History: First People

When I was studying archaeology as an undergraduate, back when wooly mammoths were a not uncommon sight in Orange County, California, the focus of the discipline was – for lack of a better term – connecting the dots. Finding the missing pieces to the puzzles of human history was what we were taught to strive for in both research and field work. These days, with the mammoths extinct, it seems that archaeology is now a discipline of “firsties”. He/she who finds the first of anything wins.


It is not surprising, then, to find this brief article over at Archaeo News online about another intriguing first. Patrick V. Kirch of UC Berkeley’s Archaeology Research Facility now says that Austronesian seafarers may have arrived in the Marianas Islands as early as 2,000 BCE or 4,000 years ago. The Marianas, which are near the Philippines and include the U.S. territory of Guam, were previously thought to have been colonized no earlier than 500 CE.

Although the article does not actually say what prompted Kirch to make his announcement, I gather that discovery of Lapita pottery of a very early date may be the key. The Lapita pottery makers spread out in three distinct waves from South East Asia, bringing with them a skill for delicate and functional pottery. Examples of this beautiful art have been found not only in the Marianas but in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tonga, Samoa and especially Fiji where large numbers of intact vessels have been discovered. These various sites of Lapita finds have been dated, according to the article, to no earlier than 900 BCE.

Besides being skilled potters, the characteristic that most distinguishes the peoples of all these islands is their superior seamanship. They travelled long, arduous distances in beautifully constructed canoes colonizing as they went much like the Vikings would some 3,000 years later. The final wave of Austronesian migration brought people to the Polynesian archipelagoes with the Hawai’in islands possibly serving as last stop for these virtually unprecedented voyages.

While I am not intimately familiar with the culture of the Marianas’ people, who are known as the Chamorros, two things about them and their beautiful islands strike me as interesting. First is the fact that the islands were called by the Spanish Islas de los Ladrones which, though frequently translated as the Islands of Thieves, is more properly interpreted as the Islands of Pirates in the context of 17th century Spanish. The second is specific to the Chamorro people themselves. They claim descent from a legendary race of giants known as the Taotaomo’na who, it is whispered, still haunt the ancient places waiting for offerings of seafood and liquor. These spirits are known as the “First People” and, given their history and their appetites, they sound very much like freebooters to me.

Header: Lapita pottery shard from the Solomon Islands via Wikipedia

Booty: Painting Time

With the advent of spring, many of us are thinking about sprucing up our surroundings. Often that includes paint, an ancient way of sealing wood and making it last longer. Ships, of course, are no exception and – aside from varnish – there is hardly anything more important to a wooden ship than good, old fashioned, oil based paint.

Ancient ships were frequently painted rather fancifully with the Sea People, Egyptians, Greeks and Chinese favoring large human eyes on either side of the prow. The Vikings liked dragons at the head of their longboats and these were usually painted to look as realistic as possible. During the Medieval period cogs and cinque ports ships were usually painted either deep green or ochre because these pigments were easy to come by in nature. Some time during the Restoration era in Britain, more brilliant colors came into favor. Ships painted scarlet red, purple and sky blue were not uncommon. Patterns began to emerge during the 18th century. Nelson famously favored black and white checkered gunnels with a black or blue hull and the mania for “chequering” took off in the Royal Navy, continuing well into the 19th century. Pirates, it goes without saying, generally used what they had on hand. The worst of the worst would forego painting all together, and simply move to a newly captured prize when their current ship began to rot.

The colors that were popular in the Great Age of Sail are much harder to come by now, but you can obtain the elements needed in modern oil based paints and mix them yourself. Here are a few recommendations from Chambers’ Encyclopedia of 1882:

Cream: white lead, chrome yellow, and Venetian red
Drab: white lead, burnt umber, four or five drops of Venetian red
Fawn: white lead and burnt sienna
French gray: white lead, Prussian blue, two or three drops of vermilion
Imitation gold: white lead, chrome yellow and burnt sienna
Purple: white lead, Prussian blue and vermillion
Carnation pink: white lead tinted with Venetian red
Violet: white lead, Prussian blue, vermillion and two drops of black

White lead, incidentally, was the favored color for decks and other trimmings. Another good point to keep in mind is that most ship’s hulls would receive no fewer than six coats of paint along with varnish. Remember, as the old salts say, save the surface and you save all.

