Galea

“ I judged that this galley, which was under sail when first sighted, had come out from Cartagena in search of us, and from the fact that she did not at once bear down upon us, but hung persistently to windward, I conjectured that she was not alone, that she had one or more consorts somewhere to windward, and that, upon fully identifying the galleon, she would lower her sails, out sweeps, and be off to windward for help to tackle us. ”

“ I could see the rocks where lay the galleon; the long line of breakers down{269} the beach; the sea stretching clear to the horizon on all sides except where the island obstructed the view; the shore and foliage lit up by the silvery light of the moon; but no sign of our interesting neighbors. The hours passed on until three o’clock and after. One after another the constellations moved down to the western sky line, and still Alice slept peacefully on. ”

“ But it was too late then for them to escape, for within a couple of seconds the galleon struck her enemy a blow so violent upon the larboard quarter as nearly to hurl our Harry upon the deck, and then with a dreadful, horrible crackling of wood, commingled with a yelling of men’s voices, the galley was swung around upon her side, and the galleon, sailing into the open sea, left nothing of her immediate enemy but a sinking wreck, and the water dotted all over with bobbing heads and waving hands in the moonlight. ”

“ We can provide against everything but the craving for change. Not being birds to fly, and unable to compel the eagles to lend us their wings, the best resort is a galley; then the sea is ours—the sea, wide, mysterious, crowded with marvels. I am never so near the stars as there. When a wave is bearing me up, they seem descending to meet me. Times have been when I thought the Pleiades were about to drop into my palm.... Here is my galley. You see, child, the palace is to be yours, the galley mine. ”

“ When the unpitying Libyan Sea surprises these galleys upon the Roman coasts, when the Norther lashes to foam the Gulf of Lyons, when the humid east wind of Syria is driving them off shore, everything combines to make life on board a modern galley a hell of misery and discomfort. The creaking of the blocks and cordage, the loud cries of the224 sailors, the horrible maledictions of the galley slaves, the groaning of the timbers, mingled with the clank of chains and the bellowings of the tempest, produce sentiments of affright in the most intrepid breasts. ”

“ The galley sailed marvellously fast, and the wind that bore her was ever fair. Yes, shipmates, weeks and weeks rolled on, and not a mariner on board her had need to start sheet, or tack,—and yet tempests swept across [Pg 358] her path, and the crew of the galley saw Spanish caravals founder in the great waves, not a bow-shot from their ship, while they were speeding over water ruffled only by a gentle breeze. And the reason was, shipmates, that an enchanted wind filled the galley’s sails, and before its breath the natural storms of the air could not prevail. ”

“ As [Pg 257] for the golden galleon, let her rot, let her sink, say I. Let her treasures go down to the mermaids' halls, that the precious gems may bedeck the mermaids' necks withal. It will not be the first ship-load of Spanish doubloons that hath gone unto the depths for the children of the ocean to play with. And I say to you, were the galleon thrice her size, with thrice her present wealth aboard of her, I would not turn back a fathom's distance with the thought of entering her. ”

“ But not on our desert island alone was nature full of life and gayety. The seals, as if glad that summer had once more returned, crawled out upon the ice, and lay there on it, where it floated in the water, basking in the sun. There were hundreds and hundreds of them to be seen almost every day; and, besides the seals, the walruses, with their great long hideous-looking tusks and ugly and ungraceful bodies, came up too ”

“ A week later, in a strait between two islands like tinted clouds, we fought a very great galleon from sunrise to noon, pierced her hull through and through and silenced her ordnance, then boarded her and found a king’s ransom in gold and silver. When the fighting had ceased and the treasure was ours, then we four stood side by side on the deck of the slowly sinking galleon, in front of our prisoners—of the men who had fought well, of the ashen priests and the trembling women. ”

“ The fifth day after the commencement of the storm, we shook a reef out of each topsail, and set the reefed foresail, jib, and spanker, but it was not until after eight days of reefed topsails that we had a whole sail on the ship, and then it was quite soon enough, for the captain was anxious to make up for leeway, the gale having blown us half the distance to the Sandwich Islands. Inch by inch, as fast as the gale would permit, we made sail on the ship, for the wind still continued ahead, and we had many day's sailing to get back to the longitude we were in when the storm took us. ”

“ At last after a weary wait the tide reached its lowest, and as I feared, we found that we dared not go into the race-way with the boat. Each swell swept through it with a great rush, breaking into foam in the narrower part, so that a boat would have been dashed to pieces unless fortunate enough to swim fairly out through the exit, and would then be extremely liable to be overwhelmed. We drew up to the rock which lay adjoining the beach and landed, so that we might look down on the galleon from above. ”

“ Cantering over the tiny plain—a scanty level of an hundred yards—the wild Galla enters the scene of confusion, his long tresses streaming in the wind, and his garment blue with the grease of ages. A jar of honey, or a basket of butter, is lashed to the crupper of his high-peaked saddle; the steed is lean and shaggy as the rider, and the snort and the start from either proclaim undefined terror and amazement at the strange sights, and the rugged rocks and precipices, unknown to the boundless meadows of their own green land. ”

“ He halted upon the edge of a low escarpment. Below him the narrowing valley showed bare, black ribs of rock, long, winding gray lines leading down to a central floor where mesquite and cactus dotted the barren landscape. Moving objects, diminutive in size, gray and white in color, arrested Gale's roving sight. They bobbed away for a while, then stopped. They were antelope, and they had seen his horse. When he rode on they started once more, keeping to the lowest level. These wary animals were often desert watchdogs for the ranger, they would betray the proximity of horse or man. ”

