as fifteen hundred tons, and carried no less
than one hundred and eighty-four pieces of ordnance. It was from the nef
and the galeasse that the sailing man-of-war arrived by the process of
evolution. The galley in the first instance was the vessel of men who
fought hand to hand, the men in whom personal strength and desperate valour
were blended, who desired nothing so much as to come to close grips with
their enemy. Such rude engines of war as the pierriers, or short cannons
which discharged some forty or fifty pounds of broken stone upon the enemy,
were first mounted in the galley; these were followed by improved artillery
as time went on. But although the galleys eventually carried quite big
guns, as instanced by the forty-eight pounder in the galleys of the Knights
of St. John, still it soon became apparent that the limit was reached by
guns of this weight; the galley was essentially a light vessel and was not
built to withstand those rude shocks caused by firing heavy charges of
powder.

The galeasse was the connecting link between the navy of oars and the navy
of sails. The navy of oars was in its generation apt for warlike purposes;
but it was in its essence a force analogous to the light cavalry of the
land; useful for a raid, a sudden dash, but without that great strength and
solidity which came in later years to the building of the sailing line of
battleship.

The galeasse was really a magnified galley, one which used both sails and
oars, on board of which the rowers were under cover; she was built with a
forecastle and a sterncastle which were elevated some six feet above the
benches of the rowers, and her very long and immensely heavy oars were of
course proportionate to the size of the vessel. The description of a
galeasse of nearly one thousand tons burden is set forth as follows by
Jurien de la Graviere:

"Her draught of water was about 18 feet 6 inches, she was propelled by
52 oars, 48 feet in length, each oar being worked by 9 men. Her crew
consisted of 452 rowers, 350 soldiers, 60 marines, 12 steersmen, 40
ordinary seamen, 86 cannoneers, 12 petty officers, 4 boatswains' mates,
3 pilots, 2 sub-pilots, 4 counsellors, 2 surgeons, 4 writers, 2
sergeants, 2 carpenters, 2 caulkers, 2 coopers, 2 bakers, 10 servants, a
captain, a lieutenant, a purser. In all some thousand men, or about the
same number as the crew of a three-decker of a later date."

The fleet of the "Holy League" at the batt