Header: Painting the Flagship Royal Navy c 1905 via pbenyon1

History: Left Behind

The perils of the sea are easily spoken of in terms of the men and women who faced them. High seas, storms, enemy fire and the taking of prizes, disease, want and just plane hard work are discussed over and over until they’ve been so minutely picked at that a new way of approaching them has to be found. Hopefully, that’s what I’m doing here at Triple P. All that being said, there is one form of abstinence, want and heartache that is too often overlooked in writings about the sea: the misery of those left behind.

There may be a number of reasons for the fact that the people left by land don’t show up frequently in historical tomes. The first and foremost may be that they were not thought much of in their own time when almost everyone had it hard and the absence of a relative or other loved one was a virtual daily occurrence. Only extreme cases of neglect or poverty would come to light in such societies. Either that or easily embraced stories of those who sacrificed their own comfort for a people’s hero. Then there is the fact that we know very little about how common people got on in history, much less about what they thought or felt. It is only relatively recently that reading and writing have become available to practically everyone, so most of our world’s life stories went to the grave with the individual, or at best their children’s children. Finally, and perhaps most unfortunately, the glaring reality is that those who waited for men to return from the sea were women. Though the field of women’s history has expanded incredibly just in my lifetime, it surely has not caught up with what has been missed.

Of course men went down to the sea in ships from the time they could build boats. The Ancient Sea Peoples, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all travelled and battled on the seas and oceans but in all fairness it was not until the Viking culture burgeoned in the early current era that Indo-Europeans ventured far afield. A Viking woman might watch her husband head out on a raid with trepidation but, as with so many cultures that followed, the voyages of exploration must have caused the most fear. The intent to settle new lands was always there but the man generally went ahead and then either returned or sent someone back for their families. The woman, whether she was the wife of a chief or a sailor, would simply have to wait. Though many cultures never resolved the problem of just how long it was reasonable to wait for a man to return from the sea, the Vikings handled this in their usual straight forward way. Unless otherwise stipulated by the couple prior to parting, a year and a day was the extent of the woman’s (or man’s) obligation. It is tempting to imagine that some people simply did not return and found greener pastures elsewhere, but that is probably putting a far too modern spin on the agreement.

Eastern cultures also put out to sea, but the kind of voyages made by Zheng He of China, which took his large flotillas all the way to Africa, were unusual. The Polynesian culture thrived on exploration, however, and women frequently accompanied their men on these voyages. This must have alleviated a lot of stress for everyone, at least to some degree. And the success of this policy shows in the numerous areas of the world that can now rightly be proud of their Polynesian ancestry.

By the great age of sail the pattern we generally espouse today was established: the sailor husband went off to sea and the dutiful wife stayed at home to tend hearth and children. The myriad complications with the system are too numerous to discuss here, but it is worth noting that most systems of pay were incredibly flawed, particularly in the great navies of the 18th and 19th centuries. Pay for any sailor was not in hand until the ship ended her commission which might be anywhere from six months to a number of years. In the U.S. Navy after the War of 1812, as an example, a foremast jack made approximately one modern dollar every month. This was a good, living wage by land but certainly impossible for a woman left in Baltimore with a small home to keep up and three children to feed. Though some men received an advance when they signed on, this was usual only during war time and would amount to no more than three months pay.

Women in such situations did what needed doing. Sailor’s women were frequently laundresses and/or seamstresses, at least before the factory systems took their ability to do these jobs at home. Those who did not have the care of children or, in more cases than is generally written about, the care of an elderly parent or in-law, might go into domestic service. Many wives took in boarders and the running of taverns in any port town on either side of the Atlantic was almost exclusively the business of women attached to sailors. Prostitution was an option that either appealed to or was the only out for many. In the 1821 census of the city of Portsmouth in England over 4,000 women residents were counted to a surprisingly low 2,879 men. There was no pretext about the fact that a large number of the women calling themselves single were also widows, probably of seaman, and that many of them had turned to prostitution for a living.

Men on the other side of the law, freebooters, pirates and privateers, also made attachments and married. Pirates’ women frequently joined in when a ship returned to port, helping to sell the goods plundered. The famous Pirate’s Alley in New Orleans, which is not far from Jackson Square, is so named because it was reputedly the sight of a Sunday market where women up from Laffite’s Barataria hawked wares of questionable origin while their men sat in coffee houses planning their next voyage.

