Sea Power: A Naval History, Second Edition

Chapter 1

The Age of Galley Warfare

When man ceased to look upon streams, rivers, and seas as barriers and learned to use them as highways, he made a giant stride toward civilization. The waterways of the world provided a new mobility—to man himself, later to the products of his toil and skill, and at all times to his ideas.

The mobility provided by rivers and seas both enriched and enlightened their users. River-faring and seafaring peoples could barter their products with other peoples far and near, trading those goods that they were best equipped to produce in exchange for the agricultural and industrial specialties of other lands. In the process they also brought home in their heads an invisible cargo of ideas and information, a form of wealth oftentimes more precious than the trade goods they carried in their ships’ holds.

Western man first began to use the broad seas in and around the Mediterranean basin. This use of the great waterways brought into contact the vigorous civilizations of Asia, Europe, and Africa. From the resulting exchange of products and ferment of ideas emerged most of the basic institutions of our Western culture.

Early Navies

The appearance of trade goods on the seas gave rise to piracy and to clashes between rival traders. Because merchant ships manned by their regular crews are ill prepared to defend their cargoes, trading communities early designated certain vessels to carry soldiers for protecting the commercial ships at sea. Such specialization of function early led to specialization of form. Thus the first books of history produced in the Mediterranean world mention two types of vessels: the round ship, broad of beam for carrying cargo and propelled mainly by sail; and the long ship, or galley, a vessel built specifically for fighting and propelled in combat by oar. Thus navies came into being to protect maritime commerce, and the history of sea power is largely a record of rivalries resulting from conflicting commercial interests.

Whatever the cause of conflict, a principal function of warships has always been to protect one’s own sea communications, that is, one’s freighters and transports and the men and goods they carry, and to block or disrupt the enemy’s communications.¹ Achieving this twofold objective confers command (or control) of the sea, and attaining command of the sea is usually a necessary preliminary to a navy’s carrying out its other wartime functions: defending the state against seaborne attack, isolating the enemy, and carrying the attack across the sea to the enemy.

Crete (c. 2,500–1,200 B.C.) was one of the earliest and most powerful of the Mediterranean sea powers. With a dense and growing population, the Cretans must early have been forced by the mountainous, inhospitable geography of their island to seek their living on the sea. Here geography was more in their favor, for Crete sits athwart the major sea routes of the eastern Mediterranean. Here she was strategically placed not only for carrying commerce but also for attacking and limiting the operations of her commercial rivals.

The Phoenicians (c. 2,000–300 B.C) were the next major wielders of Mediterranean sea power. They established a flourishing maritime trade that carried their ships into all the inland seas in their part of the world and even beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to seek the tin of Britain, the amber of the Baltic, and the slaves and ivory of western Africa to exchange for the spices, gold, and precious stones of India. In this East–West trade, they made use of the ports of Sidon and Tyre at the termini of caravan routes from the Orient.

The Phoenicians’ search for new customers and new sources of raw materials made them the first great colonizers of ancient times. Their trading stations on the shores and islands of the Mediterranean became new centers of civilization. Carthage is a notable example. This Phoenician colony came to dominate the western Mediterranean and founded an empire embracing northwest Africa, Sardinia, Corsica, half of Sicily, and much of Spain.

It is of early Greek sea power that we are able to attain the clearest and most accurate picture, thanks to Herodotus and Thucydides, who wrote contemporary histories of the Greco–Persian and Peloponnesian wars. But Greece’s naval traditions were already old by then, and her sea trade was well developed. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Homer’s Iliad is really a poetic description of prehistoric Greek sea power at work—that the siege of Troy was a commercial war to secure control of the Hellespont (modern Dardanelles) and thus of the Black Sea trade. At any rate, the Greeks had by the fifth century B.C. excluded the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians from the Black and Aegean seas and held a virtual monopoly on shipping in the eastern Mediterranean. From their own mountainous, unfertile peninsula they could export few agricultural products but olive oil and wine; these products, however, were of the best quality and much in demand. Moreover, the work of their artisans (pottery, rugs, swords, tiles, and metal work) and their artists (jewelry, painted vases, and statues) gave them a highly favorable balance of trade.

As Greek trading stations developed into colonies, the coasts of Asia Minor to the east, Thrace to the north, and Sicily and southern Italy to the west became virtual extensions of Greece. Other Greek settlements existed as far away as the northern shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and Gaul (France). All that prevented the ancient Greeks from founding one of the mightiest maritime empires of history was the fatal defect of disunity. Within the Hellenic peninsula the Greek peoples were split up into separate little city-states—Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, and the rest—more often than not at odds with each other. The overseas Greek settlements were for the most part not true colonies but independent communities, attached to the mother cities of Greece by sentiment, tradition, and commercial ties. This dispersion of power, as much as anything else, was at length to cost the Greeks their freedom.

The Greco–Persian War

The dawn of recorded naval history coincides with one of the great crises in the annals of mankind. As viewed from later times, it can be seen as nothing less than an attack by Asia on Europe. Had the hordes out of the Middle East succeeded in subduing peninsular Greece, the cradle and first home of Western civilization, we may be sure that subsequent world history would have been very different.

The attacker was Persia, one of a series of empires that through the centuries dominated southwestern Asia. Expanding out of the Iranian highlands, Persian control had by the sixth century B.C. reached the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. The Phoenicians, having no solidarity as a nation or prospect of assistance, submitted easily—as they had earlier submitted to Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians—and provided fleets for the overseas conquests of their new masters. But the Greek cities of Asia Minor resisted and, even when conquered, rose against their conqueror with naval aid from Athens and Eretria across the Aegean. The Persians recaptured the rebellious cities, but suppressing the revolt cost them several years and gave the city-states of the Hellenic peninsula time to prepare for the inevitable attack.

The expanding Empire had already spread across the Hellespont and through Thrace and Macedonia. The first Persian expedition against Greece, in 492 B.C., succeeded in subduing revolt in these areas, but the fleet of galleys that accompanied the Persian army as it marched around the northern shores of the Aegean Sea was heavily damaged in a storm. With the fighting fleet out of action, cargo vessels could not be protected while supplying the troops; hence further advance was out of the question. The army was too large either to live off the land or to subsist upon supplies hauled overland by wagon. Loss of overseas communications thus stopped the first expedition in its tracks.

