form from that of the ships of modern times; and as both ends were alike, if we suppose a full-built merchant-ship of the present day [1848] cut in two, and the stern half replaced by one exactly the same as that of the bow, we shall have a pretty accurate notion of what these ships were’ (The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 1880, p. 182). Mr. Torr, whom I consulted, has very kindly written, ‘I should say that his [Smith's] statement that “both ends were alike” would be correct only in this very limited sense:—In contrasting merchant-ships with war-ships, one might say that the merchant-ships had both ends alike, as their stemposts sloped up from the water-line in much the same way as their stemposts, whereas in war-ships the stemposts sloped the other way to join the ram. In other words, the statement would be true (so far as it is true at all) only of the appearance of the ships as seen from the side. I do not think it would be true of the appearance of the ships as seen from above: they would be wider at the stem than at the bows.’

page 32 note 4 St. Paul, the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, p. 330.

page 33 note 1 We learn, however, from Laurie's Mediterranean Directory, ed. A. G. Findlay, p. 222, that in the Adriatic ‘the [wind called the] bora... very often continues for nine, fifteen, and sometimes as long as thirty days, many times subsiding at intervals,’ but that ‘during its cessations it would be highly imprudent to set sail until the symptoms have entirely disappeared.’

page 33 note 2 L'art nautique, etc., p. 241 (Breusing, p. 189). Oddly enough Breusing, in the map at the end of his book, makes St. Paul's ship drift in a direction nearly identical with that traced by Smith.

page 33 note 3 The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 1880, p. 102, n. 1.

page 33 note 4 Smith says (ib. p. 176) that to suppose that an E.N.E. gale would have changed to an E.S.E. one ‘is entirely contrary to the observed wind-phenomena of the Mediterranean.’ I do not gainsay this assertion; but the Mediterranean Pilot does not support it; and Captain Stewart, to whom Smith refers, was speaking only of the Archipelago. In Laurie's Mediterranean Directory, ed. A. G. Findlay, 1856, p. 178, it is stated that near Malta N.E. winds sometimes veer to S. E.

page 33 note 5 Instead of ‘up and down’ the Revised Version has ‘to and fro.’

page 33 note 6 Ib. p. 120.

page 33 note 7 St. Paul, the Traveller, etc., p. 334.

page 33 note 8 See pp. 27–8, supra.

page 34 note 1 L'art nautique, etc., pp. 222–4 (Breusing, pp. 176–7).

page 34 note 2 ‘She has perhaps a maintopsail or trysails, and comes up to within six points, and falls off to wind abeam, forging rather ahead,’ etc. (Admiral W. H. Smyth, The Sailor's Word-Book, 1867, p. 442).

page 34 note 3 Acts, xxvii. 17, (‘they used helps, undergirding the ship’). ‘This obscure statement,’ says Mr. Torr (Ancient Ships, p. 42, n. 102), ‘seems to mean that they used expedients which answered the purpose of the girding-cables They would not find any of these cables on board, for they were on a merchant-ship, and these were used for war-ships; nor could they fix them on a ship during a storm at sea, for even in a dockyard this was a long and troublesome process.’ But is the statement obscure? There has been much controversy as to whether the were fastened horizontally or vertically. Mr. Torr. (op. cit. p. 41, n. 100), quoting Athenaeus, v. 37, Vitruvius, x. 15, 6, and Plato, Civitas, p. 616 C, affirms that they extended ‘from stem to stern along the starboard side and back from stern to stem along the port side’; but, as he truly says, they could not have been so fastened during a storm. Some fifteen years ago, when the use of was being discussed in the Athenaeum, I went into the Young Street Station of the London Fire Brigade and had a talk with one of the men, who, like every man in the force, had been a sailor. I asked him (knowing what the answer would be) whether, in the operation of frapping a ship during a gale, the cable could usefully be passed from stem to stern. He looked silently at me in blank amazement; and his look said, ‘Are you an amiable lunatic ?’ Only he would have used other words. I told him that I knew what I was talking about, and that my question only embodied a suggestion made by others. Then he replied, ‘To pass a cable round a ship from stem to stern would be impossible in a gale, and if it could be done it wouldn't be of no use. I've served in the timber trade myself between Hull and Norway, and helped in the job. It's done with a chain cable, and you make three or four turns round the hull.’ Cf. J. Smith, The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 1880, pp. 108–9, 210–5.

page 34 note 4 See J. Smith, The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 1880, p. 141, n. 2.

page 35 note 1 See the French Government map, Ile de Crète issued by the Service giographique de l'armèe.

page 35 note 2 Acts, xxvii. 13.

page 35 note 3 L'art nautique, etc., p. 202 (Breusing, p. 163)

page 35 note 4 xxvii. 15.

page 35 note 5 Suidas, a lexicographer of the tenth century, implies the same when he says (Lexicon, ed. G. Bernhardy, i. 1853, p. 335) that the word is used ‘when there is a storm at sea, and a ship is allowed to drift under bare poles without attempting to make head against it

page 36 note 1 Rice Holmes, Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar, 1907, pp. 613, 624–5, 740–1. I may add to what is written on pp. 740–1 that my friend and former pupil, Mr. W. H. Stuart Garnett, who is not only a thorough seaman but an accomplished mathematician, assures me that not even a racing cutter, such as Fyfe's Shamrock, can lie within less than about 3¼ points in fairly smooth water consistently with going to windward effectively. ‘In a light air,’ he adds, ‘and in perfectly smooth water such a boat would actually lie much closer (I should say 2 points off), but will go so slowly that it is no use for the purpose of getting anywhere. If there is the least sea, the driving force is not enough to put her through it.’

page 36 note 2 B.G. iii. 13, § 5.

page 37 note 1 See my Ancient Britain, pp. 499–514.

page 37 note 2 iii. 14, §§ 1–2.

page 37 note 3 C. Torr, Ancient Ships, p. 20.

page 37 note 4 xix. 4.

page 38 note 1 For example, in those which are quoted passim in Capt. Desbrière's Projets et tentatives de debarquement, etc.