“ It is not a port, but a very tolerable road, where you have very safe riding, under the shelter of a low desert island called Crab Island, with a few rocks at the end of it. But it must be remembered, the people are Galla, the most treacherous and villanous wretches upon the earth. They are Shepherds, who sometimes are on the coast in great numbers, or in the back of the hills that run close along the shore, or in miserable villages composed of huts, that run nearly in an east and west direction from Azab to Raheeta, the largest of all their villages. ”

“ It was off the island of Terceira that the Revenge—or what remained of her—came to her end. She had been taken out in tow by the San Andrea galleon, but when the tempest rose to its height she was cast off and abandoned to her fate. Driven by the tremendous [Pg 322] waves upon the outlying rocks, she was shattered to splinters, so that not a trace of her remained but a few balks of her stout oaken timbers that drifted as flotsam to the beach. There had been seventy men on board of her, many of them Spaniards, some few of them captive Englishmen. ”

“ I have come across a galley drifting idly before the wind, with all her crew, a grim row of skeletons, hanging in a row along her yard, and swinging this way and that, and rattling drearily against the sail and each other in melancholy unison with the listless wallow of their vessel. At another time, a Roman trireme fell upon a big pirate of Melita and stormed and captured her. The three hundred men on board were too ugly and wicked to sell, so the Romans drove them overboard like sheep, and burned the boat. ”

“ I had no right on any account to subject Alice and her father for a moment more to the tender mercies of such a gang of cutthroats. Let the galleon and its treasure go if necessary, we must put to sea at once. The full moon would rise by nine o’clock, and as we wanted to be off shore before that time, we had to hurry our preparation. The boats were fortunately both provided with a supply of fresh water in gourds, which would keep sweet, and it did not take us long to put our provisions on board, together with such things as we thought we might need{267} for a voyage. ”

“ Put out to sea and capture that accursed black galley. String up the whole of its crew from its own yardarms and the devil take their souls. Tomorrow at daybreak I want the four galleys that are lying here at anchor to weigh anchor. Do you hear me, gentlemen? The Andrea Doria will stay here and await further orders. But the galleys will make sail tomorrow good and early. The message has already been given to the ships' captains at Sluys to put out to sea with every ship available. The black galley—bring me the black galley or bring me back Satan himself. ”

“ The galley has always been the type of business ship on the Mediterranean. All through the classical wars the rowing galley was the mainstay of power. The Homeric catalogue of ships, the Phœnician coinage, the Assyrian sculptures, the Greek fleets, the Carthaginian navy and its destroyers of Rome, the pirates of Liburnia and Lycia, down to the Venetian fleet and the French galleys of a couple of centuries ago, all show the dominance of the oar. ”

“ Gale turned his horse, not without urge of iron arm and persuasive speech, for the desert steed scented water, and plodded back to the edge of the arroyo, where in a secluded circle of mesquite he halted. The horse snorted his relief at the removal of the heavy, burdened saddle and accoutrements, and sagging, bent his knees, lowered himself with slow heave, and plunged down to roll in the sand. Gale poured the contents of his larger canteen into his hat and held it to the horse's nose. ”

“ By carefully guarding against raising a smoke during the day with our fires, we should greatly diminish the chances of being discovered, and at night we would keep no fire. We could lower the masts of the boats, and by mooring them a little farther up they would be partly hidden by the willows. So, too, as to the galleon; unless one actually climbed upon the rocks and looked down into the basin, there was nothing in the external appearance of the place from sea or shore to denote its existence. ”

“ The word gallevat seems to come directly from the galeota of the Portuguese and other S. European nations, a kind of inferior galley with only one bank of oars, which appears under the form galion in Joinville, infra (not to be confounded with the galleons of a later period, which were larger vessels) , and often in the 13th and 14th centuries as galeota, galiotes, &c. It is constantly mentioned as forming part of the Portuguese fleets in India. Bluteau defines galeota as "a small galley with one mast, and with 15 or 20 benches a side, and one oar to each bench." ”

“ A succession of gales prevented the women from getting shell-fish on the rocks, and they could not go out in their canoes to catch seal. A small party of these men one morning set out, and the other Indians explained to him that they were going a four days’ journey for food: on their return, Low went to meet them, and he found them excessively tired, each man carrying a great square piece of putrid whales-blubber with a hole in the middle, through which they put their heads, like the Gauchos do through their ponchos or cloaks. ”

“ If this had been done at the beginning of the gale, she would not have approached the centre nearer than 150 miles; for the winds drawing to the Eastward, as the gale advanced to the Westward, she would have made no drift to the Southward, and she would have been in a safe position to receive the shifts—as each one would have been more aft—and the ship, coming up to the wind, would have been riding head on to the heaviest sea. ”

“ On a large galley, besides 270 rowers, there was a mixed crew of about 75 men, together with 50 or 60 soldiers; so that the whole equipment of a fighting-galley must have reached about 400 men. A galleas originally was a large, heavy galley, but later it became a sailing ship, as was the galleon of the Spaniards. ”

“ Many a dark night Galenus had feared that the sailors would throw him into the sea. More than one of them related that in the terrible stormy nights he had seen dark hands stretching out of the water, grasping after the ship. And they did not think it was necessary to cast lots to find out who it was that these hands wanted to draw down into the deep. Both the skipper and the crew did Silvius Antonius the special honour to think that it was for his sake these storms rent the air and scourged the sea. ”

“ There was no sign of the gale breaking; in fact it seemed to be scarcely at its height, for away to windward it looked as dirty and as full of wind as ever; and the sea was something awful to contemplate. It looked, of course, worse to us than it would to those on the deck of a large ship; but even allowing for that, it was unquestionably running far higher than anything I had ever seen before.
I have read somewhere that scientific men assert that even in the heaviest gales and in mid-ocean the sea never attains a greater height than twenty feet from trough to crest ”