Famous Sea Fights Part 1

Famous Sea Fights.

by John Richard Hale.

INTRODUCTION

Three hundred years ago Francis Bacon wrote, amongst other wise words: "To be Master of the Sea is an Abridgement of Monarchy.... The Bataille of Actium decided the Empire of the World. The Bataille of Lepanto arrested the Greatnesse of the Turke. There be many Examples where Sea-Fights have been Finall to the Warre. But this much is certaine; that hee that commands the Sea is at great liberty, and may take as much and as little of the Warre as he will. Whereas those, that be strongest by land, are many times neverthelesse in great Straights. Surely, at this Day, with us of Europe, the Vantage of Strength at Sea (which is one of the Princ.i.p.all Dowries of this Kingdome of Greate Brittaine) is Great; Both because Most of the Kingdomes of Europe are not merely Inland, but girt with the Sea most part of their Compa.s.se; and because the Wealth of both Indies seemes in great Part but an Accessary to the Command of the Seas."[1]

[1] Bacon's Essay on "The Greatness of Kingdoms," first published in 1597. The extract is from the edition of 1625.

The three centuries that have gone by since this was written have afforded ample confirmation of the view here set forth, as to the importance of "Battailes by Sea" and the supreme value of the "Command of the Sea." Not only "we of Europe," but our kindred in America and our allies in Far Eastern Asia have now their proudly cherished memories of decisive naval victory.

I propose to tell in non-technical and popular language the story of some of the most remarkable episodes in the history of sea power. I shall begin with the first sea-fight of which we have a detailed history--the Battle of Salamis (B.C. 480), the victory by which Themistocles the Athenian proved the soundness of his maxim that "he who commands the sea commands all." I shall end with the last and greatest of naval engagements, the Battle of Tsu-s.h.i.+ma, an event that reversed the long experience of victory won by West over East, which began with Salamis more than two thousand years ago.

I shall have to tell of British triumphs on the sea from Sluys to Trafalgar; but I shall take instances from the history of other countries also, for it is well that we should remember that the skill, enterprise, and courage of admirals and seamen is no exclusive possession of our own people.

I shall incidentally describe the gradual evolution of the wars.h.i.+p from the wooden, oar-driven galleys that fought in the Straits of Salamis to the steel-built, steam-propelled giants that met in battle in the Straits of Tsu-s.h.i.+ma. I shall have something to say of old seafaring ways, and much to tell of the brave deeds done by men of many nations. These true stories of the sea will, I trust, have not only the interest that belongs to all records of courage, danger, and adventure, but also some practical lessons of their own, for they may help to keep alive that intelligent popular interest in sea power which is the best guarantee that the interests of our own navy--the best safeguard of the Empire--will not be neglected, no matter what Government is in power, or what political views may happen for the moment to be in the ascendant.

J.R.H.

CHAPTER I

SALAMIS

B.C. 480

The world has lost all record of the greatest of its inventors--the pioneers who in far-off ages devised the simple appliances with which men tilled the ground, did their domestic work, and fought their battles for thousands of years. He who hung up the first weaver's beam and shaped the first rude shuttle was a more wonderful inventor than Arkwright. The maker of the first bow and arrow was a more enterprising pioneer than our inventors of machine-guns. And greater than the builders of "Dreadnoughts"

were those who "with hearts girt round with oak and triple bra.s.s" were the first to trust their frail barques to "the cruel sea." No doubt the hollowed tree trunk, and the coracle of osiers and skins, had long before this made their trial trips on river and lake. Then came the first ventures in the shallow sea-margins, and at last a primitive naval architect built up planked bulwarks round his hollowed tree trunk, and stiffened them with ribs of bent branches, and the first s.h.i.+p was launched.

This evolution of the s.h.i.+p must have been in progress independently in more places than one. We are most concerned with its development in that eastern end of the land-locked Mediterranean, which is the meeting-place of so many races, and around which so much of what is most momentous in the world's history has happened. There seems good reason for believing that among the pioneers in early naval construction were the men of that marvellous people of old Egypt to whom the world's civilization owes so much. They had doubtless learned their work on their own Nile before they pushed out by the channels of the Delta to the waters of the "Great Sea."

