Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1877 — The Galleys. [ARTICLE]

The Galleys.

It was by a revival of classical strategy that England was, in the seventeenth century, put into extremest peril. Louis the Magnificent’s galley? in Torbay were a more real danger than the fleet with which De lluyter had burned our ships in the Medway. For, however meat the alarm caused in Lyndon by the sullen roar of the Dutch guns, the Hollanders had not a single regiment to disembark, whereas the French King had sent to the Devon coast a formidable force of whitecoated grenadiers, to co-operate with the expected Jacobite rising. The galleys were an especially French, as they had been an especially Roman, institution. The force had been patronized by several Kings, nor was it until the reign of Louis XIII. that the General of the Galleys was made subordinate to the High, Admiral of France. For harassing an enemy’s coast, and for the transport of troops, this fair-weather flotilla was unsurpassed. But a galley of Louis XlY.’s time, rowed by wretches chained to the oar, the vilest felons mingled with runaway Protestants, whose sole crime was their attempt to escape to Holland or England, was the nearest approach to a floating pandemonium ever devised. To every ten convicts was allotted a Turkish or Moorish prisoner of war, whose knotted cord fell on the bare shoulders of all who flinched, while boatswain and officers patrolled the nar-row-space between the row-benches, and plied rattan and lash unsparingly. It was by sheer fear of physical suffering that the Chained rowers were urged to keep the great oars rising and falling with such mechanical regularity. The galley-slaves were not expected to fight; there were soldiers on board to do that. But they were expected to row, and no plea of illness or exhaustion was admitted. Bo far from the sick or weary being sent to an infirmary, they were deliberately beaten to death. Fainting, bleeding, the miserable wretches were to the last regarded as so much mechanism, to be stimulated by cuts of the whip, and when they died their bodies were unchained from bench and oar, and tossed into the sea. —All the Year Roun d.