"Royal Navy frigate vs. French oared galleys – 1707" Topic

"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…"

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Armand