HIS FAST BLACK SHIP
To know where Odysseus was capable of going, "swept along for nine days by the force of the
hostile winds", we have to know something about what kind of ship he had. There are clues we
can piece together. We've already seen that he lost six men to the Kikones. Although we haven't
discussed it yet, I can tell you in advance that he lost six men to the Cyclops. Then on Circes'
Island the remainder were divided into two groups -- his best friend Eurylochus headed up one
group of 22 men; presumably Odysseus had another 22. So now we have 6 + 6 + 22 + 22 + 2=
58.
This is a very significant number, and explains why Homer says Odysseus
had a fast black ship. What this tells us is that Odysseus had a Penteconter, the top of the line
and
fastest capital warship of his day. (For illustration see cover.)
Here's how we know it was fast:
The penteconter had 50 rowers, and at least one square sail. Each rower needs about 40 inches.
That's 25 X 40 inches or about 84 feet. Add a bow of about ten to twelve feet, with probably
some decking to keep things dry under it, and a poop deck, say 10 - 15 feet, at the stern where the
helmsman stood to steer. That's about 105 - 110 feet in length.
What we see here is actually a trireme, a later version of a penteconter, with three banks of oars,
and thirty on one bank of rowers to the penteconter's twenty-five, but it gives some idea of the
rowing power of the ancient ships. This trireme is going from left to right. (Also see Note 1 at the end
of this chapter for more on triremes.)
The speed of a boat is affected by the bow wave. At slow speeds the small bow wave will have
little effect:
As speed increases the bow wave will lengthen:
This raises the bow of a ship. Then the stern drops. Now the ship is trying to climb uphill and
more power is needed to drive it. Remember this ship is going from left to right. The greater the
length of the ship the faster it will go before trying to climb uphill.
This may seem very theoretical, but what it means in practice is very startling: the fastest
penteconters had an estimated speed under oars of 9.5 knots, or 17.6 kilometers per hour, close to
that of a modern racing shell.
So a penteconter under oars could travel at 9.5 knots, or almost 11 miles an hour. But the
penteconter also had sails.
We're told at one point that Odysseus' ship was struck by lightning. This happened to a modern
sailing ship also, so it's not just fanciful.
"The 'Fieldwood' struck by Lightning
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night
following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of
lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the
foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving,
which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of
gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
This is a very significant number, and explains why Homer says Odysseus
had a fast black ship. What this tells us is that Odysseus had a Penteconter, the top of the line
and
fastest capital warship of his day. (For illustration see cover.)
Here's how we know it was fast:
The penteconter had 50 rowers, and at least one square sail. Each rower needs about 40 inches.
That's 25 X 40 inches or about 84 feet. Add a bow of about ten to twelve feet, with probably
some decking to keep things dry under it, and a poop deck, say 10 - 15 feet, at the stern where the
helmsman stood to steer. That's about 105 - 110 feet in length.
What we see here is actually a trireme, a later version of a penteconter, with three banks of oars,
and thirty on one bank of rowers to the penteconter's twenty-five, but it gives some idea of the
rowing power of the ancient ships. This trireme is going from left to right. (Also see Note 1 at the end
of this chapter for more on triremes.)
The speed of a boat is affected by the bow wave. At slow speeds the small bow wave will have
little effect:
As speed increases the bow wave will lengthen:
This raises the bow of a ship. Then the stern drops. Now the ship is trying to climb uphill and
more power is needed to drive it. Remember this ship is going from left to right. The greater the
length of the ship the faster it will go before trying to climb uphill.
This may seem very theoretical, but what it means in practice is very startling: the fastest
penteconters had an estimated speed under oars of 9.5 knots, or 17.6 kilometers per hour, close to
that of a modern racing shell.
So a penteconter under oars could travel at 9.5 knots, or almost 11 miles an hour. But the
penteconter also had sails.
We're told at one point that Odysseus' ship was struck by lightning. This happened to a modern
sailing ship also, so it's not just fanciful.
"The 'Fieldwood' struck by Lightning
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night
following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of
lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the
foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving,
which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of
gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
The penteconter had 50 rowers, and at least one square sail. Each rower needs about 40 inches.
That's 25 X 40 inches or about 84 feet. Add a bow of about ten to twelve feet, with probably
some decking to keep things dry under it, and a poop deck, say 10 - 15 feet, at the stern where the
helmsman stood to steer. That's about 105 - 110 feet in length.
What we see here is actually a trireme, a later version of a penteconter, with three banks of oars,
and thirty on one bank of rowers to the penteconter's twenty-five, but it gives some idea of the
rowing power of the ancient ships. This trireme is going from left to right. (Also see Note 1 at the end
of this chapter for more on triremes.)
