Grapeshot

[kronckew]

One of their main problems were that cannon balls of the period bounced off the durn things, so they went back to old school, really old school an put a ram on the bow, much like a Greek/Roman trireme. If you can't shoot a hole in it, crank up the boilers and ram it. That bottom pretty one was built by the UK for the Confederate navy, but it arrived after the war was over.

The beak of a roman era trireme was called a rostrum. The Roman Forum had a speaking area where rostrums from defeated enemy warships were mounted as trophies. You would literally stand on the rostrum to speak to the crowds at the Forum, hence our use of the term to mean a speakers platform.

[fernando]

Originally Posted by kronckew

... The beak of a roman era trireme was called a rostrum. The Roman Forum had a speaking area where rostrums from defeated enemy warships were mounted as trophies. You would literally stand on the rostrum to speak to the crowds at the Forum, hence our use of the term to mean a speakers platform.

Ephemeral, if i may; Romans borrowed the term used for the beak (snout) of an animal and we, Post Romans, later brought it back, this time for the face (rosto) of a human .
For the ships ram we here use 'esporão' (large espora=spur) also from latin 'sporõne'.
... just for perusal, of course .

[kronckew]

...and they called another 'weapon', a boarding ramp that let them put infantry on Carthaginian triremes rather than ramming, which the Carthaginians were better at, called by them a Corvus as it had a big curved spike at the end like a crow's beak to embed in the deck planking, blackbirds, crows, rooks, jackdaws, and ravens are all classified as Corvidae. The crow is a Corvus in latin.

..but we digress.

[Philip]

Originally Posted by kronckew

... called by them a Corvus as it had a big curved spike at the end like a crow's beak to embed in the deck planking, blackbirds, crows, rooks, jackdaws, and ravens are all classified as Corvidae. The crow is a Corvus in latin.

..but we digress.

The corvine analogy also also extends to the name of a late-medieval to Renaissance-era polearm used by infantry, essentially a war-hammer mounted on a long staff, whose French name is bec de corbin. The head consists of a transverse beak (slightly curved) with opposed poll, and a terminal spike to enable its use for the thrust. The weapon is alternatively known as a "Lucerne hammer".

[Philip]

Originally Posted by kronckew

The Roman Forum had a speaking area where rostrums from defeated enemy warships were mounted as trophies. You would literally stand on the rostrum to speak to the crowds at the Forum, hence our use of the term to mean a speakers platform.

You can still see the Rostra (named using the plural form of the neuter noun, since it was once adorned with several trophy beaks taken at Actium) today in the ruins of the Forum Romanum. History records that it wasn't only the beaks of ships that were displayed there. Recall the grisly fate of Roman statesman Cicero, who was assassinated in 43 BC on order of the Second Triumvirate -- his severed head and hands were displayed on the Rostra by Mark Antony, who was the target of Cicero's letters and speeches.

[fernando]

It would appear as one reads that, the fashion to exhibit ships rams of defeated enemies was first practiced by Gaius Duilius, eventually the same who first used the boarding bridge (corvus) against Carthaginians, in the battle of Mylae (260 BC); such rostra column formerly in the Roman Forum, presently replicated, including the original inscription remnants, is kept in Capitoline Museum.
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; it has been suggested that this instability led to Rome losing almost two entire fleets during storms in 255 and 249 BCE. Apparently this system was 'soon' abandoned in favor of the more orthodox a harpoon & winch system, known as the harpax.

.

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[kronckew]

Yup, that's pretty much it, tho your image makes it look like a bit smaller than it probably was. It was more of an ungainly & heavy bridge with decking and railings to carry a section of Roman Marines in Armour charging across, and was pivoted so it could swing out to the sides as well as fore/aft. breaking loose in a storm would make the narrow warship disastrously unstable. The trireme while looking substantial was rather light and fragile so that it could be rowed for fairly long distances in battle. unlike the movies, they were manned by free men, sailors and Marines of the Roman Navy. The use of slaves and prisoners was a more recent late renaissance thing, the Venetian, Spanish and Turkish galleys were famous for their unpleasant aroma as the slaves were chained to the benches and there were no toilet or bathing facilities.

[fernando]

Originally Posted by kronckew

...Yup, that's pretty much it, tho your image makes it look like a bit smaller than it probably was...

I just picked that one as i could pick another. Meaning to say that images, even those carved not far from or even within the period may, or in fact, are less an evidence of facts than the author's imagination.
If you take the trireme, you then ought to acknowledge that there also were Mediterrnic monorremes, birremes, quadriremes and quinquerremes. Taking into consideration the presumption that each line of rowers of would need a different deck, imagine one of these ships with such a multi deck construction or, how long would the oars in the upper deck have to be to submerge into the water, besides considering that the different decks should have a reasonable distance between each other, to prevent the oars from getting tangled. A realistic reasoning is that what happened is that, there was only one row of oars, where two to five men would operate one oar, having inside the ship a number of pavements with different heights, with seats inclined towards aft ship, the lower one the thalamite, then the 'sigite', 'tranite' etc.

[fernando]

Originally Posted by kronckew

... unlike the movies, they were manned by free men, sailors and Marines of the Roman Navy...

Basically, yes. What a temptation would be to draft the losers from a battle towards such a captive entertainment ... salary savings diving into the captain's purse .

[Philip]

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;

.

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.