The second Persian expedition, two years later, came to an even more inglorious end. This was an amphibious operation, an attack from across the Aegean. When the first Persian echelon, numbering about 10,000 troops, landed on the plain of Marathon, some 8,000 Athenians, without waiting for tardy reinforcements from their Spartan allies, marched the 23 miles to the beachhead and hurled the invaders into the sea.

The Persians did not attack Greece again for ten years, partly because the new Persian ruler, King Xerxes, undertook elaborate precautions to ensure that the third expedition would be a success. Choosing the overland approach as probably less vulnerable, Xerxes in 480 B.C. assembled 180,000 troops at Sardis in Asia Minor and marched them to the Hellespont, which they crossed by means of boat bridges. The new expedition followed the example of the first by proceeding along the Aegean coast, while hundreds of cargo vessels kept it supplied from Asian bases. About 1,300 fighting ships, manned by some 175,000 seamen, rowers, and marines, covered the flank of the advancing army and protected the cargo vessels.

Aware of the Persian preparations, the peninsular Greeks had for once united, setting up a Panhellenic Congress to direct the defense. Luckily, Athens had produced an exceptional leader in Themistocles, who correctly saw that the Persian army was no stronger than the fleet that protected its communications back to base. He persuaded his fellow Athenians to invest in an enlarged fleet, which with galleys of other city-states gave the Greeks a naval force of nearly 500 warships. Themistocles expected this force at least to prevent the Persians from using their navy to outflank and put troops behind the Greek army’s defense lines. With luck it might win a naval victory that would expose the Persian communications to attack.

When the Greek army failed to hold the Persian hordes at the coastal pass of Thermopylae, it fell back to the Isthmus of Corinth, while the Greek fleet retired south to the narrow waters between the island of Salamis and the mainland not far from Athens. At the same time Xerxes pressed with his army into Attica, laying waste everywhere and at length plundering the abandoned city of Athens. His fleet of some 1,400 ships entered the Bay of Phalerum a few miles east of the Salamis strait.

The Peloponnesians were for withdrawing the Greek ships to the Corinthian Isthmus, where the Greek army had taken a new stand. Themistocles, however, argued for keeping them where they were instead of exposing them to superior numbers in the open sea. To make sure that the ships would not withdraw, he sent a double agent to Xerxes with the information that the Greek fleet was planning to escape. The Persian king thereupon sent 200 ships around to close the narrows west of Salamis, and he blocked the eastern exit from the strait with his main body. When the Greeks learned, during the night, that they were thus entrapped, they sent a detachment to contain the western Persian squadron and with the rest of their ships prepared to do battle with the enemy main fleet.

At dawn the Greek ships east of Salamis were seen withdrawing, as if in retreat. It was a ruse to draw the Persians into the strait, where they could present no broader fighting front than could the heavily outnumbered Greeks. When the leading line of Persian ships, closely followed by several more lines, approached the narrows, the Greeks reversed course. Under the eyes of Athenian evacuees watching from the heights of Salamis and of King Xerxes enthroned on the opposite shore, the Greek ships bore down on the enemy, oars stroking in unison, archers stationed at the bows firing volleys of arrows.

Among the Greeks were no unwilling conscripts, but freemen fighting desperately for their homes and families. Moreover, they had what in the circumstances proved to be a superior tactical plan and suitable ships and skillful seamanship to carry it out. Their galleys were slim, low-lying triremes. On board each were some 40 marines, but its principal weapon was a bronze-sheathed underwater ram projecting from the bow. Each was propelled in combat by 150 rowers, manning oars in three banks. The rowers, able to attain speeds in excess of seven knots, gave the triremes and their rams a powerful forward thrust.

The Persian galleys, less agile, were designed for boarding tactics. Their marines counted on grappling ships together, friend and foe, into a floating battlefield and fighting hand to hand across decks.

As the fleets drew together, the leading Greek ships sped forward and crashed their bronze beaks into the first line of enemy galleys, sinking them or driving them back into their own oncoming reinforcements. The nimble triremes, avoiding Persian grapnels, now circled the enemy ships, forcing them into an unwieldy bunch, and ramming again and again until the outermost ring had become a shambles of wreckage and floating corpses.

When a west wind arose, all the Persian ships that were able hoisted sail and fled. Though still outnumbering the Greeks, they were too demoralized to renew the attack, then or later. Xerxes recognized that with the Greek fleet unassailable in its fastness, his own seaborne communications were no longer secure, and that his army was stranded with insufficient supplies for an extended campaign. So he dispatched what was left of his fleet to Asia Minor and returned the way he had come, leaving behind some 50,000 troops to winter in Thessaly, where grain enough could be found to feed that many but no more. The following summer, land forces of the Panhellenic League attacked and annihilated Xerxes’ 50,000 at Plataea, 40 miles northwest of Athens. That summer also the combined Greek fleet hunted down the Persian fleet drawn up aground on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, defeated its guard force, and with fire destroyed what was left of Xerxes armada.

Mediterranean Operations in the Age of Galley Warfare

The Battle of Salamis and its aftermath illustrate as clearly as any operations in history the truth of naval philosopher Alfred Thayer Mahan’s famous dictum: Communications dominate war. An army that cannot live off the land is no stronger than its line of supply, and when its supplies must come across water, a victory at sea can set the stage for a victory on land.

The Greek victory ushered in the Golden Age of Athens, in which the Athenians gained maritime and commercial superiority and achieved an intellectual and artistic preeminence that laid the foundations for Western civilization. Conversely, Salamis marked the beginning of Persia’s decline. The Persians never again invaded Greece. In the century following Salamis, Greeks and Macedonians, led by Alexander the Great, overran and conquered the moribund Persian Empire.

The Rise of Rome

For two centuries after Salamis, Carthage and the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily held each other in check. The Carthaginians controlled the waters west of the Mediterranean narrows as their private lake, but the Greeks consistently blocked their attempts to advance eastward. In 275 B.C., however, the Romans, expanding from the Tiber basin, conquered southern Italy, engulfing the Greek cities.