They had invented the sail, though it was centuries before any one learned to do more than scud before the wind. It took long experience of the sea to discover that one could fix one's sail at an oblique angle with the mid-line of the s.h.i.+p, and play off rudder against sail to lay a course with the wind on the quarter or even abeam and not dead astern.

But there was as important an invention as the sail--that of the oar. We are so familiar with it, that we do not realize all it means. Yet it is a notable fact that whole races of men who navigate river, lake, and sea, successfully and boldly, never hit upon the principle of the oar till they were taught it by Europeans, and could of themselves get no further than the paddle. The oar, with its leverage, its capacity for making the very weight of the crew become a motive power, became in more senses than one the great instrument of progress on the sea. It gave the s.h.i.+p a power of manoeuvring independently of the wind, the same power that is the essence of advantage in steam propulsion. The centuries during which the sailing s.h.i.+p was the chief reliance of navigation and commerce were, after all, an episode between the long ages when the oar-driven galley was the typical s.h.i.+p, and the present age of steam beginning less than a hundred years ago.

Sails were an occasional help to the early navigator. Our songs of the sea call them the "white wings" of the s.h.i.+p. For the Greek poet aeschylus, the wings of the s.h.i.+p were the long oars. The trader creeping along the coast or working from island to island helping himself when the wind served with his sail, and having only a small crew, could not afford much oar-power, though he had often to trust to it. But for the fighting s.h.i.+p, oar-power and speed were as important as mechanical horse-power is for the wars.h.i.+ps of the twentieth century. So the war galley was built longer than the trader, to make room for as many oars as possible on either side. In the Mediterranean in those early days, as with the Vikings of later centuries, the "Long s.h.i.+p" meant the s.h.i.+p of war.

It is strange to reflect that all through human history war has been a greater incentive to s.h.i.+pbuilding progress than peaceful commerce. For those early navigators the prizes to be won by fighting and raiding were greater than any that the more prosaic paths of trade could offer. The fleets that issued from the Delta of the Nile were piratical squadrons, that were the terrors of the Mediterranean coasts. The Greek, too, like the Norseman, began his career on the sea with piracy. The Athenian historian tells of days when it was no offence to ask a seafaring man, "Are you a pirate, sir?" The first Admirals of the Eastern Mediterranean had undoubtedly more likeness to Captain Kidd and "Blackbeard" than to Nelson and Collingwood. Later came the time when organized Governments in the Greek cities and on the Phoenician coast kept fleets on the land-locked sea to deal with piracy and protect peaceful commerce. But the prizes that allured the corsair were so tempting, that piracy revived again and again, and even in the late days of the Roman Republic the Consul Pompey had to conduct a maritime war on a large scale to clear the sea of the pirates.

Of the early naval wars of the Mediterranean--battles of more or less piratical fleets, or of the war galleys of coast and island states--we have no clear record, or no vestige of a record. Egyptians, Phoenicians, Cretans, men of the rich island state of which we have only recently found the remains in buried palaces, Greeks of the Asiatic mainland, and their Eastern neighbours, Greeks of the islands and the Peninsula, Illyrians of the labyrinth of creek and island that fringes the Adriatic, Sicilians and Carthaginians, all had their adventures and battles on the sea, in the dim beginnings of history. Homer has his catalogue of s.h.i.+ps set forth in stately verse, telling how the Greek chieftains led 120,000 warriors embarked on 1100 galleys to the siege of Troy. But no hostile fleet met them, if indeed the great armament ever sailed, as to which historians and critics dispute. One must pa.s.s on for centuries after Homer's day to find reliable and detailed records of early naval war. The first great battle on the sea, of which we can tell the story, was the fight in the Straits of Salamis, when Greek and Persian strove for the mastery of the near East.

King Darius had found that his hold on the Greek cities of Asia Minor was insecure so long as they could look for armed help to their kindred beyond the Archipelago, and he had sent his satraps to raid the Greek mainland.

