Reconstructing a Roman Warship

[Flavius Promotus]

Hi Florian, great to have someone with sailing experience on the forum.

You are too kind :oops:

My observation was based on an experiment of hauling a galley up on land.

A galley in the Netherlands? What kind of type? Tell me more

They ripped the towwire completely through the woodwork

MURDER!!! hock:

and only managed in the end by securing a sling running back around the stern of the vessel. Different circumstances, I agree, but the design will have to take towing into account and the Rhine near here is very constricted.

Maybe they should have pulled out the ship stern first, with a crow's foot in the hawser, so the rope could have been fixed to the threnus beam on both sides of the hull. (the threnus beam is the one to which the two rudders are fixed). Our ship has a pair of oak bollards between the bowcastle and the first pair of thwarts (the benches for the oarsmen), and
these bollards are stable enough to have the galley pulled up a river against a strong current.

Pulling the ship onto the beach should perhaps best be done below a jetty, so the current cannot 'interfere'. On the other hand, natural bays aren't too frequent on the river Rhine nowadays.

I have understood the Liberna to carry 50 to 80 rowers, so there is nice variation in size of these vessels, some longer and a bit wider then others.

There were certainly variations. Even the late Roman galleys from Mainz were not from a completely uniform type. As to the number of oarsmen, H.C. Konen writes somewhere that the liburnae of the Classis Britannica might have had ca. 64 oarsmen each, but I would have to look up the evidence on which this assumption is based. Wolfagng Viereck thought of 54-56 oarsmen, but his reconstructions are not very trustworthy.

Pity we don't have a good riverwreck!

Ay! Before the Mainz galleys were excavated and thoroughly researched, some scholars misinterpreted a passage from Ammianus and came to the conclusion that a typical navis lusoria had only 7-8 men, each :roll:

AFAIK someone wrote somewhere that the County Hall wreck (around 300 AD) might have been a late liburna.