Athenian Triremes and the Head of the Charles

Last Thanksgiving, my brother gave me Lords of the Sea, archaeologist John Hale's account of the Athenian oared navy in its days of ancient glory.  It's a brisk walk through Herodotos, Thucydides, Xenophon, and other ancient historians, focusing just on the seagoing bits.

According to Hale, the image of slaves shackled to the benches and being mercilessly whipped while rowing to the beat of a drum is purely a Hollywood concoction, at least as far as ancient Athens was concerned.  Athens had a citizen navy.  The only slaves who rowed for Athens had been granted their freedom in order to man ships in time of greatest need.  And on an Athenian ship, the auletes kept the beat with his flute.  There was no drum.

The business end of an Athenian trireme

The relatively light wooden ships were essentially missiles, built to pierce and sink enemy ships with a heavy bronze ram mounted at the waterline.  Some had as many as five banks of rowers.  But the most famous for their speed and agility had three -- the triremes.

No plans for an Athenian trireme have survived from antiquity.  What we know about them comes from literary sources and a few archaeological records, such as the footings for the Piraeus shipsheds where the boats were dried out after their summer campaigns.

In the early 1980s, the longest correspondence on any subject in The Times of London revealed a keen and widespread interest in ancient Athenian triremes.  Prevailing on this interest, a naval architect, a historian, and a classics teacher formed the British Trireme Trust to build and test a full-scale replica for purposes of probing the mysteries of dimension, construction, and operation.

H.N. Olympias

The result was H.N. Olympias, built in Piraeus and commissioned in 1987 as a ship of the Hellenic navy.  Sea trials were conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a crew of 170 volunteer college rowers.

Ancient sources indicate the Athenian trireme was capable of about 6 knots at a relatively leisurely rowing pace.  In one account (Thucydides), a trireme dispatched from Athens in 427 B.C. caught up with another sent out twenty-four hours earlier to a destination about 185 sea miles distant.  The first trireme, says Thucydides, sailed "in no great hurry," and the second, encountering no adverse winds, was hastened by the promise of great rewards if it arrived first.  The chasers "continued rowing whilst they ate their barley, kneaded with wine and oil, and slept and rowed by turns."  The two boats reached their common destination at just about the same time.  Assuming the chasing boat rowed continuously for twenty-four hours, it would have covered the distance at an average speed of about 7.7 knots. 

Olympias has proved it could be done.  She can sprint at 9 knots and can hold a steady 4 knots with half the crew resting.  Allowing for the expert design and navigation of her ancient predecessors (Olympias is probably not a perfect replica) and for their well-practiced and exclusively male crews (Olympias's crew of men and women had limited time to practice), the ancient accounts are credible.

Reading about the ancient triremes inevitably brought to mind my own brief encounter with rowing, which provides something of a bond, tenuous as it may be, with those who manned the ancient Athenian warships.  In my very first semester of college, I joined the freshman lightweight crew.  At 135 pounds I was a bit too small to row and a bit too large to be a coxswain.  But the freshman lightweight coach, Rock Brockman, let me try my hand at coxing anyway.

The Princeton boathouse on Lake Carnegie

Like me, lots of us who came out for the team had never previously rowed or coxed.  Without prior experience, it made no sense to allow us immediately into the ridiculously fragile and frightfully expensive eight-oared shells.  They were rumored to cost $3,000 apiece (a year's tuition was $6,000 at the time), and their glossy hulls were made of paper-thin wood kept meticulously varnished by a full-time university employee.  A misplaced hand or foot, even a finger, could poke through a hull quite easily if you didn't know what you were doing.

We therefore learned the basics on a sturdy, flat-bottomed wooden barge.  It had sixteen sliding seats for the oarsmen, eight on each side, and a narrow deck down the middle so the coach could walk forward and aft to instruct the rowers up close while underway.  The novice coxswains stood on a stern poop and took turns steering the thing with a bulky tiller at waist level.