That first invasion ended disastrously at Marathon. His son, Xerxes, took up the quarrel and devoted years to the preparation not of a raid upon Europe, but of an invasion in which the whole power of his vast empire was to be put forth by sea and land.

It was fortunate for Greece that the man who then counted for most in the politics of Athens was one who recognized the all-importance of sea-power, though it is likely that at the outset all he had in mind was that the possession of an efficient fleet would enable his city to exert its influence on the islands and among the coast cities to the exclusion of the military power of its rival Sparta. When it was proposed that the product of the silver mines of Laurium should be distributed among the Athenian citizens, it was Themistocles who persuaded his fellow-countrymen that a better investment for the public wealth would be found in the building and equipment of a fleet. He used as one of his arguments the probability that the Persian King would, sooner or later, try to avenge the defeat of Marathon. A no less effective argument was the necessity of protecting their growing commerce. Athens looked upon the sea, and that sea at once divided and united the scattered Greek communities who lived on the coasts and islands of the Archipelago. It was the possession of the fleet thus acquired that enabled Themistocles and Athens to play a decisive part in the crisis of the struggle with Asia.

It was in the spring of B.C. 480 that the march from Asia Minor began. The vast mult.i.tude gathered from every land in Western Asia, from the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and the wild mountain plateaux of the Indian border, was too numerous to be transported in any fleet that even the Great King could a.s.semble. For seven days and nights it poured across the floating bridge that swayed with the current of the Dardanelles, a bridge that was a wonder of early military engineering, and the making of which would tax the resources of the best army of to-day. Then it marched by the coast-line through what is now Roumelia and Thessaly. It ate up the supplies of the lands through which it pa.s.sed. If it was to escape famine it must keep in touch with the s.h.i.+ps that crossed and recrossed the narrow seas, bringing heavy cargoes of food and forage from the ports of Asia, and escorted by squadrons of long war galleys.

Every Greek city had been warned of the impending danger. Even those who remembered Marathon, the day when a few thousand spearmen had routed an Asiatic horde outnumbering them tenfold, realized that any force that now could be put in the field would be overwhelmed by this human tide of a million fighting men. But there was one soldier-statesman who saw the way to safety, and grasped the central fact of the situation. This was Themistocles the Athenian, the chief man of that city, against which the first fury of the attack would be directed. No doubt it was he who inspired the prophetess of Delphi with her mysterious message that "the Athenians must make for themselves wooden walls," and he supplied the explanation of the enigma.

The Persian must be met not on the land, but in "wooden walls" upon the sea. Victory upon that element would mean the destruction of the huge army on land. The greater its numbers the more helpless would be its position.

It could not live upon "the country"; there must be a continual stream of sea-borne supplies arriving from Asia, and this would be interrupted and cease altogether once the Greeks were masters of the sea.

The Athens of the time was not the wonderful city that arose in later years, embellished by the masterpieces of some of the greatest architects and artists the world has ever known. The houses huddled round the foot of the citadel hill--the Acropolis--which was crowned with rudely built primitive temples. But the people whose home it was were startled by the proposal of Themistocles that their city should be abandoned to the enemy without one blow struck in its defence. Not Athens only, but every village and farm in the surrounding country was to be deserted. Men, women, and children, horses and cattle, were all to be conveyed across the narrow strait to the island of Salamis, which was to be the temporary refuge of the citizens of Athens and of the country-folk of Attica.

Would they ever return to their ruined homes and devastated lands, where they would find houses burned, and vines and olives cut down? Could they even hope to maintain themselves in Salamis? Would it not be better to fight in defence of their homes even against desperate odds and meet their fate at once, instead of only deferring the evil day? It was no easy task for the man of the moment to persuade his fellow-countrymen to adopt his own far-sighted plans. Even when most of them had accepted his leaders.h.i.+p and were obeying his orders, a handful of desperate men refused to go. They took refuge on the hill of the Acropolis, and acting upon the literal meaning of the oracle toiled with axe and hammer, building up wooden barriers before the gates of the old citadel.