The Carthaginians at first saw Rome’s conquest of the Italian Greeks as their own opportunity and promptly renewed their pressure on the Greeks of Sicily. They were thereby coming to grips with a rival far more formidable than any they had ever encountered. The Romans, sturdy and resolute, originally of farming stock, had developed a genius for administration and the arts of war. When the Carthaginians in 264 B.C. threatened to send troops into Messana (modern Messina), just across the strait from the toe of the Italian boot, the alarmed Romans sent their legions into Sicily and quickly bottled up the Carthaginians in their fortified cities at the western end of the island. They thereby launched the first of three Punic wars (so called from the Latin word for Carthaginian) and took the initial step toward overseas conquests.

Rome’s first problem in her century-long conflict with Carthage was how to deal with the Punic navy, which not only guarded Carthage from Roman attack but promptly interdicted Rome’s maritime commerce and began to plunder her coasts. The problem was twofold: how to acquire a fleet, and how to handle it. Solving the first proved not too difficult; Rome’s subject and allied Greek cities provided galleys and also shipbuilders to build additional galleys. More perplexing was how to deal with the highly evolved Carthaginian mode of sea fighting, which included ramming, sideswiping, flanking, and breaking the line—distinctly naval tactics, designed to concentrate ships against ships. Rome’s only hope was to force a return to the old tactics used before Salamis, tactics that concentrated men against men. Rome would then have the advantage of confronting the Punic mercenaries with her own specialty, the well-disciplined legionaries. The crux of the problem was how to get close enough to the agile foe to throw men on board his ships.

The ingenious Roman solution was the corvus, an 18-foot gangway bearing a pointed iron beak under the outboard end. Pivoted from a mast by a topping lift, it could be dropped forward or on either side to grip an unwary enemy vessel that approached close enough to ram or sideswipe. Over the gangway, foot soldiers then surged to convert a naval battle into an infantry battle across decks. The corvus first proved decisive off Mylae in 260, when the Carthaginians, despising their lubberly foe, bore down without bothering to assume a formation. The crashing corvi and the expert legionaries promptly disposed of nearly half the enemy ships and sent the rest scurrying in bewildered flight. In a subsequent battle off Mt. Ecnomus, the Romans not only made deft use of their corvi but, in a dazzling display of teamwork and command control, turned Punic envelopment tactics to their own advantage. But Roman ingenuity and teamwork proved after all no adequate substitute for seamanship. Admonished by a defeat and the loss in storms of several mishandled fleets, the Romans by dogged perseverence at length made themselves such skillful sailors that they brought the First Punic War to a close with a naval battle in which they defeated the enemy through sheer shiphandling.

Such was the ascendancy the Romans had won at sea that in the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general, Hannibal, chose to attack Rome overland from Spain via the Alps. Though he managed to maintain himself in Italy for 15 years, he did so only by ravaging farm lands to sustain his army, thereby incurring the wrath of the disaffected Roman subject states, on which he had counted for aid. At length when Rome, by virtue of her sea command, carried the war to Africa, Hannibal hastened home to the defense, only to be defeated in the Battle of Zama. The Third Punic War began with a Roman seaborne invasion of Africa and concluded with the razing of Carthage and the utter destruction of the Carthaginian power.

Rome’s first war with Carthage gave her Sicily as a province, the second gave her Spain, and the third gave her North Africa. The struggle and the final victory provided the warlike experience that carried Roman armies eastward through the Hellenic Peninsula and the Middle East to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf and northward through Gaul to Britain.

During the period of expansion, the Roman navy, ever the neglected stepchild, cleared the Mediterranean of pirates, covered the overseas transport of the invincible legions, and successfully challenged any hostile fleet that had the temerity to contest Rome’s command of the seas. In the process Rome completed her naval education. The legionaries remained her principal weapon on the sea as on land, but these she learned increasingly to support by judicious use of ship tactics and, later, missile tactics—employment of catapults and ballistae to hurl stones, javelins, and combustibles. Out of this combination the methodical Romans developed a fighting team as irresistible at sea as their infantry proved on land.

Rome’s far-reaching conquests were at length interrupted by civil war at home. Control of the expanding empire was disputed between Mark Antony, married to Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, and Octavius, grandnephew and adoptive son of the assassinated Julius Caesar. Octavius accused Antony of planning to subdue Rome and make Alexandria the imperial capital. The dispute was decided in 31 B.C. by the Battle of Actium. Fought off the west coast of Greece, it was the last major naval battle of antiquity.

To meet Octavius’s fleet of 260 galleys, Antony put to sea with about 200 much larger vessels. The latter were burdened with troops and stores—and carried sails, for flight in event of defeat. Neither Octavius nor his admiral, Agrippa, was overawed by Antony’s floating monsters. Aware that their opponent had legionaries every bit as good as theirs, they intended to avoid boarding or being boarded. Correctly estimating that the big ships would prove sluggish, they planned to maneuver and use naval tactics against Antony’s infantry and missiles.

Initially the opposing fleets were drawn up facing each other in three squadrons abreast, each squadron composed of galleys in single line abreast. Each galley thus protected its neighbors’ vulnerable sides, where the banks of oars were exposed, and at the same time exposed to the enemy its fighting part, the bow, with its ram, its grappling devices, and its missile-hurling apparatus. Behind Antony’s line was a reserve of 60 vessels under Cleopatra.

Through the morning the opposing fleets remained inactive. At noon a breeze set Antony’s left flank in motion, and soon the fleets were engaged all down the line. Octavius’s ships avoided compact formations of the enemy, but attacked vessels that had become isolated, darting in to sweep away oars and then, without pausing to permit boarding, backing off and striking swiftly again. At a crucial moment, Agrippa discharged a terrifying fire of blazing arrows and pots of flaming charcoal that had considerably greater range than his opponent’s catapulted stones.

Seeing the battle turning against Antony, Cleopatra came charging through the center of both lines with the wind at her back and her reserve squadron under sail. Octavius’s agile ships seem merely to have drawn aside and let her pass, leaving her separated from the main body of Antony’s fleet. Since the wind did not permit her to reverse course and repeat her maneuver, she headed south and sailed away to Egypt. Antony boarded one of his smaller craft and managed to join her, but the rest of the fleet, under attack by Agrippa’s fiery missiles, could not disengage and follow according to plan. Instead, they fought on until the flaming arrows and fire pots decided the battle in Octavius’s favor. After dark that evening what was left of Antony’s fleet managed to slip away. A week later all of his surviving ships and his military forces in the area surrendered to Octavius. This victory gave Octavius command of the whole Mediterranean, an indispensable preliminary to his subsequent conquest of Egypt and his assumption of imperial power as Caesar Augustus.