The speed of a boat is affected by the bow wave. At slow speeds the small bow wave will have
little effect:
As speed increases the bow wave will lengthen:
This raises the bow of a ship. Then the stern drops. Now the ship is trying to climb uphill and
more power is needed to drive it. Remember this ship is going from left to right. The greater the
length of the ship the faster it will go before trying to climb uphill.
This may seem very theoretical, but what it means in practice is very startling: the fastest
penteconters had an estimated speed under oars of 9.5 knots, or 17.6 kilometers per hour, close to
that of a modern racing shell.
So a penteconter under oars could travel at 9.5 knots, or almost 11 miles an hour. But the
penteconter also had sails.
We're told at one point that Odysseus' ship was struck by lightning. This happened to a modern
sailing ship also, so it's not just fanciful.
"The 'Fieldwood' struck by Lightning
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night
following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of
lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the
foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving,
which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of
gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
What we see here is actually a trireme, a later version of a penteconter, with three banks of oars,
and thirty on one bank of rowers to the penteconter's twenty-five, but it gives some idea of the
rowing power of the ancient ships. This trireme is going from left to right. (Also see Note 1 at the end
of this chapter for more on triremes.)
The speed of a boat is affected by the bow wave. At slow speeds the small bow wave will have
little effect:
As speed increases the bow wave will lengthen:
This raises the bow of a ship. Then the stern drops. Now the ship is trying to climb uphill and
more power is needed to drive it. Remember this ship is going from left to right. The greater the
length of the ship the faster it will go before trying to climb uphill.
This may seem very theoretical, but what it means in practice is very startling: the fastest
penteconters had an estimated speed under oars of 9.5 knots, or 17.6 kilometers per hour, close to
that of a modern racing shell.
So a penteconter under oars could travel at 9.5 knots, or almost 11 miles an hour. But the
penteconter also had sails.
We're told at one point that Odysseus' ship was struck by lightning. This happened to a modern
sailing ship also, so it's not just fanciful.
"The 'Fieldwood' struck by Lightning
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night
following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of
lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the
foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving,
which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of
gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
As speed increases the bow wave will lengthen:
This raises the bow of a ship. Then the stern drops. Now the ship is trying to climb uphill and
more power is needed to drive it. Remember this ship is going from left to right. The greater the
length of the ship the faster it will go before trying to climb uphill.
This may seem very theoretical, but what it means in practice is very startling: the fastest
penteconters had an estimated speed under oars of 9.5 knots, or 17.6 kilometers per hour, close to
that of a modern racing shell.
So a penteconter under oars could travel at 9.5 knots, or almost 11 miles an hour. But the
penteconter also had sails.
We're told at one point that Odysseus' ship was struck by lightning. This happened to a modern
sailing ship also, so it's not just fanciful.
"The 'Fieldwood' struck by Lightning
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night
following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of
lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the
foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving,
which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of
gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
This raises the bow of a ship. Then the stern drops. Now the ship is trying to climb uphill and
more power is needed to drive it. Remember this ship is going from left to right. The greater the
length of the ship the faster it will go before trying to climb uphill.
This may seem very theoretical, but what it means in practice is very startling: the fastest
penteconters had an estimated speed under oars of 9.5 knots, or 17.6 kilometers per hour, close to
that of a modern racing shell.
So a penteconter under oars could travel at 9.5 knots, or almost 11 miles an hour. But the
penteconter also had sails.
We're told at one point that Odysseus' ship was struck by lightning. This happened to a modern
sailing ship also, so it's not just fanciful.
"The 'Fieldwood' struck by Lightning
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night
following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of
lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the
foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving,
which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of
gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
This may seem very theoretical, but what it means in practice is very startling: the fastest
penteconters had an estimated speed under oars of 9.5 knots, or 17.6 kilometers per hour, close to
that of a modern racing shell.
So a penteconter under oars could travel at 9.5 knots, or almost 11 miles an hour. But the
penteconter also had sails.
We're told at one point that Odysseus' ship was struck by lightning. This happened to a modern
sailing ship also, so it's not just fanciful.
"The 'Fieldwood' struck by Lightning
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night
following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of
lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the
foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving,
which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of
gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
We're told at one point that Odysseus' ship was struck by lightning. This happened to a modern
sailing ship also, so it's not just fanciful.
"The 'Fieldwood' struck by Lightning
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night
following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of
lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the
foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving,
which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of
gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
On a passage north in 1926 the Fieldwood was in the Gulf Stream during a storm. The night following the storm the sea fell flat and nature put on a fireworks display with vivid bolts of lightning and echoing volleys of thunder. Suddenly a great streak of lightning struck the foretopmast at the lower truck, cut it off completely and ran down the backstay to the serving, which it sliced off as with a very sharp knife, then jumped into the water, leaving a sorry mess of gear aloft. Captain Hants Cole was master at this time."