Everywhere else the city and the country round were soon deserted. The people streamed down to the sh.o.r.e and were ferried over to Salamis, where huts of straw and branches rose up in wide extended camps to shelter the crowds that could find no place in the island villages. In every wood on either sh.o.r.e trees were being felled. In every creek s.h.i.+pwrights were busy night and day building new s.h.i.+ps or refitting old. To every Greek seaport messages had been sent, begging them to send to the Straits of Salamis as many s.h.i.+ps, oarsmen, and fighting men as they could muster.

Slowly the Persian army moved southward through Thessaly. A handful of Spartans, under Leonidas, had been sent forward to delay the Persian advance. They held the Pa.s.s of Thermopylae, between the eastern shoulder of Mount aeta and the sea. It was a hopeless position. To fight there at all with such an insignificant force was a mistake. But the Government of Sparta, slaves to tradition, could not grasp the idea of the plans proposed by the great Athenian. They were half persuaded to recall Leonidas, but hesitated to act until it was too late. The Spartan chief and his few hundred warriors died at their post in self-sacrificing obedience to the letter of their orders. The Persians poured over the Pa.s.s and inundated the plains of Attica. The few Athenians who had persisted in defending the Acropolis of Athens made only a brief resistance against overwhelming numbers. They were all put to the sword and their fellow-countrymen in the island of Salamis saw far off the pall of smoke that hung over their city, where temples and houses alike were sacked and set on fire by the victors.

The winds and waves had already been fighting for the Greeks. The Persian war fleet of 1200 great s.h.i.+ps had coasted southwards by the sh.o.r.es of Thessaly till they neared the group of islands off the northern point of Euboea. Their scouts reported a Greek fleet to be lying in the channel between the large island and the mainland. Night was coming on, and the Persians anch.o.r.ed in eight long lines off Cape Sepias. As the sun rose there came one of those sudden gales from the eastward that are still the terror of small craft in the Archipelago. A modern sailor would try to beat out to seaward and get as far as possible from the dangerous sh.o.r.e, but these old-world seamen dreaded the open sea. They tried to ride out the gale, but anchors dragged and hundreds of s.h.i.+ps were piled in shattered ma.s.ses on the sh.o.r.e. Some were stranded in positions where they could be repaired and refloated as the weather cleared up; but by the evening of the third day, when at last the wind fell, only eight hundred galleys of the Persian armada were still in seaworthy fighting condition.

Here, as on other occasions, the very numbers of the Persian fleet proved a source of danger to it. The harbours that could give shelter to this mult.i.tude of s.h.i.+ps were very few and far between, nor was it an easy matter to find that other refuge of the ancient navigator--a beach of easy slope and sufficiently wide extent to enable the s.h.i.+ps to be dragged out of the water and placed high and dry beyond the reach of the angriest waves. The fact that s.h.i.+ps were beached and hauled up the sh.o.r.e during bad weather, and in winter, limited their size, and in both the Persian and the Greek fleets there probably was not a s.h.i.+p much bigger than the barges we see on our ca.n.a.ls, or as big as some of the largest sea-going barges.

The typical wars.h.i.+p of the period of the Persian War was probably not more than eighty or a hundred feet long, narrow, and nearly flat-bottomed. At the bow and stern there was a strongly built deck. Between this p.o.o.p and forecastle a lighter deck ran fore and aft, and under this were the stations of the rowers. The bow was strengthened with plates of iron or bra.s.s, and beams of oak, to enable it to be used as a ram, and the stem rose above the deck level and was carved into the head of some bird or beast. There was a light mast which could be rigged up when the wind served, and carried a cross-yard and a square sail. Mast and yard were taken down before going into action.

The Greeks called their war galleys _trieres_, the Romans _triremes_, and these names are generally explained as meaning that the s.h.i.+ps were propelled by three banks or rows of oars placed one above the other on either side. The widely accepted theory of how they were worked is that the seats of the rowers were placed, not directly above each other, but that those who worked the lowest and shortest oars were close to the side of the s.h.i.+p, the men for the middle range of oars a little above them and further inboard, and the upper tier of rowers still higher and near the centre-line of the s.h.i.+p. An endless amount of erudition and research has been expended on this question; but most of those who have dealt with it have been cla.s.sical scholars possessing little or no practical acquaintance with seafaring conditions, and none of their proposed arrangements of three banks of oars looks at all likely to be workable and effective. A practical test of the theory was made by Napoleon III when his "History of Julius Caesar" was being prepared. He had a trireme constructed and tried upon the Seine. There were three banks of oars, but though the fitting and arrangement was changed again and again under the joint advice of cla.s.sical experts and practical seamen, no satisfactory method of working the superposed banks of oars could be devised.

