Wierd Wave-Riders : Etruscan (?) Ships

The odd ship on the' Aristonothos krater' is worth following-up. Let us dig a bit deeper into what is going on with this peculier vessel.

 

 In the previous post I suggested that, for my money, the hooked beak prow of the right-hand ship drawn by Aristonothos was a misinterpretation or, rather, a failed interpretation of what a real ship may have looked like. I have dragged a few additional pieces of evidence to gether to see if more light can be shed on the matter.

WHEN DID RAMS FIRST APPEAR ?
The Aristonothos depiction dates from the first quarters of the seventh century B.C..

Tanum, Bohuslan 1500bc?

We have rock art from Bronze-Age Scandinavia which resemble the Hjørtspring boat from 300b.c. that have structures which are really cut-waters.

A reconstruction of the Hjortsrping boat : prow not ram

The very first ram-like structures depicted in Mediterranean art are from ceramic fragments from the proto-Greek  or 'Helladic' culture circa 1600B.C. We have no evidence as to their intended function.

Iolkos fragments 1600b.c.

The shape of the prow is, however, very reminiscent of a later ram.

Later depictions of what may be a ram we have are from the mid-to-late eightth century B.C. These are fragments of greek 'Geometric style pattery which are not precisely dateable.

Late eighth century rams?

The pointed prow of the ships may be a cutwater to aid navigability or may already have become a weapon but we do not know. Homeric texts speak of ships but do not mention a ram.

The shape of the prow does differ from the Iolkos fragments.

The very first dateable depiction we have of a ship armed with a ram is on the relief slabs from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh which date to after 701B.C. because they show the flight from Tyre in 701B.C..

Pointed ram

It is interesting to note that the ram is not what we come to know and love as a bronze hull-opener in the Classical Age. These rams are pointed cut-waters with a (metal?) sheath.

Fastening collar seen to left.

The next depictions are contemporary with  or later than  the Aristonothos picture and show ship's prows modelled as boar's heads. No remains have revealed a structure anything like this. Maybe it is a symbolic representation of the mode of attack ? A charging boar.

Nicosthenes vase c.525b.c.

The  first written description of ramming in naval warfare is  the Battle of the 'Sardinian Sea' in c.540b.c from Herodotos where a Phocaean fleet defeated a combined Carthaginian-Etruscan fleet which outnumbered them two-to-one.

?
The point of this short survey is to show that there was not a single structure we can identify as a typical ram before the Second Persian War or even the Second. We can identify several structures which resemble the later rams we have definite knowlege of.

: They are located at the foot of the bow
:They project forward to a point
:They are fitted to galley, longships, not round ships


Back to Aristonothos

There is some evidence to identify the round ship on the krater as Etruscan. This is on the basis of crab and cross motifs on the shields of the warriors on the round ship. The only problem I see with this is that why would Aristothonos have Etruscan symbols accurately depicted on his vase when he was a colonial Greek. ? Also, crab symbols turn up on coins from Sicily and Italy alike. More likely would the explanation be that the whole item is Etruscan but the potter's name agues against this.

Is there anything we can find to explain the bow structure of the round ship ?

First, the right-hand ship is probably the one the potter identifies with. The right-hand ship has a boar's-head ram and is comfortably identified as an attacking warship. This is not two ships out for a sail in consort. Few would argue that an item decorated with a scene of aggression would most likely be ´made, commissioned, owned by the aggressor's faction. People under the Blitz did not hang photos of Heinkel 111s on their living room walls.

Next, the target ship is therefore foreign. This would make more understandable any misinterpretation of the exotic ship type by the Greek potter.

Second, there are some odd ships depicted in non-Etruscan contexts.

On a Spartan cloak brooch from 8th century b.c..

This scene seems to be a direct analog of the Aristonothos krater. So the orignal composition is Spartan, not 'Tyrhennian' and the antagonists need not necessarily include Etruscans. In addition, we can see here that the right hand ship is not a 'round ship' but a galley - there are rowers under the catwalk deck. It may be a 'kourkoros' which is is a galley-freighter but it is not a sailing ship as on the krater.

Detailed drawing of scene

Note that the bow structures on both sides have a serrated appearance. Both left and right ships.

