und his neck; the
signal is repeated by the under officers and very soon all the fifty
oars strike the water as one. Imagine six men chained to a bench as
naked as they were born, one foot on the stretcher the other raised and
placed on the bench in front of them, holding in their hands an oar of
enormous weight, stretching their bodies towards the after part of the
galley with arms extended to push the loom of the oar clear of the backs
of those in front of them who are in the same attitude. They plunge the
blades of the oars into the water and throw themselves back, falling on
to the seat which bends beneath their weight. Sometimes the galley
slaves row thus ten, twelve, even twenty hours at a stretch, without the
slightest relapse or rest, and on these occasions the officer will go
round putting into the mouths of the wretched rowers pieces of bread
soaked in wine to prevent them from fainting. Then the captain will call
upon the officers to redouble their blows, and if one of the slaves
falls fainting upon his oar, which is a common occurrence, he is flogged
until he appears to be dead and is then flung overboard without
ceremony."

The Italian captain, Pantero Pantera, of the _Santa Lucia_ galley, in his
work on "L'Armata Navale" published in 1614, gives it as his opinion that
although soldiers and sailors could be obtained for service in the galleys
if good pay were given, still no money could tempt any free man to
adventure himself as a rower for any length of time owing to the
intolerable sufferings which the "gallerian" was called upon to endure. As,
however, in the opinion of the captain it was most necessary that the
galleys should be manned, he thought that all judges should in future send
criminals aboard; those who had committed murder as "lifers," those who had
committed lesser crimes _pro rata_. Those who by the nobility of their
birth or their physical incompetence were unable to handle the oar should
be called upon to pay for substitutes to act for them; these were called
"Buone-Voglie."

There was not much difference after all between the methods used by the
seventeenth-century Italian to those actually in force in England at a much
later date when the Press Gang swept the honest and the dishonest into its
net in its midnight raids.

"The galley slaves," observes Pantera, "cherish repose and sincerely wish
to avoid fatigue; in order to incite them to do their duty i