For five centuries after Actium, commercial vessels moved from the Black Sea to the Atlantic protected only by small fleets of police vessels to keep down piracy. The entire Mediterranean and its tributary waters had become a closed sea, with all coasts and naval bases controlled by Rome. On land and sea the Pax Romana was established, the longest period of comparative peace in history.

The Decline of Rome and the Rise of Europe

The heavy influx of slaves, which for centuries had offset Rome’s declining birthrate, came to an end as the Roman conquest reached its limits. Into the resulting manpower vacuum at first seeped, then poured, the Germanic peoples of northern and eastern Europe—originally by invitation, as farmers and soldiers; then by permission, to escape the inroads of the nomadic Huns out of Central Asia; and at last as conquerors. Under these stresses, the Empire split into two parts, each having its own emperor: the Western Roman Empire, with its capital at Rome, and the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, with its capital at Constantinople.

By the end of the fifth century A.D., the Western Empire had disappeared as a political entity. In the next century, the rise of Islam threatened all Roman and former Roman territories. Nomadic Arabs, filled with religious fervor by the eloquence of Muhammad, poured out of the Arabian desert and attacked the neighboring empires. The Persians and the Byzantines quickly gave way as Muslim forces advanced eastward to the Indus and westward to Egypt and the Bosporus.² Based securely on the whole Middle East, the Muslims took to the sea, overrunning Cyprus and Rhodes and raiding southern Italy and Sicily. At the same time they pushed westward across North Africa, conquering by the sword and then converting the defeated peoples to Islam. By A.D. 700 the invasion had reached the Straits of Gibraltar, across which Berber converts to Islam advanced to conquer Spain and invade Gaul. It appeared that Muslim power was about to engulf the whole Christian world. In the east, however, Constantinople held firm. An assault by 80,000 Muslims in 717 failed to breach the city walls, and Byzantine galleys scattered the blockading fleet with a new incendiary weapon, the practically inextinguishable Greek fire. In the West, the Muslim thrust into Gaul was repelled in 732 by a Frankish army.

The Franks under Charlemagne, in cooperation with the Papacy, briefly restored order in western Europe, but the Frankish empire fell apart under fresh attacks by the Muslims in the South, by Slavs and kindred peoples in the East, and by Vikings out of Scandinavia in the North. Thus, while the Islamic and Byzantine empires reached peaks of culture and enlightenment, the West entered a period of disorder and confusion.

Out of the ruins of the Frankish empire at length rose the Holy Roman Empire, embracing Germany and most of Italy. The Vikings ceased their raids and blended with the peoples whose lands they had penetrated. The Slavs settled down in the areas east of the new empire. Only the Muslims continued to pick at the frontiers of Christendom, while their fleets dominated the Mediterranean.

By the eleventh century Christendom was ready to strike back. Christian forces expelled the Muslims from Sardinia and Sicily and thrust them down into southern Spain. In 1095 Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade. By the end of the century the Christians had captured Jerusalem and very nearly swept the Arabs from the seas.

The Crusades, which fired Western imagination for 250 years, were responsible for a prodigious growth of the Italian commercial cities. These cities took over the bulk of the carrying trade between East and West, their merchant fleets picking up spices and fine goods at the termini of the Oriental caravan routes in the Middle East and transporting them to the coastal cities of southern and western Europe.

Venice was especially fortunate in her central position. Situated at the head of the Adriatic, her merchants had ready access to the passes of the Alps, through which they conducted a lucrative commerce with northern Europe. As a result of the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, partly instigated by the Venetians, Venice acquired possession of Crete. Subsequently she increased her control over the sea traffic by annexing Cyprus. The great Arsenal of Venice, a sort of assembly-line shipbuilding yard, provided the fleets of galleys whereby she enforced her monopoly. By the year 1400, when Venice was at the height of her power and grandeur, she had 3,000 ships, and in a population of 200,000, had 38,000 seamen.

But prospering Christendom was already under attack by a new surge of Muslim aggression. Political and religious feuds among the Arabs opened the way for the Turks, coming down out of the hills of central Asia, to take over the Arab world and its religion. By 1400 the Turks had swept across the Dardanelles and advanced to the Danube. In 1453 Constantinople, surrounded, fell before a Turkish siege backed by guns.

The Byzantine Empire, which for a thousand years after the fall of Rome had been a bastion of Europe and a preserver of the ancient culture, had at last been extinguished. Thereafter, the Turks overran eastern Europe as far as Vienna, and from their bases in North Africa and the Middle East, increasingly dominated the Mediterranean. Like the Arabs, they gladly served in the profitable capacity of middleman for the trade between Europe and the Orient, but this did not in the least hinder their sea rovers from capturing Christian merchant ships and enslaving their crews or from raiding and pillaging the Mediterranean coasts of western Europe.

The Campaign of Lepanto

Against the menace of the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire there was never any such spontaneous uniting of the forces of Christendom as had carried European armies and navies into the Middle East during the Crusades. A Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1570, however, at length provided the atmosphere of urgency and alarm that drew the Christian Mediterranean powers together. Pope Pius V sponsored the creation of an anti-Muslim Holy League. Neither Portugal nor the Holy Roman Empire would have any part of the alliance, but Spain and the Italian states answered the papal summons and dispatched their fleets for a concentration at Messina, for it was clear that the Christians would have to defeat the Turks at sea before Christian armies could land on Cyprus.

The Christian fleet comprised some 200 galleys, mostly Venetian and Spanish, with a few from the Pope and from Genoa, Savoy, and Malta. Their total complement was about 44,000 seamen, including rowers, and 28,000 soldiers, of whom two-thirds were supplied by Spain. Commander in chief of the fleet was Don John of Austria. Though the choice was dictated by his half brother, Philip II of Spain, it was not an unpopular one, for at the age of 24 Don John was known as an experienced and successful campaigner on land and sea. The Ottoman fleet, commanded by Ali Pasha, numbered about 250 galleys, manned by 50,000 seamen and 25,000 soldiers.