Closer examination of the krater reveals this detail there, too.

On this drawing it looks like wales are extended out in front of the stempost. As they are on later warships also.




This serrated edge, again on a manned warship - with a waterline ram - is also shown another brooch which is also Greek from the eighth century b.c..

We have now shown that BOTH details originate in a Greek, not Etruscan context.

Tunisia 3rd cen A.D.

Is there any more we can discover about the 'hook' structure? Well, there are some freighters from Roman contexts which have unusual looking bows.

But these do not mimic the Aristonothos ship completely.

Grafito, Veii 650b.c.Etruscan

There are 'round ships' with upturned hulls that have a ram/cutwater depicted. The ship at left is definitely from an Etruscan context - Veii in the early seventh century B.C.
This means thatEtruscan  artists could draw a round ship - equipped with mast and sails, upturned prow and a waterline ram. ..and this is only a graffito..This depiction is not so different in age from the Aristonothos krater but a ram has been added convincingly, at the waterline as a warship would have it.



Then we have some ship profiles which a) are Etruscan and b) have a similar form to our subject.

The convex bow which ends in a point followd by the stem post is here as on the krater. The ships have has sails, mast and rigging to identify them as round ships. Everything is here except the ram. Oh. yes, and the catwalk deck and the warriors.

Here may be the answer so long sought.



The warriors indicate a fighting ship. The deck for them to parade on indicates a fighting ship. These features together, when transposed to our Etruscan sailing ship produce a foreign/Etruscan ship to a potter. Oh, yes and there should be a ram to make them warships. Add one to taste.

The left-hand ship from the Aristonothos krater contains accurate details from seventh century b.c. warships. However, in an effort to depict a Greek ship attacking an Etruscan one, the 'Observer's Book of Etruscan Ships' not being to hand, the artist produced a mash-up. Nothing too ludicrous but one which showed the difference between 'us' - left ship and 'them' - right ship.

A nautical expert might have told him that a ram needed to be at the waterline to stave-off attacking warships. Much later, some ship's rams were mounted to attack the enemy hull just  above the waterline but here we are at a time when ram warfare was at its infancy.

An impact on the hooked ram would place crazy stresses on the freighter's bow oblique to its structural grain - the longitudinal planking of the ship and the keel. Rams were designed to essentially keep stresses in the plane and direction of the keel where the ship was strongest so a blow could be safely dealt.

Freighter bows = continental margin plus accretionary wedge : Warship's ram =  Oceanic plate

Having discussed one Etruscan topic, I have another in mind. 'Fancy Dress for Roman Marines' or 'Does your skipper go naked on watch ?' Coming next.

SHOCK AND OAR : Part III

 

One of the failings of much writing about galley warfare, and especially trieres combat, in the past has been to focus on the act of ramming only from the point of view of the target.


I have scribbled about rams and the effects on the target. What I would also like to get across is the fact that a ramming attack is a double-edged event. To put into perspective, to the other lunatics like me and maybe some half -interested others, how the full picture of what was going on in this type of combat was more complex, more uncertain. more frightening and more skillfull than is generally appreciated.

Dare you take to sea for battle in a trieres ?

Trieres combat, and galley combat in general, required the cooperative efforts of 200 or more  men to put to use the near-perfected product of thousands of hours of skilled work by experienced craftsmen. The whole project could be wrecked by poor management, a moment's error of judgement or the vagaries of nature. In the Second World War many thousands of tank crew took imperfect vehicles into combat and found the harsh realities of cooperation under restricted conditions while under threat of death an almost intolerable physical and psychological challenge.  A few moments could bring a shift between the vehicle and its crew being victorious and elated at destroying and damaging other vehicles and into a state of abject fear and trepidation as the enemy turned the tables on them. A lot of technology and training could be put in danger by a ditch beside the road, a poor electrical connection or if the team in the other tin can had a smidgin more luck or skill.

In the back of each crewman's mind....

Newton's Third Law was first defined and written down by him but many people had prior awareness of it. The crew of a trieres in particular. If a ram is accelerated into a target then the attacking ship will also feel some repercussions. Newton's First Law was felt by the oarsmen in their legs and arms as they accelerated the ship towards the target. Newton's Second law was appreciated by the kybernetes in his calculation of how much speed he could coax from his crew and how fast they could accelerate and how much momentum he would need to damage his target.

