GALLEY SLAVE

Throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the premier naval vessel in and around the Mediterranean Sea was the oared galley. Galleys were used by everybody: the Europeans, the North African corsairs, the Ottomans.

Oared galleys were sleek and fast and dangerous. They were also motorized—not with any sort of combustion engine, though. The ‘engine’ was human power. Galleys could have anywhere from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred slaves chained to the oars, depending on the size of the vessel. European war galleys were typically large, double-masted ships with twenty to twenty-five banks of oars. These were large oars, anything up to 10 meters (33 feet) long. It could take five men to handle the really big oars. A galley with twenty banks of large oars (that is, with forty oars), with five men chained to each oar, needed two hundred slaves. Having such a powerful human ‘motor’ meant that galleys were not dependent on the wind—a distinct advantage back in the days of sail.

Galley slaves’ lives, however, were a kind of living hell.

Very few first-hand accounts by galley slaves have survived. Back in those days, the sort of literate person who would have been capable of producing a coherent written account was typically well enough off to avoid having to serve on a galley. The men—it was all men—who slaved in the galleys were those who had no way out. They were the poor folk, farm laborers, fishermen, sailors, etc.—not the sort likely to be literate.

One man did leave a written chronicle of what it was like to be a galley slave, though: Jean Marteilhe. A very readable, abridged version of his original French-language account was published in English in 2010, titled simple Galley Slave.

 

Marteilhe was a Huguenot who lived in France at the turn of the century from the 1600s to the 1700s. For the crime of being a Protestant, he was sentenced to life as a slave in the French galley fleet. His chronicle is interesting for two completely different reasons: 1/ it provides a first-hand account of what it was like to be a galley slave; 2/ it provides an example of what happens when the rule of law is replaced by corruption and cronyism. The first is of purely historical interest. The second is entirely relevant to our world today.

There isn’t actually all that much descriptive detail about life aboard a slave galley in the English translation of Marteilhe’s narrative. The Introduction does provide some detail, though. Here is a combination of descriptions quoted from different authors in that Introduction:

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A galley is a long flat one-decked vessel, though it has two masts. Generally in all, they have 300 slaves and 250 men, either officers, soldiers, seamen, or servants… Those who see a galley for the first time are astonished at so many persons; there being an infinite number of villages in Europe without as many inhabitants… There is little room to sleep, for they put seven men on one bench—a space about ten feet long by four feet broad… Everything combines to make life aboard a galley hell. The cries of the sailors, the horrible maledictions of the slaves, the groaning of the timbers, the clank of the chains, the rain, hail, lightning and the waves that dash all over the vessel… The evil smells are so strong that one cannot get away from them.

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Marteilhe himself does provide some description of life as a galley slave. Here, for example, is his account (slightly abridged) of what it is like to row a galley:

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The Comite, who is master of the slaves, and a tyrant much dreaded, stands always at the stern, near the captain, to receive his orders. There are also two sous-comites who carry whips of cords which they exercise without mercy on the naked bodies of the slaves. When the captain gives the word for rowing, the comite gives the signal with a silver whistle. The slaves, who have their oars in readiness, strike all at once, and beat time exactly.

This they continue, without requiring further orders, till by another signal of the whistle, they desist in a moment. The comites exercise their whips like furies, while the muscles of the slaves , all in convulsions under the lash, pour streams of blood onto the seats. This, however dreadful it may seem to the reader, is soon learned by regular usage, to be born without murmuring.

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As you can see, the life of a galley slave was indeed pretty dreadful.

The focus of Marteilhe’s, narrative, however, wasn’t actually on conditions aboard the galleys. Rather, it was about the palpable injustice of his sentence and of the society in which he lived.

Hugenots in France at this time were in a tough spot: their Protestantism was outlawed and they were being coerced to convert to Catholicism, and it was illegal for them to leave the country.

Marteilhe and a companion were accused of trying to depart from France for the Netherlands. The evidence against them was merely circumstantial, however, and they managed to assert their innocence and were acquitted by the French Parliament. This was not the end of the matter, though, Marteilhe explains:

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The councilor told us to “kneel before God and the law and to listen to the official reading of the sentence.” We obeyed. The substance, after the preamble, being simply:

“The said Jean Marteilhe and Daniel Le Gras having been suspected and convicted of professing the pretended reform religion, and of attempting to escape from the kingdom in order to profess freely the said religion, for punishment of which crime, we condemn them to serve as convicts in the King’s galleys for life.”

After the councilor finished, I said, “How, sir, can such a just and venerable body as the parliament make this sentence agree with your decision to acquit us?”

“The parliament,” said he, “acquitted you, but the royal court condemns you.”

“But where, sir, is justice, which ought to direct both tribunals?”

“It is not for you,” he said, “to fathom such things.”

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And there you have it: the break down in the rule of law. The parliamentary court found Marteilhe and his companion not guilty of the charges laid against them. The King, however, had other ideas and produced his own ruling.

The brute power the King wielded decided the outcome of the case rather than the law. The rest—the councilors, the official reading of the sentence—was just lipstick on the proverbial pig.

Marteilhe’s narrative is filled with examples of such corruption.

At one point, he and a number of other Huguenots are marched off with other convicts from Dunkirk to Marseilles. It is a terrible journey, but the lot of Marteilhe and his fellow Huguenots is eased by a bribe negotiated by a friend of Marteilhe and offered to the captain in charge of the journey:

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M. Girardot counted the money out into the hands of the captain—about eight hundred francs. The captain told M. Girardot that, as we had sick and infirm among us, it would be necessary to provide one or two wagons. He added that he could not do this at the government’s expense, without severely lashing those who could not walk, to be certain that they were not malingering. M. Girardot understood and agreed that we would pay the captain one hundred crowns so that, when we complained of not being able to walk, they might put us into wagons without striking us.

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Marteilhe’s narrative is filled with examples such as this. The society in which he lived was, on the surface, a society in which the rule of law governed all. The reality, though, was that constant corruption and bribery were the norm and brute wealth and power won all arguments.

In Western industrial democracies, we live under the rule of law. It gets perverted, of course, and the powerful can play games with it, but mostly it’s a robust enough framework that it functions reasonably well—or at least well enough—and we take for granted.

Marteilhe’s narrative is a sobering reminder of what can happen once the rule of law has been subverted: all the right words are there, and the surface formalities are all seeming observed, but, underneath, powerful men do pretty much whatever they want—unchecked—to serve their own ends and better themselves—at the expense of everybody else.

Sound familiar?

One of the purposes of the rule of law is to guarantee equal treatment for everybody, and in the process put constraints on the actions of such uber-powerful men. These days, however, we can see such constraints beginning to be flouted, disregarded, and sabotaged by national leaders in ways that nobody would have expected as little as five years ago. None of this bodes well.

But it makes Galley Slave thoroughly worthwhile reading, not only as a moving chronicle of what it was like to be a slave aboard an oared galley, but also (and more importantly) as a dramatic reminder of just how important the rule of law—a thing most of us pay no more attention to than your average fish pays attention to the water in which it swims—actually is.