The faith of a woman, or a man, could be tempted after a long time away. The historical records show that more than one seaman returned home to find a child that could not mathematically be his own. David Porter, the first Commodore of the New Orleans Station, hero of the War of 1812 and successful pirate hunter, grumbled later in life that his wife, Evalina, had not been faithful. He swore that some of their eight children were not his, but he would not reveal which ones. Evalina denied the accusation stringently and struck back, accusing him of insanity. Conversely, the second wife of Renato Beluche, then living in Porto Cabello Venezuela and having waited two years for her husband’s return, appears to have given up. She put an add in a local paper that she was selling off all of her furniture with the intent of taking her three children back to New Orleans. Commodore Beluche returned before Mizelle had a chance to carry out her plan. One wonders if he mentioned the twenty-something girl he spent months with in Panama, leaving her pregnant when he sailed back to his wife.

Death, more often from disease or the whim of the ocean than in battle, dogged the sailor and his woman. Men came home to find wife or child or both buried in the local churchyard. Countless wives probably never knew what happened to their men but simply went on, year after year, finally remarrying if possible. At home they were a great asset to their local economies in many aspects. Whether their men fished, whaled, freebooted or explored, the ladies ashore did the tasks that rarely come up in scholarly histories: goods were sold, livestock tended, butchered, cooked and eaten, gardens tended, cloth woven and made into clothes and sails, fishing nets mended, roofs patched, homes kept clean, children raised, the list goes on and on. All this with the nagging anxiety of when would the husbands return.

Some moments and emotions are too great for words and I feel justified in falling back on a picture to explain. The painting above, “A Hopeless Dawn”, was done by Frank Bramley during the 1880s when he was living in a fisherman’s a village in Cornwall. Bramley experienced the despair of women whose men would not come home from the sea and he translated it brilliantly to canvas through paint. The emotions shared between wife and mother (or mother-in-law), both of whom knew what it was to love a sailor, are clear to anyone who can see. After that, there is nothing left to say.

Lady Pirates: The Queen Of Illyria

Pirate queens are actually far more numerous in the annals of history than the average American education would have us believe. From Grania ni Maille to Cleopatra VII and everyone in between and beyond, they are a colorful bunch who have been rather shamefully hidden under a sturdy bushel because of misogyny and religion. So today, I'm turning the bushel over to reveal the high spirited pirate queen who took on mighty Rome before Rome even knew what hit it.

The Illyrians, whose territories in 232 BCE covered roughly the area now occupied by modern Albania and Serbia, were a seafaring tribe. Perhaps descendant from the ancient Sea People, they made their livings in boats. They were aggressive and warlike and fond of leaders who held to the same code. So when King Agron returned from a hugely successful raid loaded down with booty in that same year, no one batted an eye his order of hard partying in celebration. Probably least of all his second wife and Queen, Teuta.

Agron, who may very well have had an upper respiratory infection when he began his week or so long binge of drink and debauch, eventually developed pleurisy and died. Thanks to the rather snotty parts about Agron and Teuta in Roman historian Polybius' Universal History, we know a lot about what happened after the King of Illyria passed away, drown in his own fluids.

Teuta seems not to have spent much time mourning her husband. Though Polybius doesn't say where she was from originally, Teuta may have been of Hittite stock and so her own warrior spirit was certainly equal with that of her people. She took up the reins of government and almost immediately turned the Illyrian navy into a privateer fleet. From Polybius:

Her first measure was to grant letters of marque to privateers, authorizing they plunder all whom they fell in with...

Teuta declared all the world her enemy and she gave free license to the sailors in her fast, one-masted galleys known as lembi to prey on all at sea and on land. The Illyrians struck hard and often, taking port cities and villages along the Ionian and Adriatic coasts. They brought home ship-fulls of loot and Illyria prospered as she never had under King Agron.

