Galley slave
[3] In the drawn-out Second Punic War, Rome and Carthage resorted to slave rowers to some extent, but only in specific cases and often with the promise of freedom after victory was achieved.
It also became the custom among the Mediterranean powers to sentence condemned criminals to row in the war-galleys of the state (initially only in time of war).
[citation needed] Convict rowers also went to a large number of other French and non-French cities: Nice, Le Havre, Nîmes, Lorient, Cherbourg, Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, La Spezia, Antwerp and Civitavecchia; but Toulon, Brest and Rochefort predominated.
[citation needed] A vivid account of the life of galley-slaves in France appears in Jean Marteilhes's Memoirs of a Protestant, translated by Oliver Goldsmith, which describes the experiences of one of the Huguenots who suffered after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
[citation needed] Madame de Sevigne, a revered French author, wrote from Paris on April 10, 1671 (Letter VII): "I went to walk at Vincennes, en Troche* and by the way met with a string of galley-slaves ; they were going to Marseilles, and will be there in about a month.
[10] In Southeast Asia, from the mid-18th to the late-19th centuries, the lanong and garay warships of the Iranun and Banguingui pirates were crewed entirely with male galley slaves captured from previous raids.
He is sentenced to the galleys as a result of his life as a "chauffeur" (in this case the word refers to a brigand who threatened landowners by roasting them).
[14] In The Sea Hawk,[15] a 1919 historical fiction novel by Rafael Sabatini, as well as the 1924 film based on the novel, the protagonist, Sir Oliver Tressilian, is sold into galley slavery by a relative.
Howard Koch was working on the script when war broke out in Europe, and the final story deliberately draws vivid parallels between Spain and the Nazi Reich.
When Thorpe (Errol Flynn) liberates a Spanish vessel full of English captives, the freed men row willingly for home to "Strike for the Shores of Dover",[16] the stirring music of score composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold and lyrics by Howard Koch and Jack Scholl.
In Lew Wallace's novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Judah is sent to the galleys as a murderer but manages to survive a shipwreck and save the fleet leader, who frees and adopts him.
In the 1943 epic novel The Long Ships, the protagonist, Orm Tostesson, is captured while raiding in Andalusia and serves as a galley slave for a number of years.
to 44 B.C ) includes a novel Arms of Nemesis, which contains an appalling description of the conditions under which galley slaves lived and worked—assuming that they did exist in Rome at that time (see above).
In Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, C. S. Forester writes in detail of an encounter during the 1790s when a becalmed British convoy is attacked off Gibraltar by two of a small number of galleys retained in service by the conservative Spanish navy.
The author notes the stench emanating from these galleys due to each carrying two hundred condemned prisoners chained permanently to the rowing benches.