The galleys on both sides were long, slim, flat-bottomed craft like those of ancient Greece and Rome, but they carried an 18-foot spur above the waterline in place of the classic underwater ram. While the Turks still clung to the bow and arrow, many of the Christian soldiers were armed with the arquebus, precursor of the musket. All the galleys carried guns at the bow. The Venetians brought along six galleasses—heavy, sluggish vessels with guns on bow and in broadside.

In mid-September 1571, the ships of the Holy League set out from Messina, crossed to the Greek coast, and worked their way slowly against head winds to an extension of the Gulf of Lepanto, where the Turkish fleet was known to be mobilized. Early in the morning of 7 October, Christian lookouts sighted Ali Pashas squadrons approaching from within the gulf.

The Battle of Lepanto is especially significant as the first great galley action since the Battle of Actium, and also as the last great galley action. As at Actium, fought 16 centuries earlier only a few miles north of the scene of Lepanto, the opposing fleets were in three squadrons abreast, the ships of each squadron in line abreast. Both Turks and Christians held an additional squadron in reserve in the rear. Don John made an innovation in the ancient battle plan by placing the four galleasses that arrived on time ahead of his squadrons of galleys. When the Turks advanced to attack, they were obliged to sweep around these floating fortresses, taking heavy losses from their broadside guns.

As the opposing lines came together, each galley fired its bow guns two or three times. The battle then became a general melee, particularly at the center, with ramming, grappling, boarding, and fighting across decks. The hottest fighting soon developed between the opposing flagships and their supporters. Twice the Turks entered Don Johns ship, and both times they were driven back as additional Christian soldiers came on board from adjoining vessels. At the crucial moment, Santa Cruz, Spanish commander of the Holy League reserve, arrived with 200 additional men. Then one of the Christian galleys, ranging alongside the Turk, swept her deck with arquebus fire, whereupon Italians and Spaniards, including Don John himself, poured on board the enemy flagship and took possession, killing Ali and all that remained of his crew.

At the northern end of the line of battle, the ships of the Turkish right squadron, under Scirocco, attempted to outflank the Christian left by putting in close to the shore, exploiting their superior knowledge of the shallows. But Barbarigo, the Christian squadron commander, concluding that where there was enough water for Turks there was enough for Christians, also closed the beach and planted his left wing impassably against the coast. At the same time, Barbarigo’s right wing, taking advantage of the Turkish shift shoreward, enveloped Scirocco’s left flank like a closing door. The Turks, thus surrounded and forced against the coast, were defeated in an hour of fierce fighting.

A Turkish attempt to envelop at the opposite end of the line of battle came nearer success. Here the Turkish squadron commander, Uluch Ali, made a feint at the right flank of his opponent, Doria, who to avoid being enveloped edged south. He thereby opened a broad gap between his squadron and the Christian center. Uluch Ali, seeing his opportunity, shifted course to the northwest and headed for the opening in order to outflank the right wing of Don John’s center squadron. In this he partially succeeded, doing fearful carnage among the Christians in that area. But by now Don John’s squadron was so near victory that it could swing bows around toward the point of attack. Before Doria, having realized his blunder, could get back into the battle, Santa Cruz had thrown his reserve squadron into the breach, and Uluch Ali was in flight.

When the battle ended late in the afternoon, the Gulf was red with blood. According to contemporary Christian accounts, possibly exaggerated, 30,000 Turks lost their lives and all but 60 of their ships were captured or destroyed. The Christian losses were 12 ships and 7,700 men.

Like most purely naval victories, the triumph of the Holy League at Lepanto was both decisive and indecisive. The Christians had won the moral ascendancy; their dread of the Turk was never again so great as it had been, and the Turks thereafter operated with a prudence that kept their incursions within bounds. They and their subsidiary states of North Africa never again threatened to dominate the Mediterranean.

On the other hand, because the Holy League soon broke asunder and the Christians did not follow up their success at sea with combined intervention ashore, the Turks retained possession of Cyprus, and armed Muslim vessels continued to create an almost intolerable nuisance. The Barbary System of raiding excursions and extortion of tribute and ransom from Christian powers continued for centuries.

Summary

Rowed warships called galleys came into being mainly to control communications on the sea by defending friendly freighters and disrupting the movements of enemy freighters. To the extent that they achieved this dual objective, generally by destroying enemy warships, they are said to have attained command of the sea.

A striking example of galleys controlling communications occurred in a Persian expedition against Greece in 480 B.C. In the Battle of Salamis, the Greeks drew the Persian fleet into a narrow strait where the latter could not profit by their superior numbers. Then, avoiding the across-decks tactics of the Persians, the Greeks attacked and defeated them with the rams of their agile, many-oared triremes. The Persian army, its supply ships now menaced by the victorious Greek warships, was obliged to retreat to avoid starvation. Few campaigns more clearly confirm Mahan’s dictum: Communications dominate war.

In the third century B.C., the Romans, expanding out of the Tiber basin, overran the Greek cities of southern Italy and clashed with the Africa-based Carthaginians. From the latter they wrested control of the western Mediterranean, at first by gripping the Carthaginian galleys with the corvus, a pivoted, beaked gangway across which Roman legionaries surged, and later by means of improved naval tactics.

After adding the Carthaginian domains to her growing empire, Rome sent her conquering legions, ofttimes spearheaded by her navy, into Europe, Asia Minor, and Egypt. Rome’s far-reaching conquests were at last interrupted by civil war at home. At sea, the climax of the civil war was reached in the Battle of Actium, in 31 B.C. At Actium, the galleys, in the final evolution of naval warfare under oars, began the battle with each fleet in single line abreast. The galleys of Octavius, by virtue of superior maneuverability, defeated those of Mark Antony. Octavius’s victory set the stage for unification of the Roman Empire under himself as Caesar Augustus.

Four centuries later, the Empire split in two. The Western Roman Empire was then overrun by Germanic invaders, and the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire was invaded by Muslim Arabs. In the eighth century A.D., Constantinople, the eastern capital, was saved by the Byzantine galleys, which repulsed a blockading Arab fleet by use of the almost inextinguishable Greek fire.