Famously, Teuta enjoyed leading some of the inland raids personally. One attack on the city of Epidamnos in modern Albania found Teuta leading her sailors (men and women) inland with water jars on their heads or shoulders. Teuta herself called up to the Epidamnosians for help, saying that her people lacked water and were dying of thirst. As the Illyrians wailed beneath their city walls, the Epidamnos guards gave in and opened the massive gates. Teuta gave her order, the jars were dashed to the ground revealing the swords they held and the Illyrians attacked. Though Epidamnos managed to repulse Teuta, many more cities were not so fortunate.

The local tribes lived in fear of the Illyrians by 230 BCE and they began to call out for help to the new power player on the Mediterranean: Rome. Rome, of course, saw an opportunity to not only halt rampant piracy but to annex more territory in the form of these desperate cities and villages. Illyria's enemies agreed to become "Roman" if Rome would stop Teuta.

Two silver-tongued brothers, Gaius and Lucius Coruncanius, were sent to Teuta as "ambassadors". In fact, they were to put the upstart Queen in her place and make sure she understood that further affronts to "Roman citizens" would lead to horrible punishment. Teuta listened to the Coruncanius brothers and then told them flat out that there was absolutely nothing the Queen of Illyria could do about private citizens raiding ships at sea. Hearing this, Lucius lost his cool and insulted Teuta. She made no effort to respond in kind, but simply thanked and dismissed the Romans. Unfortunately for Lucius, Teuta had a long arm. On the caravan back to Rome, Lucius was killed by a group of Illyrian strong men.

Rome had now been personally affronted and reacted with typical aggression. 200 ships and 20,000 infantry were sent against Illyria with the result that her fleet was virtually destroyed. Queen Teuta was forced to retreat to the nearly impregnable fortress at Rhizon where she and her people became the victims of a year long siege. Finally, in 228 BCE, Teuta cracked. She conceded to every Roman demand, including giving up all her lands but the city of Rhizon itself. No further sallies went forth from Illyria except unarmed merchant galleys that were a pitiful shadow of their former privateer glory.

Teuta, the pirate Queen of Illyria, faded from memory and has almost been forgotten. Thanks to her enemy, the Roman Polybius, we still know of her and her few spectacular years of domination at sea.

Tools Of The Trade: Anchors Aweigh

Ah, anchors. They seem like straight forward tools. In fact, they originally were. The early Sea People (our old pirate friends) and even the technically advanced Ancient Egyptians originally used heavy rocks as anchors. Anything big you can wrap a rope (and later, a chain) around can technically be used to hold a boat relatively still.

Be that as it may, all one has to do is read an O’Brian novel and the terms for that simple anchor lose their simplicity all together. How, in fact, does one tell a kedge from the best bower? Or, for that matter the best from the small bower? Actually, what seems maddening on the face of it is deceptively simple. An anchor really is an anchor, after all.

Anchors are first referred to in writing in Ancient Greece. The poets referred to the anchors as dentes; teeth. No one is really sure where the reference came from but it may have to do with the fact that Greek anchors had only one fluke. The fluke is the curved piece at the bottom of the anchor that appears to have a flipper at the end. Greek anchors more closely resembled modern fluke or Danforth anchors that look like a plow and set nicely into the seabed. All Greek mono and bireme ships, and later Roman triremes, had several anchors for use in various seabeds and weathers. Each ship carried one very large anchor that was reserved for storms and nasty lee shores and was known as the sacra. From this, the Catholic Church brought forth sacram anchram solvere – the anchor of last refuge.

Anchors similar to the type we are most familiar with, as shown at the header, developed in the Iron Age and changed very little until 1801. In that year a clerk in the Royal Navy, Richard Pering, began playing around with the general design and came up with what became known as a Rodger’s anchor. Introduced for use in 1813, the eventual Rodger’s anchor had curved rather than straight flukes and arms at the top that pivoted on a bolt. These innovations made retrieval immensely easier than it had been previously saving navies a sizeable amount of money in lost iron. Rodger’s anchors, named after Royal Navy Lieutenant Rodger who added the pivot to Pering’s design, were in almost universal use by 1870.

As with Greek and Roman ships, the ships of the Great Age of sail carried a number of anchors. The larger the ship the more anchors in fact, particularly because a certain number of anchors lost was considered a cost of doing business. The most common anchors carried, from pirate schooner to 900 man ship of the line were as follows:

Bower-Anchors: There were two bower-anchors, the best and the small. The names have nothing to do with use or size but are simply indigenous to the lingua of sailing. The best bower rested (or, in seaman’s terms, was “catted”) on the outward starboard bow while the small was catted on the larboard (now port) bow.

