Two of my kids have rowed crew, so I’ve now attended quite a few crew regattas. Of course I appreciate the beauty and synchronicity, but I also know how hard the rowers work in practice, and how grim and repetitive the sport can be. At races, as I watch the rowers stroke past in perfect unison, my warped mind always jumps to a comparison to galley slaves. Recently I did a little research about them.
When many people think of galley slaves, poor wretches toiling away at their oars in dark, stinking ships, they might conjure up images from the movie Ben Hur and ancient Rome. But in fact, the Romans tended not to use slaves to man the oars of their battleships. It was the seventeenth century that was known as “the great age of the galleys.”

According to W.H. Lewis (brother of C.S.) in his fascinating book, The Splendid Century, all the seventeenth century Mediterranean navy powers used galley slaves. Wind and oars were the only known propellant of the age. Paid employment at the oar had been tried and dismissed. The only reliable way to produce the necessary speed and endurance to chase down (or escape from) enemy ships or Barbary pirates was to use the whip on your oarsmen, something that didn’t go over well with paid employees. But as condemned criminals were plentiful in that era, it wasn’t difficult to find candidates to man the oars, people whom you could whip with relative impunity.

When in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes—a law passed by his grandfather Henri IV that had ensured the freedom of Protestant worship in France—many French Protestants (known as Huguenots) who tried to flee the country were sent to the galleys.

So, according to Lewis, the primary groups that made up the galley rowers were deserters, smugglers, common criminals, and, after 1685, Huguenots.

What was life like as a galley slave? We know something about it from letters and memoirs of Huguenot convicts.

After a long and often grueling march to the ports, the convicts would be sorted into groups of five—these would become the people with whom one would eat, sleep, and work, often until one died of old age or overwork or both. Each group of five men manned an eighteen-foot oar–and there might be fifty oars on a ship. The convicts remained chained to their places. With each stroke, they had to rise together and push the oar forward, and then dip it in the water and pull backward, dropping into a sitting position. During the heat of battle, rowers might be required to maintain full speed for twenty-four hours straight, and be fed biscuits soaked in wine without pausing in their exertions. Those who died—or lost consciousness—were cut from their places and thrown overboard.

Horrific, yes. But there were at least some brief respites from the wretched existence, periods of time when the wind’s sails propelled the ship and the rowers could rest, or, if there were no wind and no engagements, the cruising speed was much less strenuous. And when the ship overwintered in port, the life of a gallérien became almost tolerable. With the rest of the crew ashore, the rowers could spread out a little and actually lie down and sleep. Many gallériens learned to knit, and others were already skilled wig makers, tailors, musicians—and were allowed to employ their trades in rotating weeks ashore.