#Galley

[vintagehomecollection]

Mimi Klein lives and works in her Munich apartment, designed by herself and Stefan Wewerka. As witty as it is practical, a tiled panel, reading like a minimalist mosaic, defines the understated galley kitchen. The counter on the right doubles as a bar. Black and white and red... are the color themes that recur throughout the space.

Rooms by Design, 1989

[acrosscenturiesandgenerations]

▪︎ Automaton in the form of a galley.

Date: 1626

Artist: Georg Burrer, (turning) (worked in Stuttgart 1598/99-1627), Georg Ernst, (turning work) (died after 1634), Christoph Schorkfel (mechanics)

Medium: Ivory, brass, linen, silk; Movement: iron

[ltwilliammowett]

Stern view of the galley replica "La Real" (La Real was not the name of the ship, but the designation for its function as a flagship), which was the flagship of Juan de Austria at the naval battle of Lepanto 7. October 1571

[fuckyeahmeikokaji]

Meiko Kaji (梶芽衣子) in Female Convict Scorpion: Grudge Song (女囚さそり　７０１号怨み節), 1973, directed by Yasuharu Hasebe (長��部安春).

[racefortheironthrone]

Do we know anything about the historical context that allowed Venice to come up with something like the Arsenal? Most accounts kind of treat it as this de Novo idea to mass produce ships, but I feel like history never actually works like that, and Carthaginians were doing that 1,500 years earlier. Were there trends going on elsewhere in Europe and the Mediterranean world that contributed to this industrial breakthrough? Do we know anything about the specific administrators who had to plan this seeming quantum leap in production out? Did a bunch of folks immediately see what the Venetians were doing and copy it? If not, why?

I'm going to take a slightly broader take on this question: the assembly line is not an invention, it's a discovery. So it's not about who did it first, because you have lots of cases of independent discoveries happening in wildly disparate times and places.

I remember quite vividly a talk given by Professor Anthony Barbieri-Low when he first arrived at UCSB, where he argued that the assembly line was first discovered in China...during the Bronze Age. As early as the Shang and Zhou dynasties around 1000 BCE, we have evidence of assembly line techniques being used in the production of bronze and pottery, because the pieces were inscribed on the bottom with indications of which worker did which parts of the process and which quality inspector signed off on the piece as good enough for sale - so that if the thing broke, officials could figure out exactly who to blame for shoddy work.

So it's not that Venice was the first to ever adopt the idea of assembly line manufacture of ships, but rather that they did it more consistently and devoted more resources to it than anyone else, and iteratively improved on the techniques to get production times down to a single day per galley.

The Arsenal of Venice was an enormous complex, roughly 15% of Venice's landmass, surrounded by a two-mile long defensive wall, and employing some 16,000 people. In addition to standardized pre-fabricated parts, the Arsenal also emphasized division of labor with workshops devoted to producing everything a warship might need in-house - rope, rigging, masts, planking, sails, nails, guns, etc. Organizing these supply chains, what we might call vertical integration, was an incredible logistical feat in and of itself.

In terms of technology, the Arsenal pioneered frame-first (as opposed to hull-first) construction, a moving assembly line whereby galleys were floated down a canal to different stages of the production process, new forms of firearms, and new kinds of ships llike the galleass and galleon. Galileo was a major consultant to the Arsenal at the height of its power.

In addition to the technical advancements, all of this required a lot of money - roughly 10% of the Republic's entire budget - and what made Venice truly unique was its ability to devote those kind of resources on a regular basis at a time when even powerful empires like the Ottomans and the Spanish were still using the yo-yoing methods of medieval fleet construction.

[memoryscan]

woman (name unknown) smoking while cooking in the galley. I’m assuming she was the resident cook on the ship at the time (which is actually how my mum and dad would meet roughly 15 years after this photo was taken.) I’m not sure which vessel this is, as my father worked on and captained many trawlers throughout his career, but I think it’s a great photo.

[todaysdocument]

Galley at recruit camp, Navy Yard, Puget Sound, 12/22/1917. 

Record Group 71: Records of the Bureau of Yards and Docks

Series: Photographs of Construction Progress and Completion of U.S. Naval Shore Installations and Shipyards

Image description: Sailors standing in a galley (kitchen). Large pots and pans hang from the ceiling and sit on a table-sized stove. The sailors stand behind the stove, wearing white uniforms, long aprons, and “dixie cup” hats cocked at various angles. 