The Third Law means that the momentum of the attacker will come back to bite him if he slams his trieres into a target without regard to this relationship. It is one thing to shoot a stone ball into the wall of a town with as much force as one can generate from a katapeltes and quite another to treat a mass of wood populated by 200 men in the same way.

A trieres hitting an imoveable target will almost instantly decelerate to a stop.  The trieres is subjected to an opposite force which stops it dead. The crew also experience this opposite force, which also stops them dead- maybe literally. This is the same deceleration which affects the unfortunates in a car crash. This is what trieres combat with rams is about. A series of car crashes.: but car crashes which are executed deliberately and in a controlled manner.

The trieres in a car crash has two problems to overcome.

The first is that the structure of the ship should survive the impact. If it does not then the crew is lost anyway and even if the target is eliminated then they have gained no advantage for their side.

The second is that the crew should survive the impact. The crew must be able to continue the fight after damaging a target ship otherwise their effort gains no advantage for their side.

THE SHIP

A trieres had two systems which contributed to its survival in a collision.

The ram itself was mounted at the front of the vessel as an extension of the keel and supported by the stem post. The centre of mass of the ship is projected forward very closely to the driving centre of the ram which means their is little turning moment to stress the structure. The ram mounting is solid and braced to resist being deviated from a forward course as it impacts the target. The ram itself is of massive bronze and formed like a modern girder. It is harder and stonger than any wood it impacts. The whole structure of the ship is mounted onto the keel and this forms the axis of attack as it bears the whole mass of the ship into the target. Because the ship is built to withstand the force of the sea resisting its progress then it is well suited to surviving an impact along that same axis. It is not coincidence that the ram as a weapon developed out of the cutwater as a hydrodynamic structure. Trieres must have been built to withstand the expected stresses of combat impacts.

 In addition, the ship's crew were not passive passengers but riders who could act to help achieve an effective impact. The rowers could obey commands to accelerate or decelerate and the kybernetes could steer the ship into the target at an angle of attack of his choosing. A good kybernetes could judge, given an appreciation of the relative courses of his own ship and the target, the correct angle of impact to achieve a hole in the enemy's vessel.

THE CREW
The crew were well aware of the implications of the meeting, no matter how controlled, Flying oar looms and tight spaces under the deck left little scope for avoiding at least a sore head from an unexpected collision.

Brace,brace,brace : one possible method after Wegener-Sleeswyk

 The deck officers must have communicated the moment of expected impact to the keleustes and on to the oarsmen. The oars must be out of the water at the moment of impact and the men braced on the beams and benches around them to take the strain.  The stresses he would experience are about 1.5G which amounts to a man of 75kg being slammed in the front by 113kg or so. It gets worse. If the target is more massive than the rammer then deceleration is more sudden and the impact rises to a maximum of 2G. This means each rower must brace himself as if being slammed by 150kg or approximately 3 medium sized lambs or two unarmoured dwarves.

Multiplied by 2 !

 EXECUTING THE ATTACK : DON'TS

If the ram was slammed into the enemy ship at a wildly oblique angle then the lateral forces experienced by the ram mounting could shatter the structure and tear it off. This we know happened on a large scale in early ramming battles. Experience was gained and applied in future tactics.

If the approach to ram was conducted at too-acute an angle then it may either not bite, experiencing a greater resistance from the hull than if it was attacked obliquely, or the speed of a target pursued may be so great that the net ramming speed is insufficent to damage the target.

The combined impact velocity of the attacker and target must be kept in a range sufficient to breach the target's hull but insufficient to damage the attacker. This is why the best way to attack another ship was from the stern quarter.

Gets it right the second time ! A perfect anastrophe.

The worst way to attack another ship was on the bow quarter. In this configuration each vessel will experience a force equal to the sum of their momenta. A trieres built to sail at 15 knots and be rowed at 10 will be severely tried, to say the least, by a head-on impact at equivalent to 20 knots.