Kedge: A small anchor used primarily to steady a ship and keep her clear of her bower-anchors in port or to warp a ship from one part of a harbor, bay or inlet to another without the need to set sail. Kedges could be partially dismantled or folded, making them easy to stow aboard.

Sheet and Spare: Reserved for large ships, these anchors were catted outward behind the foremast. These were assistance anchors that allowed more security and less strain on the bows when using the best and small bowers, particularly in high seas.

Smaller ships such as pirogues or periaugers and boats might use kedges or grapnels, depending on the size of the ship and the anchor.

This is, of necessity, a very general overview. How anchors work, their various modern types, and the many amazing things that can be done with a ship at anchor (warping is just the beginning) are subjects for another time. Until then remember Brethren: anchors aweigh is the signal to weigh, or pull up, the anchor. Drop anchor is the opposite. I told you it was simple.

History: Pirates Of Cyprus

The first and best ancient pirates were probably the elusive men and women known to the Egyptians as the "Sea Peoples". They came from the coastal areas of the Persian Gulf, or so it would seem, and - like the buccaneers of the 17th century - attacked both ships at sea and settlements by land. They were respected and feared and by the 7th century BCE they were roving over the Mediterranean and parts of the Atlantic in ships by the thousands. By that time they had become a distinct nation that we now know as the Phoenicians.

Because their own land was mostly desert, the Phoenicians were prone to colonization as well as raiding. They established outposts, many of which would become cities, in places as far afield as Chelah (the future Sale port in Morocco) on the Atlantic coast of Africa and as close to home at Tripoli in modern Libya. Now a new and surprisingly large Phoenician battle complex has been unearthed near Nicosha, Cyprus.

This Reuters article gives a quick glimpse of the archaeological excavation and the complex itself. The buildings are over 2,000 years old and were built by the Phoenicians on to the existing city of Idalion. The Phoenicians, according to the article, captured the city in the 5th century BCE and governed it for 150 years. Interestingly, Idalion was originally founded by Chalcanor, a descendant of King Priam of Trojan War fame. The Minoans, who may have been related to the Trojans, were one of the great rivals of the Phoenicians for seafaring dominance in the Mediterranean and beyond.

The fort was found to contain a large cash of metal weapons and bronze shields which have been collected for study. The sight, which has been under excavation since 1991, will eventually be open to the public. "Soon," according to the article. This will make it possible for modern people to walk the streets and stand in the courtyards once populated by some of the first pirates in the world. And that is certainly something worth considering for the ubiquitous bucket list.

Home Ports: In The Land Of Sallee

The notorious Barbary Corsairs ranged the coast of North Africa from Roman times to the early 19th century. They were notorious for their tenacity and feared as ruthless slave catchers. Being chained to a Barbary galley was basically a death sentence and no European or American sailor wanted any part of it.

The corsairs used many ports along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Africa: Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli and today's city, Sale in northern Morocco. This port town was probably originally colonized by Phoenician sea raiders - the Sea Peoples who harried Egyptian shipping. It is situated across the Sale harbor from the Ancient Roman port of Cella, now known as Chellah (near modern Rabat). Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a thriving seafaring culture there, both local and Roman, that dates back to about 200 BCE. As the old city fell into disrepair, Sale (pronounce "Sah-lay") came into her own once again. By Medieval times, the descendants of local Berbers were sailing out to raid European shipping from her snug harbor.

During the heyday of Barbary piracy, from the Crusades until the final denouement in the 1810s, many famous corsairs used Sale as a base. The Barbarossa brothers, Aruj and Hizir, the great Murat Rais and of course the enemy of Islamic piracy, the Knights of Malta, all claimed Sale as a home port at one time. The fiercely independent local population rallied around the pirates and some writers - Peter Lamborn Wilson in particular - make Sale out to be a kind of pirate utopia where all were equals and no one went hungry.

Like Captain Johnson's kingdom of Libertaria on Madagascar, this is probably nothing more than wishful thinking. It does point up the fact, however, that the people of the port's livelihood was very much intertwined with freebooting. To a large degree the booty brought in by the pirates was humans. Sale was a slave port, and the people sold there could come from as far afield as Ireland and Newfoundland.