The Crusades, originally organized to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims, stimulated the growth and enrichment of the Italian commercial cities, which took over the bulk of the shipping between East and West. Venice, situated at the head of the Adriatic Sea, was especially fortunate in her central position. She brought goods by sea from the Middle East and the Mediterranean and transported them over the passes of the Alps to the cities of northern Europe. By 1400, to carry her maritime trade, Venice owned 3,000 ships protected by fleets of galleys.

Meanwhile, the Turks had overrun the Arab empire, adopted its Muslim religion, and swept across the Dardanelles and advanced to the Danube. In 1453 Constantinople, surrounded, fell before a Turkish siege. Thereafter the Turks overran eastern Europe as far as Vienna, and from their bases in North Africa and the Middle East increasingly dominated the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean showdown between the Christians and the Muslims occurred in the naval Battle of Lepanto, in 1571, with the galley fleets of Spain and Italy arrayed against that of the Turks. As at Actium, fought 16 centuries earlier in nearby waters, the opposing fleets fought in single line abreast. The Christians soundly defeated the Turks and thereby gained moral ascendancy in the Mediterranean, but armed Muslim vessels continued to create an almost intolerable nuisance in those waters. The Barbary System of seaborne raids and extortion of tribute and ransom from Christian powers continued for centuries.

¹Not to be confused with another word of the same spelling that refers to the dissemination and exchange of information by whatever means—messenger, post, telegraph, radio, flag hoist, and the rest.

²Muslim: believer in the faith taught by Muhammad. Islam: the whole body of Muslims; also the religion.

Chapter 2

The Rise of English Sea Power

Though the Vikings employed combat craft using oars as well as sails, galley warfare did not develop to any great extent in Atlantic waters. Slim, shallow-draft galleys, adequate for the choppy waters of the Mediterranean, were too easily capsized by the long ocean swells. Besides, the kings of medieval western Europe could not afford ships specially designed for fighting. When they wished to contest the seas with their rivals, they usually called on their merchants for cargo sailing vessels—crank, broad-beamed, single-masted ships—and sent them out loaded with soldiers to do the work. Fighting consisted mostly of grappling and boarding, and the action ended when the soldiers on the captured vessels were tossed over the side to drown.

The first structural refinement in men-of-war under sail was the addition of temporary towers fore and aft, called forecastles and aftercastles. When the enemy succeeded in boarding, the defenders retreated into these towers and rained down stones, arrows, hot pitch, and, later, shot upon the intruders in the waist of the ship. From the towers too, missiles could be fired and stones dropped upon the enemy in the ships alongside. The towers, or castles, proved so useful that the merchant owners had them built permanently into new construction, for one never knew when he might have to deal with pirates or other raiders. This is only one of the many structural changes resulting from the occasional use of cargo carriers as men-of-war. The great advances in ship design in the fifteenth century doubtless owed much to this dual employment.

The ancient, relatively frail cargo carrier with one mast and one sail evolved in the fifteenth century into a full-rigged ship with three or four masts, a bowsprit, and five or more sails—a vessel strong enough to cope with Atlantic gales and swift and seaworthy enough to cross vast stretches of ocean without replenishment or repair. The compass, coming into general use in ships, gave the seafarer his approximate direction in any sort of weather. He had learned to measure his approximate speed by observing the time it took his vessel to pass a bubble or a bit of flotsam. Using these two factors, he was able to find his way reasonably well by dead reckoning.

Though dead reckoning enabled the mariner to guess intelligently, once out of sight of land he was never really sure of his course or position. Contemporary instruments for finding latitude all required a steady platform and some knowledge of mathematics; the sea-tossed mariner rarely had either. In general he found it wise to sail north or south along the coast to the latitude of his destination and then strike out due east or west, hoping to make a recognizable landfall on the far shore. Finding longitude was utterly beyond his means because he had no way of accurately measuring time. Development of the dependable chronometer and the reflecting quadrant, which would solve his navigation problems, was still centuries away. Nevertheless, ships out of western Europe ventured farther and farther afield.

Meanwhile, rising commercial interests along Europe’s Atlantic seaboard were observing with envy the Italian and German monopoly of the rich carrying trade from the Orient. The cottons, silks, spices, dyes, perfumes, and gems of the East found a ready market in the West, even though prices quadrupled in transit—chiefly as a result of costly transport from the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Toward the end of the medieval period, Europeans dwelling on the Atlantic front began to consider old legends and quasi-historical accounts of unbroken water routes to the Orient. The invention of printing made widely available ancient ideas of a spherical world, so that daring thinkers and explorers dreamed of reaching the Far East either around Africa or across the mysterious Atlantic.

Explorers sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal inched their way down the west coast of Africa. In 1487 Bartholomeu Dias, by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, raised to a near certainty the belief in an all-water route to the Orient. In 1492 Christopher Columbus, sponsored by the queen of Spain, crossed the Atlantic in search of a competing route and instead discovered the New World. Six years later Vasco da Gama completed the work of Diaz by sailing from Portugal around Africa all the way to India.

Results flowing from these discoveries ushered in the modern period, sometimes known as the Oceanic Age. Portuguese fleets, following in the wake of da Gama, easily defeated the Arab traders in the Indian Ocean, established a trade empire stretching from East Africa to Japan, and secured a monopoly of the rich spice trade of the East Indies. Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru made available to Spain wealth accumulated over the centuries by the Indian civilizations, and the working of American gold and silver mines assured an apparently inexhaustible flow of precious metal into the Spanish treasury. These changes were bound to have a shattering effect upon the Old World economy.

Europe was already in ferment. The vague internationalism of the feudal system was giving way to national feudalisms with a dominant monarch. National monarchs were abetted in the increase of their power by a rising merchant class that wanted domestic peace, uniform coinage, and a centralized government favorable to commerce and industry. The Church, for centuries a unifying influence, was itself beginning to break asunder in the Protestant Reformation. The new maritime discoveries hastened the breakup of medieval unity by shifting European interests from the East, so long the focus of trade and the source of recurrent threats of conquest, to the West, where nationalism had made its greatest advances. With loss of trade, the Ottoman Empire gradually weakened, and the commercial cities of Italy and Germany went into a decline. The inland seas of Europe and the Middle East, from the Baltic to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, became backwaters. The major states of Europe’s Atlantic seaboard—Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England—began to rise as rival oceanic powers.