It was only marginally less bad to attack a target from the beam if the target was moving. If the target is crossing then the lateral stress on the bow timbers was at its maximum and this was the weakest aspect of its structure. In addition, the forces affecting the crew of the attacker would be severe. They would be thrown forwards by the deceleration of the impact AND to the side opposite to that to which the target was moving. Heaven help any on deck who did not have a good hand-hold in that situation.

And what of the human sardines squished amongst sweat, farts, bilge and curses into this high-speed wooden can and expected to hurtle themselves at an unseen foe? What happens to them on impact ?

So much seems to hinge upon the kybernetes that we can only increase our admiration for these men. They were not of sufficient social status to warrant more than a few cursory lines from ancient authors but it was their skill and judgement derived from years of experience which was the key to a successful ramming attack.

The kybernetes must control the speed of his vessel. He must control the angle of attack and he must judge the timing to perfection with his ship moving in three planes on the sea.

The poet Lucian wrote about the pilot of a giant grain freighter, The Isis, he visited in Athens harbour in AD. This was about a sailing ship of great size but a sneaking admiration is to be detected in this terse and outwardly disrespectful description of an unassuming kybernetes who must have nevertheless exuded a sense of great  skill and confidence.

'Samippus: And all depends for its safety on one little old atomy of a man, who controls that great rudder with a mere broomstick of a tiller! He was pointed out to me; Heron was his name, I think; a woolly-pated fellow, half-bald. 
Timolaus:  He is a wonderful hand at it, so the crew say; a very Proteus in sea-cunning.'
(Lucian - The Ship. 35)



EXECUTING THE ATTACK : DOS

Once the ram became de rigeur for sea battles, mariners must have rapidly gained knowledge of how to use it to best effect by reports spread of various trials and errors. Herodotos tells us that the Phoceans learnt an early lesson in his account of the battle of Alalia in 535bc. They won, but many of their ships were almost as wrecked as their targets, the bows being ruined by the impact forces.
By the time we have good evidence for the structure of warships we can see all the longitudinal timbers meet behind the ram so that all impact forces are distributed along the whole ship and focussed through the bronze tip of the ship.

To hit an enemy effectively only required a small advantage in speed to give the required excess force to penetrate the tenon-and-peg hulls of triereis. Computer simulation has established that  different types of wood in the target or different angles of approach do not significantly change the basic rule which is that an advantage of 1/2 knot in speed will mean a penetrating hit.

On the other hand this means that vastly excessive speed will send the attacker barrelling in to the target and as the breach widens and the attacker slows he is more likely to get wedged-in and unable to withdraw. In this classic situation the crew of the ruined ship will launch a frantic boarding attempt, seeking for survival aboard the (more) bouyant victor.

The same excessive speed will tumble deck passengers into the briney and injure some rowers.

Shock and Oars !

This means that lightness of touch was a required attribute of a successful warship commander. The cooperation between the deck officers to feed information to the poop deck and the cooperation - almost empathy - required between the kybernetes, pentekontarchos and trierarch could only be developed by intensive practice. Just when sufficient speed had been achieved, just where the best angle of attack lay to ensure a hit and space to back-off, and the exact moment at which to stop rowing and brace for impact should all be judged and broadcast to ensure an attack was delivered.

The best position for an attack was to sit on the tail of the target as per an aerial dogfight.
In this position the target's speed is obvious, any change of course he makes is signalled by movements of his pedalia. By the same token, the target cannot read the attacker's changes in course and speed until after a disadvantageous delay.

 

The other significant advantage of the tailing position is that when the ram is set at the target it will hit a receeding target at an acute angle which minimises the stresses on the attacker. Transverse stress were the worst in terms of damaging a ship's bows and converging course would give increased shock of impact.

In trieres combat the secret was to ram the enemy in the right place, from the right position of attack, and with just enough force necessary to do the job.

In later times, as larger ships appeared, one could count  more on the mass of ones' own vessel to survive impact especially against smaller vessels. The trieres was a Formula One vehicle rather than a Stock Car and had to be treated as such.

SHOCK AND OAR : PART II

The ram is an instrument used to project the kinetic energy of the attacker into the hull of the target. If the energy put into the structure of the target exceeds the stress limits for that structure then it is damaged. At sea a damaged structure fills with water to the disadvantage of its crew.