Image description: Zoomed-in portion of image, showing a sailor sitting on the shelf of a pass-through window to another room, looking over his shoulder at the camera.

[reubenyeoart]

Commission - Ship's Cook

A Rendered illustration commission for a client, of their TTRPG Wizard pirate character in their galley!

[male-us-prison-experience]

Just to draw your attention to another new blog I have just started, about serious slave labor, I give here the first part of its introduction.https://www.tumblr.com/blog/serious-ancient-slavery

ANCIENT SLAVERY: A STRENUOUS LIFE OF CHAINS, SHACKLES, SINGLETAILS, SWEETING BODIES AND SEVERE PUNISHMENT

The scene is of unprecedented intimidating intensity. Dozens of muscular male slaves below deck in the depths of the hold of the galley, three next to each other, but each with his own oar, for long periods chained with one of their ankles to their rowing bench, dressed only in a grubby loincloth. Their naked torsos thus will be completely exposed to the soon-to-be merciless whip of the slave overseers on their back, the latter already supervising them from the raised central path, with the feared flogger in their hand.

For the sequel:

[grayrazor]

Episode 4 of the Shogun remake is a good showcase for a specific development in the history of warfare. When galleons, made to survive the rougher conditions of the Atlantic, went up against galleys and small boats made for seas, the ancient tactics of boarding and fighting hand-to hand didn’t work anymore because they were just too tall.

There’s one story of a galleon sailing into the Mediterranean and getting attacked by quinqueremes and galleasses, and when one tried to ram her like it was the Peloponnesian or Punic Wars the galley just crushed herself against the side of the galleon, doing no damage.

[mapleicedlatte]

Found this boat just fuckin parked up at the jetty today?? Hello? 👀

[ltwilliammowett]

A Galley and a Portuguese caravel, detail from the Nautical chart of the Mediterranean, by Grazioso Benincasa, 1482

[serious-ancient-slavery]

For those who are interested, here is an interesting analysis of the stirring music for the well-known rowing scene from the film Ben Hur (1959), composed Miklos Rosza especially for that scene on base of the rhythm of the strokes of the oars by the toiling galley slaves.

[racefortheironthrone]

You already guesstimated how much it would cost to maintain a man-at-arms in Westeros, but what about ships? Like longboats, the Iron Fleet's small galleys, the true galleys and dromonds from the Redwynes and the Royal Fleet and the Summer Islands' swan ships; how much would it cost a lord to build, crew and maintain any of these?

You don't ask much, do you? Only a whole bunch of math and research into three different kinds of costs of four different kinds of ships. That comes across a little bit demanding, a little bit entitled.

Tell you what, I'll do it just for a true galley.

Construction Costs

Thankfully, the English fiscal state has fairly good records when it comes to paying its bills. So for example, the so-called "Pipe Roll" records of 1295 have data on the construction costs of building eight galleys of 100 oars. These galleys tended to cost an average of £223 (roughly evenly split between materials costs and labor) - which works out to about 178 golden dragons.

Crew Costs

There is a long and ugly history of galley slaves that wouldn't be allowed given Westerosi prohibition on slavery, so we have to look for historical wages for oarsmen in periods where free wage laborers were used in galleys.

So for example, in the 1530s the Spanish galleys paid 11 reals per month - which works out to 2.75 shillings a month, or £2.75 per year, which works out to 2.2 golden dragons a year per oarsman. With a galley of 100 oars, you're looking at minimum crew costs of 220 dragons a year in oarsmen wages alone (because running a galley requires food and drink, cordage and chandlery, wages for the sailors and the marines, etc).

Maintenance Costs

So I managed to find some Genoese sources on maintenance costs for galleys - in 1528, Genoa was spending about 5,000 ducats a year in maintenance per galley. That works out to £500 a year, which works out to 400 golden dragons a year.

Conclusion:

In total, that suggests that a lord would have to spend 178 dragons to build a galley, and at least 620 dragons to operate that galley for a year.

[screencapt]

The Magic Christian, by Joseph McGrath, 1969.

The ship’s machines

[rainbow-hunters]

Art exhibit 🩷🩷🩷