oar, continued down to the 16th century, during the first half of which
came in the more modern system of using great oars, equally spaced,
and requiring from four to seven men each to ply them, in the manner
which endured till late in the last century, when galleys became
altogether obsolete. Captain Pantero Pantera, the author of a work
on Naval Tactics (1616), says he had heard, from veterans who had
commanded galleys equipped in the antiquated fashion, that _three_ men
to a bench, with separate oars, answered better than three men to one
great oar, but four men to one great oar (he says) were certainly more
efficient than four men with separate oars. The new-fashioned great
oars, he tells us, were styled _Remi di Scaloccio_, the old grouped
oars _Remi a Zenzile_,—terms the etymology of which I cannot explain.[5]
It may be doubted whether the four-banked and five-banked galleys,
of which Marino Sanudo speaks, really then came into practical use.
A great five-banked galley on this system, built in 1529 in the
Venice Arsenal by Vettor Fausto, was the subject of so much talk and
excitement, that it must evidently have been something quite new and
unheard of.[6] So late as 1567 indeed the King of Spain built at
Barcelona a galley of thirty-six benches to the side, and seven men
to the bench, with a separate oar to each in the old fashion. But it
proved a failure.[7]
Down to the introduction of the great oars the usual system appears to
have been three oars to a bench for the larger galleys, and two oars
for lighter ones. The _fuste_ or lighter galleys of the Venetians, even
to about the middle of the 16th century, had their oars in pairs from
the stern to the mast, and single oars only from the mast forward.[8]
[Sidenote: Some details of the 13th century Galleys.]