Sometimes, one must improvise.

Studies of ram function have accelerated since the discovery of the Egadi rams. Previously there were only three known and only 1 in perfect condition. Now we have many rams including some which show battle damage which can be analysed.

Bent blades - from Egadi

What is surprising is the similarity of form the rams show. They are similar across time from monuments in ancient Greece of 4^th century BC down to Rome of the first centuries AD. The found rams also show great similarity between Roman, Carthaginian and Greek examples.

Rams from Athens 4thcenBC?, on Arc de Triomph d'Orange 20BC, Egadi3(Carthaginian)241BC

We know the ancients were no slouches in the technological sense. If something could be made to function better then it would be adopted if the economic situation allowed. Witness the use of mechanical pumps, piped water, katapelta and the experimentation that produced Hero's steam turbine, Archimedes steam cannon etc. The Antikythera mechanism has been shown to be a wonderfully complex 'laptop' for celestial time and place calculations. It cannot have existed in isolation.

Not made by numbskulls

 The structural similarities the rams are showing us reveal effective mechanical principles that had been developed from experience and were held-to because they worked.

The earliest images we have of rams show – if they are true military rams and not cut-waters – rounded spike-like forms. 

Phoenician Ship ? From Nineveh

These would do the job of holing an opponent but the big problem with ramming as a tactic is at once apparent. Once one has smashed the ram into the opponent there is the problem of extrication. If the ram has a uniformly increasing size then the point exerts massive stress and will penetrate easily. As the point moves into the target the hole is widened as the rest of the ram follows.

At some point, however, the compressive and resistive forces counter the attacker's momentum and the intrusion is stopped and the ram is gripped. This is nicely illustrated by those of us who have energetically tried to split logs which are too wet or tough and, even though one strikes along the grain, they allow the blade of an axe in but grip it tight at some point allowing no escape.

Stuck in a slightly different way...

Boar spears and bayonets also have this problem – hence the cross-piece use to prevent deep penetration and the standard advice for bayoneteers to twist their weapon before attempting to pull it out of their adversary. 

 

The hull structure of ancient ships comprised planks laid edge-to-edge that were joined with many mortise-and-tenon joints. These were very tightly made. The resulting shell is very resistant to splitting and to lateral disruption. This kind of structure would grip a flat blade or a spike-formed penetration. A sheet of steel will simply fail and be punched open but a composite wooden structure will react elastically and grip the intrusion.

 

The solution to the problem of holing and disrupting a wooden hull of the type used in triereis is rather more cunning. One must break the planks to make gaps and one must also overcome some of the joints to make recovery impossible and one must prise the hole wider to allow a serious amount of water in.

Not surprisingly the ancient rams fit this purpose perfectly.

The form is at first somewhat disguised by the ancient aesthetics of seeing the only appropriate device for penetrating an enemy at sea as a trident. This is the weapon of Poseidon or Neptune, the lords of the undersea. If one's maritime enemy should be smitten it is only fair to call upon and to acknowledge the help of the earthshaker. So when we look at an ancient ram we see a trident from the side superimposed on the geometry of a technical solution to staving-in the hull of a ship. 

One of Poseidon's tridents on the sea floor at Egadi

It is not accidental that the ram has the three 'blades'. A single blade can wedge and be stuck. Two blades may penetrate but hold a single plank. Three blades can strike across two planks and three joint-lines giving a better chance of success. More blade are superfluous and begin to dissipate the force applied.

The blades hit the target like chisels or axe-blades with their blades entering along the grain. The widening profile splits the wood. The vertical extent of the ram means at least one joint line will be hit and, hopefully, burst. The strakes on ancient triereis wer in the order of 20 to 30 centimetres wide. The separation of the ram blades is of the same order thus ensuring a spread of attack across at least one and probably two joint lines and three or four strakes.

Side of hull impacted by ram (Oldfield2012)

 Once the blades have wedged open the target's planking then the momentum of the attacker is transmitted across the whole of the ram's cross-section – the so-called 'driving centre' – because the blades have a vertical cross-piece which joins them and presses all the wood in front into the target. This breaks the tenons out from their mortises. Once out of place they will never go back. There is no need to drive the ram deep into the target hull. It must just break the hull shell's integrity. (Steffy(1983) refers to this when he says the ram 'pounded' rather than pierced the target).

