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Originally Posted by fernando
Much has been written on the corvus, to the extreme point of its existence being denied by some scholars on basis that, once such bridge was raised would make a ship, with the design like that of the Roman galley, to roll over and capsize. More within reasoning is that of considering such apparatus only being viable in flat waters, opposite to those of high seas, due to problems with ship's navigability;
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Good point regarding stability. After all, oar-powered warships tended to be narrow of beam and shallow of draught. The Mediterranean, with its particular maritime conditions, favored the use of such vessels for many centuries before the age of steam -- providing that mariners were attuned to the yearly cycles of wind and current.
Ernle Bradford summarizes it nicely in his
Knights of the Order, when writing about the galleys of the 16th cent,,
"...for its ancestry one must go back to the days of...classical Greece and
Rome. She was a vessel designed for speed and mobility, not for
carrying capacity or for weatherliness in anything other than the months
of summer. She stepped...short masts on which were set triangular
lateen sails. These had been known to the Romans..."
The tendency toward roilovers in oar-powered craft was a consideration when guns aboard ship were adopted at this later time. The only practical solution was to put them on the raised platform
(rambades) ahead of the mainmast and pointing straight forward because the recoil of pieces fired abeam would de-stabiliize the ship. (exacerbating this problem was the fact that the guns, being on a raised platform due to the necessity of firing clear over all that manpower on the main deck, raised the relatively narrow vessel's center of gravity.) The guns also had to be of relatively small size and few in number, and aiming them required the rowers and helmsman to orient the entire vessel. No wonder that the use of the ram continued well into the gunpowder age.
So, getting back to the post: yes, the use of the
corvus, and indeed the operation of oared warships in open seas, could well be problematic.