The English Navy

King Henry VIII was the first English monarch prosperous enough to be able to build a few national ships, intended exclusively for fighting. Henry’s shipbuilding nearly coincided with the development of the big, muzzle-loading ship guns, which eventually displaced the small railing-pieces that were mounted on bulwarks and in the castles to repel or defeat boarders. Because placing the heavy guns so high above the waterline could cause the vessel to capsize, the king’s carpenters cut gunports in the sides and mounted most of them on the cargo deck. Thus the first broadsides came into being. An action off Shoreham in 1545, demonstrating that the broadsides could destroy ships as well as kill men, introduced a new sort of warfare under sail. Off-fighting had become possible; ships no longer had to be in physical contact to engage.

With the introduction of guns in broadside and King Henry’s decision that he would have a fighting fleet apart from the merchant marine, England began to forge ahead of all other nations in warship design. Progress slackened during the brief reigns of Edward VI and Mary Tudor. Under Elizabeth I it came to a standstill until the threat of a Spanish attack impelled her to resume Henry’s naval rearmament.

Philip II of Spain took very seriously his role as leading Roman Catholic monarch and champion of the Church of Rome. We have seen how he responded to Pope Pius V’s proclamation of 1570 against the Muslims and the part his galley fleet played in the Battle of Lepanto. In 1570 also, the Pope, despairing of reclaiming Protestant England, excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, branded her a heretic and usurper, and called on Philip to launch a crusade against her as well as the Turks. To the Spanish monarch, northern Europe’s heretical Protestantism was every bit as detestable as infidel Islam, but against Elizabeth he was not prepared to move. He had his hands full, being at war with both the Turks and his Netherlands subjects, the latter having revolted against his bloody drive to suppress Dutch Protestantism.

Elizabeth realized that Philip’s forbearance was only temporary. Once his hands were freed, he would undoubtedly try to oust her from her throne. She therefore set about strengthening England’s defenses and undermining the power of Spain. In 1572 she achieved a masterstroke by allying herself with the King of France. Then she secretly released her gold-hungry seamen against Philip’s treasure ships and with equal secrecy encouraged her subjects to aid the Dutch. More to the point, she began rebuilding her neglected navy.

Foremost among the semi-pirates that the queen turned loose against Spanish colonies and shipping were John Hawkins and his cousin and protégé Francis Drake. Hawkins’s position as chief sea commander of England made his opinions respected long before he was appointed Treasurer and Controller of the Navy in 1577. A prosperous merchant shipowner of Plymouth, he had interspersed peaceful pursuits with periods of freebooting and slave-running in Spanish–American waters, sometimes with royal connivance and profit. His experiences at sea, which included some hot fighting, had imbued him with a dislike for boarding tactics and an unshakable respect for guns and maneuver. By his advice and, later, under his stewardship, royal combat vessels became floating gun platforms emphasizing speed and mobility. The lofty fore- and aftercastles were reduced, and length was increased relative to beam.

Though armament was outside Hawkins’s responsibility, his influence can be detected in this department also. If the new fashion in the English navy was to eschew hand-to-hand fighting for long-range gunnery, then guns of the longest range were desirable. So we find in English ships fewer and fewer stubby, short-range guns firing heavy shot and an increasing proportion of long-barreled guns called culverins that could throw a light 17-pound ball 1¼ miles.

One priceless advantage Elizabeth possessed was her seamen. They had little opportunity to develop tactical niceties, but their freebooting excursions had endowed them with an incomparable knowledge of ships and the sea.

The Challenge of Spain

Nothing infuriated Philip II more than the raiding of Spanish bases and shipping by English privateers, whom the irate Spaniards considered mere pirates. The most famous of such expeditions was that of Drake’s Golden Hind, which entered the Pacific through the Straits of Magellan in 1578 and raided Spanish cities and shipping up and down the west coast of South America. Drake returned to England via the Cape of Good Hope, arriving in 1581 with gold, silver, and jewels valued at half a million pounds sterling. Queen Elizabeth openly acquiesced in the enterprise by sequestering the bulk of the treasure and knighting Drake on his own quarterdeck. Though Philip raged, he was not yet prepared to risk open warfare. Instead he began secretly conspiring with the large Roman Catholic faction in England to assassinate Elizabeth. Her death would vacate the throne in favor of her Catholic cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had held captive since 1568, when Mary had been driven out of Scotland by the Calvinist hierarchy.

Two events in 1584 at length brought this clandestine warfare into the open. France was plunged into civil war by the death of the Catholic heir and the succession of a Protestant claimant to the throne; and an assassin in Spanish pay struck down William the Silent, Stadtholder of the newly proclaimed Dutch republic. The war in France destroyed the effectiveness of the Anglo–French alliance that had restrained Philip for 12 years; and the assassination of the Stadtholder paved the way for Spanish subjugation of the Netherlands, which would undoubtedly be followed by an invasion of England. Philip now began seizing English merchantmen peacefully trading in his ports. Elizabeth promptly retaliated. To cut down still further the flow of precious metal to Spain, she sent Drake with a fleet of 19 ships to raid the Spanish Indies. She formed an alliance with Philip’s rebellious Dutch subjects and dispatched an army to Holland. If there was to be war, she considered, it was better to fight on foreign soil with an ally than alone in her own realm. The Spanish king now stepped up his campaign for the assassination of Elizabeth. To remove the focus for such plots, Elizabeth early in 1587 reluctantly signed the death warrant of Mary Stuart. Philip thereupon openly claimed the crown of England, alleging his descent from Edward III and his marriage to Mary Tudor, Elizabeth’s half sister and predecessor on the English throne.

The Spanish monarch proposed nothing less than a descent upon England out of the ports of Spain with an army carried and supported by a great naval armada. In the end he had to compromise by drawing most of his invasion troops from those engaged in Flanders against the Dutch, but his general concept remained. If Philip had any hope of conquering the English fleet with the weapons he had used in 1571 against the Turks, he was presently disabused, for in April 1587 Drake sailed boldly into the Spanish port of Cadiz with 23 ships, easily thrust aside the defending galleys, and destroyed some 18 cargo vessels. The vaunted galleys were clearly no match for England’s sailing fleet with its long-range broadside batteries.