The hull shell of the target ships has now suffered a devastating blow from piston with sharp blades. The force developed by a triereis of circa 50 tonnes hitting at 10 knots has been calculated by John Coates as circa 66 tonnes. This is applied over the driving centre of the ram which is less than 50cm square. Something will give !

Hole made in hull. Police are looking into it.

Computer simulations (Oldfield 2012) have been run to discover how much energy is needed to breach hulls in relation to woods used and the relative velocities and inertia of triereis. The results confirm that the concept of ancient warships as massive hulks engaging each other like mastodons with rams instead of tusks and delivering terrible damage to each other until one succumbs are completely wrong.

 

The first point to be aware of that it is not speed we are discussing here but relative velocity. It makes a big difference to the impact if two ships are moving in the same or opposite directions. This will also have big implications for how we imagine triereis to operate, as we shall see. If the ships move towards each other the impact forces are much greater than if one is stationary or the target is moving away. 

Luckily, this is not a head-on collision so the force of impact will be reduced. Somewhat.

Oldfield discovered that the forces generated by a trieres ram are more than sufficient to catastrophically damage a trieres hull so long as the collision velocity was 0.5 knots ! No need for cries of 'ramming speed' and extra lashes for the galley slaves ! A smooth approach at reasonable speed would result in a nice smooth impact and busting of the target's flush. The best angles for attack were, as may be expected, those closer to perpendicular. The strength of the mortise-and-tenon hull is greater against acute-angled attacks. Also, attacks with high closing velocities had a much greater chance of success than those pursuing – but this has a downside we shall discuss later.

Successful attacks can be made in the arcs shown -for set relative velocities and wood(Oldfield2012)

These finding mean that the kybernetes would know he could count on holing the target in a head-on attack and in an attack against a fleeing enemy he had to strike a careful balance to deliver his maximum effect which, if done correctly only need a 0.5 knot advantage in speed to hole the target.

What we stand with now is a model for trieres battles which involves combatants more like first world war stringbags than mastodons.

Gertcha...!

The opponents can easily damage each other if they are given the chance but each also has a high degree of manoeuvrability to use in evading being hit – or making a hit. Once hit effectively the game was probably quickly up (see this blog entry -  'Get Down Ship' 20/08/14).

The weapon developed to equip the trieres was well suited to its purpose. It is hard to imagine a better form. It was developed with full knowledge of the hull construction techniques then in use and exploited their weaknesses. These weaknesses would be well-known to the commanders – kybernetes, pentekontarchos and trierarch, as they stood anxiously on the poop-deck and sought to manoeuvre their ship to ensure its survival and success.

"And all depends for its safety on one little old atomy of a man, who controls that great rudder with a mere broomstick of a tiller! He was pointed out to me; Heron was his name, I think; a woolly-pated fellow, half-bald."                             -Lucian:'The Ship/The Wishes'(Sean McGrail in control of Olympias from Trireme Trust)

DEATH OF THE MARSALA SHIP

Italian freelance 3D computer modeller Francesco Frazzitta has made some impressive renderings of the Marsala ship and its demise at the hands of the Egadi 1 ram mounted on a Roman trieres. 

The Marsala ship was a wreck found with another off the Ægadi Islands in 1969. They were identified as Carthaginian and have subsequently been much discussed. The wreck appeared to have a single tier of oars but they were possibly double-manned. Its curious upturned 'ram' is probably a structure to facilitate operating in areas with many sand bars rather than a weapon. Its companion ship was equipped with a bronze ram of which only the supporting timbers remained.

Frazzitta's graphics of the Marsala ship are also impressive.

I am working on the Roman-Carthaginian naval conflicts now and it is great to see these archæological remains brought to life.

GET DOWN SHIP!

 Doing some work on 'how to sink a galley'. It is not straightforward. They just won't stay down !

To begin with, the concept of sinking a galley is a misconception. A galley has a lot of positive bouyancy and
even when full of water there is little chance of it disappearing beneath the waves.