Caribbean pirates took to calling any Muslim corsair a Sallee or Salley Rover or simply Salley men. Their galleys were known by the same monikers. They were generally avoided not for any unusual bloodthirstiness but because of their propensity to kidnap sturdy men for sale back home.

Sale has become an essentially unappealing industrial town over the course of the last 100 years. Her history can still be seen, however, in the Phoenician and Roman touches, the Medieval stone moles near the water and the ancient port that will probably always be very close to what she was in the Golden Age of Barbary Corsairs.

Tools Of The Trade: Purchase And Pay

MSNBC offered this article last week regarding the confusion over a recent declaration by President Obama that may (or may not) make paying modern pirates ransoms for ships and people illegal. Feel free to peruse the article at your leisure. I'm not going to discuss it in detail because a wise man once advised that talking about politics gets one in trouble. No doubt, Mr. Burleson is right. That said, ransoms have a long history in piracy and privateering and they were certainly one of the main money makers for many a freebooter all over the world.

Phoenicians, those infamous Sea Peoples, drove the Egyptians nuts by ransoming villages in the Nile Delta. Failure to pay meant Pharaoh lost the village to plunder, fire and murder. Julius Caesar was famously captured by Cilician pirates as a young man. He was held on the island of Pharmacusa for about six weeks in 78 BCE until his family ponied up and the pirates released him. Caesar vowed revenge and got it in a big way. As First Consul he saw to it that the Roman Navy choked the life out of Cilician trade and piracy for good.

Barbary pirates made an institution of ransoming slaves. Wealthy Christians were always taken as hostages and their families forced to pay if they did not want their loved ones to live in chains or die in the galleys. Poorer folk were quite literally enslaved unless a Christian relief group, such as the one written about by Father Pierre Dan, intervened. In his 1637 book Histoire de Barbarie et de ses Corsaires, Father Dan told, in rather purple prose, of rescuing near martyred Christians from fates worse than death.

The Christians weren't any kinder to their Muslim captives, however. If a prisoner managed to stay out of the Maltese galleys, his family could pay a ransom to those pirates for Jesus, the Knights of Malta, for his release. If not, he would be sold as a less-than-human slave. Either way, the pirates got their cash.

The Chinese pirate Confederations that sprang up in the late 15th century and continued to rule the South Pacific for hundreds of years kept careful records of ransoms. They sent extortion notes, some of which are still in existence, to ship owners and families of captives demanding ransom. Once the fee - considered by Chinese merchants a cost of doing business - was paid, the pirates would issue protection documents for the ship or individual. With this in hand, they would never be ransomed by that Confederation again.

The Sea Dogs of Elizabeth I's era were big on ransoms. Hawkins tried to ransom Cartagena and, though he failed, his nephew Drake succeeded rather stunningly. The buccaneers of Tortuga, Petit Goave and Jamaica became rather systematic about ransoms as well. Francois L'Olonnais received a ransom for the city of Maracaibo, as did Henry Morgan only a few months later. Morgan also ransomed Portobello and Panama. Part of the breakdown of the Spanish empire in the New World was directly linked to expensive ransoms for cities and towns along the Main.

Edward "Blackbeard" Teach held the city of Charleston, North Carolina for ransom and was paid in gold dust and a kit of medicines. This was an unusual and notable situation in the Golden Age of piracy. Most of the famous pirates of the era were looking to plunder, not ransom.

The privateers of Barataria were not above requesting ransoms, particularly for ships but sometimes for wealthier captives as well. The complaints of a Spanish merchant held by Vincente Gambi at Barataria around 1811 have come down to us in tact. The Spaniard in question writes that he and his fellows were kept four weeks in "the most cruel situation" before payment was received and they were sent on their way in a felluca. Not all the men on Grande Terre were gentlemen rovers.

And so it continues to the present day. Pay the ransom, put it down as a loss in your books and you'll get your ship and her people back. Or that is the way it seems.

History: Minoan Shipwreck

The January/February addition of Archaeology magazine, in print and online, featured a fascinating article about the excavation of the first Minoan shipwreck ever found.