The probability is that no such method of working was ever generally employed, and that the belief in the existence of old-world navies made up of s.h.i.+ps with tier on tier of oars on either side is the outcome of a misunderstanding as to the meaning of a word. _Trieres_ and _trireme_ seems at first glance to mean triple-oared, in the sense of the oars being triplicated; but there are strong arguments for the view that it was not the oars but the oarsmen, who were arranged in "threes." If this view is correct, the ancient wars.h.i.+p was a galley with a single row of long oars on either side, and three men pulling together each heavy oar. We know that in the old navies of the Papal States and the Republics of Venice and Genoa in the Middle Ages and the days of the Renaissance, and in the royal galleys of the old French monarchy, there were no s.h.i.+ps with superposed banks of oars, but there were galleys known as "triremes," "quadriremes," and "pentaremes," driven by long oars each worked by three, four, or five rowers. It is at least very likely that this was the method adopted in the wars.h.i.+ps of still earlier times.

A trireme of the days of the Persian War with fifty or sixty oars would thus have a crew of 150 or 180 rowers. Add to this some fifty or sixty fighting men and we have a total crew of over two hundred. In the Persian navies the rowers were mostly slaves, like the galley slaves of later times. They were chained to their oars, and kept in order or roused to exertion by the whip of their taskmasters. To train them to work together effectively required a long apprentices.h.i.+p, and in rough water their work was especially difficult. To miss the regular time of the stroke was dangerous, for the long oars projecting far inboard would knock down and injure the nearest rowers, unless all swung accurately together. The flat-bottomed galleys rolled badly in a heavy sea, and in rough weather rowing was fatiguing and even perilous work.

Some two hundred men in a small s.h.i.+p meant crowded quarters, and lack of room everywhere except on the fighting deck. But as the fleets hugged the sh.o.r.e, and generally lay up for the night, the crews could mostly land to cook, eat, and sleep. In the Persian s.h.i.+ps belonging to many nations, and some of them to the Greek cities of Asia, Xerxes took the precaution of having at least thirty picked Persian warriors in each crew. Their presence was intended to secure the fidelity of the rest.

In the Greek fleet the rowers were partly slaves, partly freemen impressed or hired for the work. Then there were a few seamen, fishermen, or men who in the days of peace manned the local coasting craft. The chiefs of this navigating party were the _keleustes_, who presided over the rowers and gave the signal for each stroke, and the pilot, who was supposed to have a knowledge of the local waters and of wind and weather, and who acted as steersman, handling alone, or with the help of his a.s.sistants, the long stern oar that served as a rudder. The fighting men were not sailors, but soldiers embarked to fight afloat, and their military chief commanded the s.h.i.+p, with the help of the pilot. For more than two thousand years this division between the sailor and the fighting element in navies continued throughout the world. The fighting commander and the sailing-master were two different men, and the captain of a man-of-war was often a landsman.

In the Greek fleet which lay sheltered in the narrows, behind the long island of Euboea while the Persians were battling with the tempest off Cape Sepias, the Admiral was the Spartan Eurybiades, a veteran General, who knew more about forming a phalanx of spearmen than directing the movements of a fleet. The military reputation of his race had secured for him the chief command, though of the whole fleet of between three and four hundred triremes, less than a third had been provided by Sparta and her allies, and half of the armada was formed of the well-equipped Athenian fleet, commanded by Themistocles in person. As the storm abated the fleets faced each other in the strait north of Euboea. In the Persian armada the best s.h.i.+ps were five long galleys commanded by an Amazon queen, Artemisia of Halicarna.s.sus, a Greek fighting against Greeks. She scored the first success, swooping down with her squadron on a Greek galley that had ventured to scout along the Persian front in the grey of the morning.