A galley which had been at sea some time without being dried-out and was burnt-away to some degree above the waterline may have gone down but the usual occurrence was that the hull would just settle in the water.

The result of a very violent ram attack could cut a ship's hull in two. In this case the fragments may capsize and the bow section, for example, may float ram-down under the weight of bronze it bears.

The main effect sought by a ramming attack was to breach the hull of the target and render it unmanageable as it was flooded and swamped. The victor in an ancient sea battle preferred to recover damaged hulls for salvage rather than watch such expensive items sink or burn.

According to Coates if a trireme's bilge was completely full the ship would not suffer much in terms of performance except the maximum wave-height it could function perfectly in would be reduced by a few centimetres. This might be expected, with the bilges constructed to have capacity within limits the ship could usefully tolerate.

We have evidence of baling procedures and capabilities in ancient ships beyond that manual balers are known from archaeology

Baler from Nydam ship c.300AD

 and later ships were equipped with Archimedian screws,- worked by hand or treadmill - treadmill bucket chains or hydraulic pumps to remove water. There was little place for such devices on a trireme but a larger freighter or polyreme could have been equipped with them. By the time of Vitruvius in the first century BC such devices were commonplace.

'Well you said you wanted to be paid to screw for a living!'

 Or a more complex machine......HERE

The post of baler was a lowly one for an older or duller crew-member. He used his antleteria or bucket to keep the bilge levels down. In a pinch he would be assisted by more men. On a trireme there were about 10 deck crew in two teams who could help before oarsmen would be called upon.

In a trireme it would have been no easy task to bale at a fast pace in the restricted space down even below the world of the thalamian oarsmen. The bucket had to be filled, handed up to a level where it could be dumped overboard and returned below.

 The same buckets wooden or linen, could be used to fight fire if such occurred, though fire at sea was rare in the age of the trireme. Later, larger ships had kitchens with fires and used fire as a weapon.

Roman bucket. Owner kicked it, down a well, long ago.

If the function of the ram was to overburden the poor old baler and thus disable his ship can we figure-out the process in a little more detail ?

HOW MUCH WATER COMES IN ?
To work-out how much water comes in-board we must determine the size of any expected hole. To determine the size of hole expected we can examine the size of the hole-maker i.e. the ram.
We now have about a dozen rams to measure and they can be associated with various classes of ship. This gives us an approximate range of holes to put into any calculation.

 The area within the cutting fins is the 'driving centre' of the ram and this is the size of the hole. Circa.

The amount of water coming in to a hole of a specific size is governed by the
equation ... 
      Flood Rate per minute in tonnes = 

[100 b (h^3/2)]

where b= breadth, h= height in metres, of hole, for the part of the aperture below the waterline.

Here we can see how much flooding each ram can generate.

RAM DRIVING CENTRE       DRIVING CENTRE      FLOOD
         HEIGHT              BREADTH        RATE 
EGADI 1    22                 41                4,2
EGADI 2    20                 31                2,7
EGADI 3    22                 37                3,8
EGADI 4    22                 36                3,7
EGADI 5    22                 32                3,3
EGADI 6    24                 41                4,8
EGADI 7    24                 38                4,5
EGADI 8    C.29          EST. 50                7,8
ATHLIT     35            65   CIRCA.            13,5
Capo Rasocolmo   c.30       c.60                9,8
ACTIUM EPTEREIS(7)            95                C. 46 !
ACTIUM ENNEREIS(9)            110
ACTIUM DECEREIS(10)           LARGER            SCARY NUMBER

It is a little hair-raIsing to find that the rams of larger ships create holes that allow massively more flooding. The larger vessels displacement increases as a cubic value as their dimensons increase so they could tolerate damaging each other but if a larger class ship hit a smaller one we can see the effect would be catastrophic.
The Athlit ram is probably from a 3. This shows that the rams from egadi are from lighter warships. The Actium rams are from Anthony's monsters.

ACTIUM MONUMENT : ENNEREIS LEFT, ATHLIT RIGHT

HOW MUCH WATER CAN BE BALED OUT ?
If we take a standard bucket to have a capacity of .035 of a cubic metre or 33cm deep, wide and high(large bucket!) then with the ten deck crew working fast enough to each dump two buckets a minute - a back-breaking rate! - then they can remove 0.7 cubic metres a minute or 0.7 tonnes.

