Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) by James Baikie Read Free Book Online

the mast, and drawn up nearly to the masthead at its upper end by a block and tackle. At the upper end there projects from the gangway a long, thick iron spike with a sharp point. It looks for all the world like a raven's beak, and our men call it the Corvus, the Raven. Every ship in the fleet is disfigured with this same monstrosity, and we have all been drilled in the use of it, and are full of curiosity as to how it will work in actual battle.
    Now we are under way, and we had best draw a veil over the first two or three days at sea, with raw crews, and a lot of soldier-men on board who never saw the sea in their lives before. There is just one comfort, and that is that the long quinqueremes do not roll nearly so badly as you would have expected. The five banks of oars on either side steady them wonderfully. Nevertheless, the Consul and the soldiers are all very unheroically sick, and the oarsmen are to be pitied most of all, for, sickness or no sickness, the oars must not stop. If the Carthaginians had caught us on our first or second day out, there would have been a sad story to tell of our new fleet. But luck has been with us, and we have seen no enemy sail; and now we have got our sea-legs, and feel that we may make a fight of it after all.

 
    A ROMAN QUINQUEREME
     
     
    Now we are off Cape Mylæ, on the north coast of Sicily, and we can see the smoke of the burning villages where the Carthaginian army is plundering on shore. And here comes their fleet, in very different trim from ours. Masts and sails are stowed, and 130 quinqueremes, cleared for action, come sweeping along with a very different stroke from that of our half-trained rowers. We know perfectly well what they will try to do. They are far faster and handier than we are, and their oarsmen can get a ship about before we should be half through with the job. So each galley will try to get on the flank of one of ours, and drive its beak home, in which case it means a galley lost for us. Or else their galleys will dodge our bows as we come on, and drive slantwise alongside us, drawing their own oars in at the last moment, and so smash right along our tiers, from bow to stern, breaking our oars and pitching our oarsmen in heaps upon one another. Then they can finish off the crippled ship at their leisure. It is very clever and seamanlike, but we are not seamen, and we do not mean to fight in that way at all.
    Our enemies have thirty ships more than we have, and they have detached that number of picked quinqueremes to make the first attack. A fine sight they make, as they come sweeping along, the foam flying from their crimson bows and from the hundreds of oar-blades. We lumber along straight ahead; but the men are stationed at the tackle of the Raven, and close behind that ungainly contrivance all our soldiers, on each galley, are gathered in order. Now the galley opposite us is within bowshot, and a few arrows fly from both ships; but this business is going to be settled by other weapons than arrows.
    Now she sweeps obliquely past our bows. You can hear the hiss of the water from her ram, and the sobbing breath of her labouring rowers. Her starboard bow is almost touching our starboard bow, and our bow oars are gone for ever with thundering cracks; but the Consul raises his hand, a shrill blast comes from the trumpeter beside him, and the big gangway comes crashing down by the run, the long iron beak of it driving deep into our enemy's deck. They will not get the Raven to loose his prey in a hurry. Now the soldiers pour across the gangway, their centurion at their head. They are on the deck of the Carthaginian, and we have got what we wanted—a land fight at sea. Indeed, it is scarcely a fight, for the Carthaginian quinquereme has only her eighteen or twenty marines to meet five times the number of our legionaries.
    The first rush clears her deck of all her fighting men, who are either cut down or thrown into the sea. A strong guard over the seamen and the