But when Odysseus' ship was struck, the mast snapped and brained the helmsman. This means
that even if the mast was stepped amidships and not forward, on a ship already calculated as
almost 110 feet long it would have been a mast about 55 feet high. From this I estimate a
square-rigged sail would have had about 2,000 square feet of 'canvas'.
A penteconter had a beam (=side to side amidships) of about 12 - 14 feet and a draft (= depth in
the water) of only 2 - 3 feet. It had an elastic hull -- it could give with the action of wind and
waves. This is a very important speed factor.
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
The penteconter could overtake and destroy any merchant ship of the time. We're told by
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, that merchant ships could sail at about 6 - 7 knots, so we
know the penteconter was faster than that.
Now that we know which way this ship is going we can see something else that's important. It
seems to have an underwater bumper in front (see front cover). What that did was break up the
bow wave so that the ship would meet less resistance and go faster. That technique is quite
advanced and has only recently been developed in present day super-tankers, which have bulbous
bows under water, like this:
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
Penteconters were not clinker built with overlapping planks like the later Viking ships.
Apparently each piece of timber was cut on the curve with an adze (or axe), and
mortise-and-tenoned into place. This carvel built system gives a smoother, faster hull. The crew
could easily pull these lightweight craft up on shore overnight when they wanted to.
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
As further proof of speed of (presumably) a penteconter, here is a passage from Homer's Odyssey
itself, as told by Nestor, describing how the Myceneans left Troy after its destruction at the end
of the war:
"And, late, fair haired Menelaos came to join us
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
and caught us at Lesbos."
Nestor was deciding whether to sail
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
"over the top of rocky Chios
by the Island of Psyros, keeping it on our left hand, or else
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
to pass under Chios, by the windy Mimas. We asked the god
to give us some portent for a sign and the god gave us
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
one, and told us to cut across the middle main sea
for Euboia... "
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
If you look once more at Map 1 you will see the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Euboia.
Homer continues:
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
"A whistling wind rose up and began to blow and the ships ran
very fast across those ways full of fish, and at nighttime
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
brought us in at Geraistos."
Some say Geraistos is a promontory on Euboia but I don't agree. You don't bring a ship in at a
promontory, you bring it in at a harbour. So I suggest Geraistos is Karystos, a sheltered port on
the south coast of Euboia,(map 1).
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
As Menelaos caught them "late", I think we can assume they set sail the next morning. From
what Nestor tells us it seems that his ship had been beached for the night either by Mytilene on
the lee side of Lesbos, or perhaps in the bay by Peramo.
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
The route they took is directly across the Aegean (which you'll notice is in opposition to those
who say they hugged the shoreline).
The distance from the bay on Lesbos to Geraistos in Euboia is about 145 statute miles. 145
statute miles = 127.6 nautical miles (a knot is a nautical mile per hour).
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
I checked with the Canadian Coastguard who consulted their nautical almanac and told me that
the longest day in the year (that's the summer solstice, June 21) where Nestor was at 37 latitude
degrees N. is:
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
Sunrise 4:40 a.m.
Sunset 19.23 p.m.
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
That is 14.43 hours/minutes
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
If we take this longest day in the year, which gives the slowest possible speed, if we don't allow
any time for
doing what Nestor says earlier they did:
"at dawn some of us hauled our ships
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
down into the divine sea."
don't allow any time for consulting the god as he says they did, and have
no allowance for rowing at slower speed out of one harbour and into the other, we still get an
average speed of:
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
127.6 nautical miles in 14 hours + 43 minutes = 8.67 knots.
It seems reasonable from this evidence to assume a speed on that leg of the voyage of Nestor and
Menelaos of at least 9 knots.
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
How close to the wind could they sail -- by that I mean if the wind was not
behind them, how far forward could it be so that they could continue on a direct course? Here's a
modern calculation:
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
You can see that the direct track is made up to a position just slightly ahead of the beam. This
tells us that a penteconter could sail straight ahead with the wind on the beam (or at right angles).
As you can see, I'm laying out my case very carefully but just before we see why, I want to tell
you something else about these ancient ships with "elastic hulls". Here's a Viking ship some
2,000 years later than the penteconter. We know these ships sailed to Iceland, Greenland,
Labrador and Newfoundland, across an ocean thousands of miles from home, and through the
straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean sea.
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
The Gokstad faering ship excavated in southern Norway in 1890 AD was recently duplicated by
construction of a replica. There is a phrase used by Norwegians and Shetland Islanders "sea
loose" or "let go of the sea", or "snoring". This is when a ship running before the wind gets on a
wave and semi-planes. The sound under the ship is as though it's being drawn through a beach of
pebbles -- it's half air and half water. This is a tendency of Viking vessels and their descendants.