This rate will have no effect upon the flooding created by a decent ram attack. Even if we get the whips out and increase the work rate of the poor balers by a factor of 3 then they can only remove less than half of the water coming into our modest hole.

 From this we can see that a ship's crew would rapidly appreciate the severity of a successful ramming attack on their vessel. They would rapidly realise the inevitable result. The ship's officers and the epibatai would have a difficult job to persuade balers to work at this Sisyphian task or to keep the thalamians at their oars as the water level rose!

WHAT IS THE EFFECT OF FLOODING ?
Within a minute of a successful ram attack from another ship of the same class we can say a trireme may have taken 5 tonnes of water onboard. With the deck crew baling, the ship will take on 4 tonnes each subsequent minute thereafter. The effects of this on a ship have been calculated by John Coates.

Firstly, the displacement of the ship increases, causing it to settle in the water.This leads to the vertical centre of gravity of the ship being lowered. It 'settles ' down into the water.

However, a more sinister effect is that the mass of water in the ship has its own centre of gravity and its own life, sloshing within the ships structure. The higher up the ship the water reaches the worse is the effect of the 'sloshing'. - the inertia of the water mass will accentuate any movement of the vessel and make slight imbalances in the ship create extreme rolling or pitching. This is a resut of the Free Surface Effect of an unrestrained body of water within the hull. Also, as the water level rises inside the ship it will settle deeper into the water.

Va's up ? or, rather , down...

To fill the bilges of Olympias would take 7,5 tonnes of water and cause a settlement of 6,7cm. The instability created would not be felt by the oarsmen or helmsman and stresses on the hull are the equivalent of taking a cargo onboard or 75 crewmen.

This amount of water would be inboard less than two minutes after being rammed.

If the flooding continues for a further 5 minutes 30 tonnes of water is now inboard.

With 30 tonnes of water inside the hull of a trireme the settlement will now be 25cm. Looking inside the hull one would see water was lapping over the floor timbers. Maybe not such a threatening sight. But now the ship is totally out of balance and requires very careful handling. A sharp turn could capsize the ship. Rowing becomes ineffective except in a flat calm. The increased displacement - the ship now effectvely weighs 70 tonnes - would overload the hull and it could split open in a swell as it 'hogged' when the bow and stern sag into wave troughs.

A weak-hulled container-ship hogs and breaks-up.

CONSEQUENCES FOR A SHIP IN BATTLE
Five mnutes after being rammed by a ship of its own class a trireme would be disabled.

The oarsmen could not propel the ship which now weighed 50% more than in battle order.

The ship would roll if turned or if many men move about. At some point the sloshing water mass inboard would probably throw the ship onto one or other side from which it could not recover . Water would enter the oarports and its fate would be sealed.

The capsized ship would not sink but steadily settle in the water. Oarsmen would emerge from their confines and their presence on deck would only add to the hulk's instability.

If the sea was a flat calm then a holed ship could make some headway if carefully nursed along by a crew who did not panic and remained at their stations. More likely the confusion and panic of being rammed combined with visible enemy nearby would rapidly seal the fate of the ship.

If there was a significant swell or the ramming impact and hole was large enough then the hull may split as the displacement exceeds its strength.

Once successfully rammed a trireme was doomed, and the crew well knew this ! Could onboard discipline keep order as the inevitable happened?

It is a sobering fact that the 150  crew of Olympias, after some training in forming-up in ranks on specific areas on the quayside and  getting themselves installed at their oars  in sequence with the thalamians first and thranites last,  could be ready to sail in about 1 minute and thirty seconds from getting the word 'go!';
but that same crew when abandoning ship could leave the trierarch alone and pondering whether to flounder with his vessel in precisely 24 seconds !

The ancient galley sea battle was a high-stress  duel between rapier-armed fighters who sought to keep their balance and poise, keep their guard up and look for the opening which could lead to a well-timed thrust into the enemy's vitals. Once pierced, the target was doomed and its combat role in the battle soon over.