ormed the subject of much controversy
amongst modern writers on naval architecture. The vessels were
distinguished, according to the numbers of the banks of oars, as
uniremes, biremes, triremes, quadriremes, etc., up to ships like the
great galley of Ptolemy Philopater, which was said to have had forty
banks. Now, the difficulty is to know what is meant by a bank of oars.
It was formerly assumed that the term referred to the horizontal tiers
of oars placed one above the other; but it can easily be proved, by
attempting to draw the galleys with the oars and rowers in place, that
it would be very difficult to accommodate as many as five horizontal
banks and absolutely impossible to find room for more than seven. Not
only would the space within the hull of the ship be totally insufficient
for the rowers, but the length of the upper tiers of oars would be so
great that they would be unmanageable, and that of the lower tiers so
small that they would be inefficient. The details given by ancient
writers throw very little light upon this difficult subject. Some
authors have stated that there was only one man to each oar, and we now
know that this was the case with the smaller classes of vessels, say, up
to those provided with three, or four, to five banks of oars; but it is
extremely improbable that the oars of the larger classes could have been
so worked. The oars of modern Venetian galleys were each manned by five
rowers. It is impossible in this work to examine closely into all the
rival theories as to what constituted a bank of oars. It seems
improbable, for reasons before stated, that any vessel could have had
more than five horizontal tiers. It is certain also that, in order to
find room for the rowers to work above each other in these tiers, the
oar-ports must have been placed, not vertically above each other, but in
oblique rows, as represented in Fig. 14. It is considered by Mr. W. S.
Lindsay, in his "History of Merchant Shipping and Ancient Commerce,"
that each of the oblique rows of oars, thus arranged, may have formed
the tier referred to in the designation of the class of the vessel, for
vessels larger than quinqueremes. If this were so, there would then be
no difficulty in conceiving the possibility of constructing galleys with
even as many as forty tiers of oars like the huge alleged galley of
Ptolemy Philopater. Fig. 15 represents the disposition of the oar-ports
according to this theory for an octoreme.

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