The Minoan culture existed on the Greek island of Crete from approximately 2,700 to 1,450 BCE. Named for their first ruler, Minos, the Minoans flourished as sea traders, sometime sea raiders, and fishermen. Minos (there were probably several kings with that name and in fact there is some debate that it may be a title like "Pharaoh" and not a proper name) was known as the "master of the seas" according to the article. It also notes that he rid the waters around his kingdom of pirates which is ironic given his people's propensity for freebooting. But all we had until now was contemporary artwork (like the mural above depicting Minoan ships off the island of Thera) to give us an idea of what these mighty sea peoples transports must have looked like.

Enter archaeologist Elpida Hadjidaki, a local gal from the Cretan port town of Chania. Elpida is also an experienced diver and in 2003 she received a grant from the Institute of Aegean Prehistory to begin an intensive reconnaissance for ancient ships off her native island.

As so often happens in these situations, her team turned up nothing. At least not what they were looking for. Frustrated and running out of time, Elpida decided to go on a hunch. She headed to a site that had previously been investigated by the famed Jacques Cousteau and started poking around. As luck (which is an archaeologist's best friend) would have it, some likely signs were found just days before Elpida's expedition was set to shut down.

One of Elpida's team was sent on an exploratory dive and within half an hour he returned to the surface with the news that he had found a whole bunch of these: Hundreds of ceramic vessels known as amphora, used generally for holding wine or oil, were packed together in a pattern that would indicate they once rested in the hold of a ship. The team had hit their mark at last and first mapping of the site and then excavation began, expanding as the volume of the find became apparent.

The ship, undoubtedly a merchant vessel, was no longer in existence. Only its contents remained. All the same, Elpida and her team were able to determine that the vessel was between 32 and 50 feet long by the way the amphora were situated. The article notes that the jars were found uniformly upside down. This led the team to believe that the ship capsized. That possibility would also explain the inability to find any of the wooden hull (ship's wood will frequently remain safe from rot when in very cold water or buried in sand).

According to speculations now being made by other experts in Minoan civilization, the ship is probably a fair representation of the merchant vessels of the day. Unlike war and raiding ships, it seems to have lacked oars and would have been powered by wind probably with a single, square-rigged sail. These smaller ships would have been used for short ventures to and from other islands. I would add that they were probably quite vulnerable to pirates, such as the Phoenicians, as well.

The excavation is ongoing, and fascinating. So far upwards of 200 amphora have been brought up with approximately 80 virtually in tact. If you'd like to read the entire article find it here. It's worth your while to click over not only for the details but for the stunning underwater pictures.

History: One, Two, Three

The history of ships and shipping, and therefor pirates and privateering, began with our friends the Sea Peoples. Known now as the Phoenicians, they were the first to build wooden boats, fit them out with sails and a row of oars on each bow, and head out into the blue water of the Mediterranean. Bless them.

Technology is not a modern invention, however, and neither is the improvement of existing technology. Ships, like everything else, improved and each culture that adopted the basic design added their own innovations as time went on.

The original monoreme ship of the Phoenicians, Egyptians and early Greeks was a wonder of technology for it's time. Slim and seaworthy, the ship sat close to the water and could initially carry 10 oarsmen on either side. In the 6th century BCE the Phoenicians added a pointed ram at the bow. This established the way in which the three incarnations of the monoreme would be used. Set the sail and head for the battle, strike the sail and move under the power of oars in battle with the goal being to ram an enemy broadside and then back water, disengaging your ram so the enemy ship would sink.

The ship shown above is not technically a monoreme but is the famous galley of Khufu in the Cairo Museum. This ship is the most intact ancient vessel yet discovered. It does give a good idea of how oars would have been shipped in a monoreme: the long pieces of wood were held in thole pins along the gunwales rather like that little rowboat at the lake. Of course, speed and agility are always necessary whether your goal is sinking an enemy in battle or taking a fat prize. Speed meant adding more oars, but in the monoreme the only way to do that was to lengthen the ship. There goes your agility. The solution was dreamed up around 700 BCE probably by the Phoenicians again but some scholars believe the Greeks were the innovators. The bireme was built with two tiers of oars, one above the other.