In a reconstructed faering with a following wind, speeds of over 15 knots were clocked.
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
The penteconter had similar attributes and probably semi-planed, as its descendant, the trireme, is
thought to have done. Experimental archaeology with sea trials of replica Viking ships that
sailed to Iceland in 1974 showed a "planing tendency" and here again speeds of above 15 knots
were reached (that's 17 mph or over 27kph).
Now if that should seem remarkable, I want to mention in passing the China tea clippers in the
19th C. AD.
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
They sailed vast distances over many thousands of miles between east and west. American
clipper ships could have masts over 180 feet high, draw 25 feet in the water and have a beam
of 45 feet, weighing well over a thousand tons. They were essentially cargo carriers.
Here's a famous one -- Sea Witch:
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
Sea Witch was not a particularly fast clipper, though. Here's an excerpt from the Captain's record
of Blue Jacket, another clipper ship, in 1865:
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
"Early one morning we hove up anchor; a heavy southwest gale followed us for several days, and
running our easting down, we averaged 20 knots at times, with all sail set; at times the patent log
even showed 23 knots. These gales carried us until we had passed Cape Horn and hauled up to
'norrard, and up to this time we had averaged 384 nautical miles per day, beating all records ever
made by a sailing ship to that time."
23 knots is over 26 miles an hour -- which is over 42 km per hour.
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
I rest my case that sailing ships can be very fast if properly constructed for speed; that the
penteconter was a warship with advanced features, built for speed, and could be rowed at about 9
knots or more, sailed easily at 10 knots or more, and could sail headed for its destination, even
with the wind on the beam.
NOTE 1
Two professors in a
Scientific American article (April 1981, p. 150) stated
" the fastest penteconters
had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which
is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell...
Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots
(21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed
from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed
in as little as two (seconds)."
In my first year at university I rowed 4 in a college 8. Our racing shell was quite
successful. We caught and "bumped" the college boat ahead of us each day of
the races and so kept moving up the river. Previously at school
I had been a distance runner and so instinctively used leg power
with the sliding seat to drive the oar through the water. After that, as a
young navy officer I once coxed a crew of naval ratings rowing a ship's
lifeboat in a race with another lifeboat. The crew just sat on benches
without sliding seats and the boat moved sluggishly through the water.
With these experiences behind me I was puzzled at how a trireme could reach
and sustain 11.5 knots under oars without sliding seats. Later I discovered
that the ancient Greek
trireme rowers were mentioned in contemporary literature as going ashore with
their cushions still strapped to their behinds. Scholars used to think this was just
to show who they were as a matter of prestige. Then some bright individual
realized the cushions were used to provide the rowers with sliding seats.
The same Scientific American article tells us this story:
"One of the most famous long-distance trireme dashes of the period took place in
427 BC. The city of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos had revolted against its
Athenian masters and had then been retaken. The Athenian demagogue Cleon
proposed that the entire population of the subject city be put to death, and his
rhetoric carried the day in the public assembly. Accordingly a trireme was sent out
to carry the order to the Athenian garrison. Given the high state of political
passions in Athens, it probably set out early in the afternoon, soon after the
assembly vote.
As Thucydides writes, however, because of the horrid nature of its errand, it made
no haste. Cruising on one or two banks and setting a slow stroke, it probably made
no more than four or five knots. The next morning the assembly met again, cooler
heads prevailed and the massacre order was repealed. Hoping for this change, the
Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens had arranged for a fast ship and a crack crew,
providing them with high-energy foods for the trip and promising large sums of
money if they could catch the first galley before its dispatch could be carried out.
The second ship apparently left for Lesbos, a trip of some 345 kilometers, about
24 hours after the first. It made the open sea before nightfall. And the crew rowed
continuously through the night, They were even fed as they rowed, with wine-moistened barley cakes. The night was clear enough for navigation and there was
no head wind. In order to maximize their speed the commanders either took on
enough rowers for an extra bank to rotate with the original three or kept two full
banks out of three going continuously in watches during the night, with the third
sleeping. Whichever technique was used, they reached Mitylene at midday, just
after the arrival of the first galley. It appears, therefore, that they spent less than
24 hours in transit, cruising at close to 9 knots (16.6 kilometers per hour). The
dispatch had been delivered but the garrison had not had time to begin putting it
into effect. A modern ferry makes the trip in 14 hours."
TO INDEX
" the fastest penteconters had a maximum speed estimated at 9.5 knots ((17.6 kilometers per hour), which is only about a knot slower than the best performance of a modern racing shell... Reasonable estimates of the top speed of a trireme range as high as 11.5 knots (21.3 km. per hour)... It probably took triremes about 30 seconds to reach top speed from a standing srart...half speed ... in perhaps eight seconds and quarter speed in as little as two (seconds)."