Luckily for Philip, he now had at his disposal the warships and armed merchantmen of Portugal and the services of Portugese marine constructors, men well acquainted with Atlantic naval shipbuilding practices. He adopted the sailing man-of-war and the broadside, somewhat grudgingly we may assume, for he could not forget Lepanto. Once more, as at Lepanto, he would rely on his infantry for victory at sea. To cripple the English vessels so that they could not maneuver out of reach of his boarders, he armed his ships with the biggest naval guns he could find, including some firing 50-pound shot.

The Grand Armada, as finally assembled and dispatched against England in July 1588, consisted of 130 vessels carrying 1,100 guns and 27,000 men, more than half of whom were soldiers. In command was the duke of Medina Sidonia, whose chief qualifications were noble rank and reputation for piety. Begging to be excused from so novel an undertaking, Medina had gloomily accepted the command only at Philip’s insistence. His assignment was to proceed via the English Channel to Flanders, add 6,000 troops to the 17,000 already there under the duke of Parma, and then cover Parma’s invasion force as it crossed in small craft from the Flemish port of Dunkirk to Margate at the mouth of the Thames. The English fleet was of course expected to give battle, probably before Parma’s crossing could be carried out. Though Philip knew that the Englishmen intended to fight with guns alone, he specifically directed his Spaniards to grapple and board and engage hand to hand.

Meanwhile the queen’s navy of 34 men-of-war had been heavily reinforced. Armed merchantmen from the seaport towns and artillerymen from all over England had brought it up to the respectable strength of 197 vessels carrying 16,000 men and 2,000 guns. Mere numbers, however, fail to point up the really important differences between the opposing fleets. Though the English ships were in general lighter than the Spanish, they were incomparably handier and better handled. Moreover, they carried no infantrymen, only sailors and gunners. The Armada, with fewer guns, was superior in total weight of broadside, about 17 pounds per gun as compared to an English average of around 7 pounds. But most of the Spanish guns were heavy, medium-range cannon and light, short-range boarder-repelling pieces, while 95 percent of the English guns were long-range intermediate culverin types. Thus the Spaniards had the advantage in striking power; and the English in maneuverability, relatively clear decks, and range.

Like the Armada, the queen’s fleet was officially headed by an aristocrat, Charles Howard of Effingham, Lord Admiral of England. An intelligent administrator, Lord Howard had the good sense to take the advice of his subordinates, old seadogs Drake, Hawkins, and Martin Frobisher. At crucial moments in the campaign, Drake virtually exercised command.

The clash, which took place off the English coast, was epochal in two respects. It was an all-out confrontation between the chief champions of Catholicism and of Protestantism, and it was the first major contest between sailing fleets. In the past there had been many small-scale skirmishes under sail, but none had provided experience on which to base a tactical doctrine. The English, however, were well aware of the advantages conferred by possession of the weather gage, the position upwind of the enemy. The windward fleet could choose the range and decide when to engage, and it could attack the windward part of the enemy’s fleet while the rest of his fleet was held in check by the wind. The Spaniards seem to have been less appreciative of these advantages.

A detached force of the English fleet under Lord Henry Seymour watched Parma from Dover, but the main body, under Howard, took station off Plymouth in order to profit by the prevailing southwesterly wind. This was the wind that blew the Spanish Armada into the English Channel, where it caught Howard’s fleet beating out of Plymouth Sound. Had Medina Sidonia attacked then, the result might have been disastrous for England. Instead, he sailed majestically past Plymouth, and Howard fell in behind, seizing the weather gage and blocking the line of retreat back to Spain. For a week the Armada sailed slowly up the Channel while the English, holding off beyond the range of the Spanish guns, fired at its weathermost ships. There were three hot engagements, but they were far from general, for such was the bunched condition of both fleets that most broadsides were masked by friendly hulls.

During the run up the Channel, the Spaniards fired more than 100,000 rounds, and the English fired almost as many, yet neither fleet seriously hurt the other. The reason is clear: the range, selected by the English, was too great. The Spaniards, despite their heavy guns, achieved almost nothing because they simply could not get at Howard’s nimble ships, which generally managed to keep to windward. The English did little better because, at the range they chose, their light shot could not penetrate Spanish hulls.

For all Howard’s attempts to thwart them, the Spaniards had apparently achieved their first objective when on 7 August the Armada, practically intact, dropped anchor in the neutral port of Calais. Actually they were in a poor situation, for Calais was not the logistic base they sorely needed. Howard had won after all, because he could be resupplied with ammunition from England, whereas Medina Sidonia had fired off most of his heavy shot and could get no more. In the dubious hope that the mere presence of the Armada would hold the English fleet in check, Medina sent a messenger posthaste to the duke of Parma urging him to launch the invasion forthwith. But Parma, tightly blockaded by Seymour and the Dutch fleet, could not move.

While Medina was still wondering what to do next, Howard sent eight fireships into Calais Roads, forcing out the Spanish fleet in the middle of the night. The next day, off Gravelines, the English attacked. They now abandoned long-range fire and closed with impunity because the Spaniards, lacking shot for their big guns, could reply only with small boarder repellers and muskets.

Western Europe

At this critical moment, the shaky English logistic system broke down completely. No more shiploads of powder and shot arrived for the queen’s fleet. After Howard had sunk two ships, driven three others on the shoals, and littered the Spanish decks with casualties, he too ran out of ammunition.

Fortunately for England, the Spaniards were already on the run. With the wind against them and the English behind them, they were convinced that they had no choice but to retreat into the North Sea. Howard plowed the Spanish wake for a few days, spurring the fugitives with a brave show of wanting to attack. But the Grand Armada was already en route back to Spain—the long way, north and west of the British Isles.

In the Atlantic, hunger and thirst completed Spanish demoralization. Storms and inept navigation scattered the Spanish ships. Some 35 or 40 foundered at sea. At least a score were wrecked upon the rocky shores of Scotland and Ireland. In October Philip received back into ports of Spain no more than half the military power he had sent so confidently against England.

God breathed and they were scattered, so went the inscription on the Protestant victory medals. Yet it was the English fleet that wore down Spanish morale, mauled the Spanish vessels into unseaworthiness, and forced the Spaniards, in a defeatist frame of mind and with insufficient provisions, to take