A modern training barge

The barge was painted battleship gray and leaked terribly.  Practice began by bailing it out.  Every oarsman had a one-pound coffee can under his seat, and out on the water the rowing stopped every twenty or thirty minutes and the bailing resumed.  This went on all through practice.  Years later I learned that our leaky barge stayed afloat until 1988, when it finally succumbed as fuel for a campus bonfire.

I liked coxing immensely and discovered I had a good feel for it.  With orderly commands and good steering at the end of one of the first practices, I brought the barge to a perfect stop right alongside the dock, eliciting Rock's "I think we have a natural here."

Daily late-afternoon practices were on Lake Carnegie, Princeton's superb man-made rowing facility dredged from the Millstone River.  (The wags say the university asked Andrew Carnegie for bread, but he gave only water.)  As the weather grew colder we novices gradually improved and moved from the barge into the shells.  In a matter of weeks, freshmen rowers and coxswains, experienced and novice, were working well together.  We could sustain 28 to 30 strokes a minute on mile-long practice pieces and could deliver a reasonably good sprint on the command of "Power Ten!"

We were also beginning to hear buzz about the "Head of the Charles," a big rowing regatta on the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It would take place in late October but hardly concerned us because only the varsity boats were going, not the freshmen.  Still, it sounded like a big deal, the main East Coast collegiate rowing event of the fall season.

Due to a shortage of varsity coxswains, I was unexpectedly tapped to go.  Suddenly, I had reason to pay much closer attention to the regatta -- and also to dread it.  It's known as the "Coxswain's Race" because of the sharp twists and turns the Charles River makes as it snakes through Cambridge.  There are also six bridges to negotiate along the race course's grueling three miles, two of them at sharp turns in the river.

The Weeks Footbridge, the fourth of six Head of the Charles bridges

To prepare me, I was assigned to practice in varsity lightweight eights.  With each stroke, the varsity rowers delivered far more power than I was used to with the freshmen, and they rowed at higher rates (36 strokes a minute was not unusual).  On giving my first command to row, the resulting blast of power from the eight strangers facing me nearly pitched me backward out of the boat.

As quickly as I could, I learned how to steer and give commands in my exhilarating new conditions.  But as the Head of the Charles regatta drew nearer, I grew more anxious about how I would fare in my first competitive race on a notoriously difficult course.  The regatta was known for disasters.  I'd seen photos of crews wading ashore mid-race from boats that had splintered into matchsticks after colliding with each other or with bridge abutments.  Could I really do this?

The regatta consists of races against time.  In each event, boats are launched at fifteen-second intervals.  Once underway their speeds vary, so passing becomes unavoidable and involves tricky steering choices, such as deciding which bridge span to shoot for.  In passing on a curve, all it takes is a moment's misjudgment of proximity or an errant twitch on the rudder for one boat's oars to foul with another's causing crucial loss of time while the boats stop to disentangle.  Much worse, at all-out racing speeds a fouled oar can cause a rower to "catch a crab" and be swept out of the boat or injured -- or both.

On the regatta weekend, coaches, rowers, and coxswains drove up to Cambridge in the long black Checker limousines the university made available to traveling teams.  Special brackets allowed our precious shells to be securely mounted on the roofs.

Head of the Charles course map

I recall only one practice run the afternoon before the regatta.  It was hardly adequate to accustom me to the course's complexities and was not rowed at racing speed.  Afterward, using a course map I tried to memorize the sequence of turns right and left and which ones portended bridges.  In passing under them, the spans seemed wide enough for two boats to pass through side-by-side.  But judging distances at water level can be deceiving, and during the practice run there had never been another boat next to mine.  So I really couldn't be sure, at least not for every span, whether two boats could pass through together.  Nor could I judge how far to the side I needed to steer to assure double clearance.

On race morning, therefore, I was mighty nervous.  I was also mighty relieved when a varsity coxswain who had finished an earlier race was driven back to the starting line in time to take my place.

My dalliance with rowing (which I dropped at the end of the semester) gave me something of a feel for being aboard an ancient Athenian trireme.  The sensation of rhythmic power and pause, delivered through human hands, is surely the same on all multi-oared vessels.  But part of me will always regret never knowing whether the Head of the Charles, my first and only chance to race in such a craft, would have made me the hero or the goat.