The men on the lower tier worked their oars through ports in the ship's side and sat close to the waterline. The men above were on deck, as they had been in the monoreme. This allowed the ship to double it's oarsmen and speed without increasing it's length. Biremes fully manned with 40 oars could reach speeds of 6 to 7 knots. Considering that a pirate sloop during the Golden Age would have averaged 5 knots, that's pretty impressive. Of course the speed could not be sustained for any extended time, but it got the job done when facing an enemy.

Ship builders are never really satisfied, though, and innovations continued into the Classical era. Some time in the 600s BCE the Corinthians struck on a feat of engineering that allowed a third row of oarsmen to be incorporated. The trireme was born.

As you can see from the Greek stamp pictured above, a trireme required an outrigged section of the hull to make seating all the oarsmen and functioning oars feasible. The first and second tier of men would work in the outrigging while the lowest tier would be in the hold proper, sometimes only a foot above the waterline. Greek triremes carried up to 170 oarsmen. Rome went big, as usual, and eventually developed triremes that could carry up to 230 oarsmen along with soldiers, commanders and so on. These ships, when rowed properly, topped out at an amazing 9 to 10 knots in quick bursts.

Trireme construction in Greece followed this general plan. The ship was approximately 120 feet in length. She was 12 feet across at the waterline increasing to 18 feet on the upper deck of oarsmen and by Classical times the ram at her bow had developed three or four prongs instead of the one prong typical on a monoreme. She was a formidable opponent. So formidable, in fact, that it was the Athenian triremes under the command of Themistocles that finally beat back the threat of Persian invasion at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. Thanks for holding the Hot Gates, Spartans. The seaman will take it from here.

The innovations that led from monoreme to trireme improved seafaring, and particularly naval, capability in the Mediterranean 100 percent in a relatively short span of time. The trireme became the workhorse of sea battle, much like the frigate would in the distant future. It's probably safe to say that without these seafaring innovations by our ancient ancestors, the ships we know today would be quite different indeed.

History: The First Pirate Culture

In popular culture, pirates are 18th century guys with tricorn hats and curved cutlasses on three masted frigates that have surprisingly large cabins below. We've talked about how ludicrous that is so I'm not going to go there again. But even among those who claim a certain amount of piratical and seafaring knowledge very little is ever said about piracy in the Ancient world.

Most books and websites on the subject hit the Cilician pirates of classical times briefly. This is probably due either to the fact that they famously kidnapped Julius Caesar for ransom or because they (also famously) betrayed Spartacus and his band of rebel slaves. Either way it's a swift nod and then we're on to bigger and better things. But before the Cilicians started nabbing Romans for pay, there was a group of sea rovers who can technically be called the first organized freebooters on Earth.

Known to their arch enemy, the Ancient Egyptians, as the Sea Peoples they are now loosely referred to by historians as Phoenicians (and may possibly be the ancestors of the Biblical Philistines). The group was actually a set of five or more tribes displaced from the Adriatic and Aegean areas of Greece and Italy. Some scholars even speculate that one or more of these tribes were Mycenaean and/or Hittite peoples displaced by the Northern invaders who later became the Classical Greeks.

Most of what we know about the Sea Peoples comes from the Ancient Egyptian temples at Karnak and the tomb of Ramesses the Great and is therefor probably skewed due to the hostility between the two groups. These highly skilled seafarers used ports in modern Turkey and Israel as their bases and from there they launched piratical attacks, particularly on Egyptian merchant ships, in the eastern Mediterranean. They returned to their ports, or others nearby, and bartered with the local Cannonites and Libyans in particular.

The people of the sea were so much trouble, in fact, that the ultimate Egyptian warrior, Ramesses, finally took matters into his own hands and sent his navy against them. The two forces met off the Nile Delta in 1186 BCE. According to Ramesses' tomb, things went very badly for the Sea Peoples but we can now recognize this as Egyptian spin doctoring. Not long after the battle the Sea Peoples were back in business - if to a somewhat lesser degree - and a few years later they were hiring their ships and services out to the Libyans and the Egyptians as well.

Cultures aside from the Ancient Egyptians praised the Sea Peoples as skilled seamen and fearsome warriors who not only preyed on ships and shipping but sacked port towns for plunder in organized, well-timed raids. The result appears to be a culture of seafaring that was at the very least similar to the Buccaneer societies of Tortuga and Port Royal in the 17th century.

Proof, once again, that there truly is nothing new under the sun. Except maybe the Sea Peoples.