… Waters – 1707
"When one thinks of battles involving oared galleys one thinks automatically of actions in the Mediterranean. The lot of a galley-slave chained to an oar must have been dreadful enough in the warm and usually calm waters of that sea, but it must have been infinitely worse in the cold, rough waters off the French Atlantic coast and in the North Sea. The galley's day as a fighting vessel – a long one, stretching back two thousand years – ended in the early eighteenth century and as such they do not figure in most accounts of sea warfare of that era, as "Fighting Sail" reached its apogee of efficiency. I was therefore all the more surprised to come on an account in a Victorian publication of a battle with galleys in the Thames estuary in 1707. This was during the War of Spanish Succession, the last of Louis XIV's wars, that which began the long decline of French power through much of the remaining century.
Louis XIV (a man much given to his own comfort and luxury, as his creation of the palace at Versailles testifies) appears to have been favourable to use of galleys and ordered that courts should sentence convicted criminals to serve as oarsmen in them as far as possible, even in peacetime. Though the idea was never implemented, he appears to have considered substitution of galley-service for the death penalty. Considering that execution in France this period was by the barbaric method of breaking on the wheel, being chained to an oar would probably have represented a marginally preferable fate.
In August 1707 a French force of six galleys, commanded by a Commodore Langeron, was off the Thames estuary, en route for an attack on the British port of Harwich. It was being guided by a Captain Thomas Smith, an English Jacobite who had taken service in the French navy after fleeing to France following the deposition of the King James II from the British throne. Like many supporters of the exiled king, Smith had a bitter score to settle. The galleys appear to have been some 150-feet long and 22-feet in the beam, carrying sail on three masts and also propelled by oars pulled by some 200 chained slaves, most likely convicts. They carried around 12 guns. Though such vessels were obviously very manoeuvrable in Mediterranean conditions, one wonders just how well their high length to beam ratio would have made them workable in rougher Northern seas…"
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