Attacked by the five the s.h.i.+p was taken, and the victors celebrated their success by hanging the commander over the prow of his s.h.i.+p, cutting his throat and letting his blood flow into the sea, an offering to the G.o.ds of the deep. The cruel deed was something that inspired no particular sense of horror in those days of heathen war. It was probably not on account of this piece of barbarity, but out of their anger at being opposed by a woman, and a Greek woman, that the allied leaders of Greece set a price on the head of the Amazon queen; but no one ever succeeded in qualifying to claim it.

The Persians, hoping to gain an advantage from their superior numbers, now detached a squadron which was to coast along the eastern sh.o.r.es of Euboea, enter the strait at its southern end, and fall on the rear of the Greeks, while the main body attacked them in front. Eurybiades and Themistocles had early intelligence of this movement, but were not alarmed by it. Shortly before sunset the Greeks bore down on the Persians, attacked them in the narrow waters where their numbers could not tell, sank some thirty s.h.i.+ps by ramming them, and then drew off as the night came on.

It was a wild night. The Greeks had hardly regained their sheltered anchorage when the wind rose, lightning played round the mountain crests on either hand, the thunder rolled and the rain came down in torrents. The main Persian fleet, in a less sheltered position, found it difficult to avoid disaster, and the crews were horrified at seeing as the lightning lit up the sea ma.s.ses of debris and swollen corpses of drowned men drifting amongst them as the currents brought the wreckage of the earlier storm floating down from beyond Cape Sepias. The hundred s.h.i.+ps detached to round the south point of Euboea were still slowly making their way along its rocky eastern coast. Caught in the midnight storm most of them drove ash.o.r.e and were dashed to pieces.

In the morning the sea was still rough, but the Greeks came out of the strait, and, without committing themselves to a general action, fell upon the nearest s.h.i.+ps, the squadron of Cilicia, and sank and captured several of them, retiring when the main fleet began to close upon them. On the third day the sea was calm and the Persians tried to force the narrows by a frontal attack. There was some hard fighting and loss on both sides, but the Greeks held their own. As the sun set the Persians rowed back towards their anchorage inside Cape Sepias.

When the sun rose again the Greek fleet had disappeared. Eurybiades and Themistocles had agreed in the night after the battle that the time was come to abandon the defence of the Euboean Strait and retire to the waters of Salamis. The Persian army was now flooding the mainland with its myriads of fighting men, and was master of Attica. A fleet, depending so much on the land for supplies and for rest for its crews, could not maintain itself in the straits when the Persians held the mainland and were in a position to seize also the island of Euboea. Before sunrise the Greek s.h.i.+ps were working their way in long procession through the Strait of Negropont. Early in the day they began to pa.s.s one by one the narrows at Chalcis, now spanned by a bridge. Then the strait widened, and there were none to bar their way to the open sea, and round Cape Sunium to their sheltered station in the straits behind the island of Salamis.

They had been reinforced on the way, and they now numbered 366 fighting s.h.i.+ps. Those of Sparta and the Peloponnesus were 89, the Athenian fleet 180, while 97 more were supplied by the Greek islands, some of the s.h.i.+ps from Melos and the Cyclades being penteconters, large vessels whose long oars were each manned by five rowers. Losses by storm and battle had reduced the Persian armada to some six hundred effective s.h.i.+ps. The odds were serious, but not desperate.

But while the Persian fleet was directed by a single will, there were divided counsels among the Greeks. Eurybiades had most of the leaders on his side when he argued that Athens was hopelessly lost, and the best hope for Greece was to defend the Peloponnesus by holding the isthmus of Corinth with what land forces could be a.s.sembled and removing the fleet to the waters of the neighbouring waters to co-operate in the defence.

Themistocles, on the other hand, shrank from the idea of abandoning the refugees in the island of Salamis, and he regarded the adjacent straits as the best position in which the Greeks could give battle. There, as in the channel of Euboea, the narrow waters would do something to nullify the Persian advantage of numbers. For the Greeks, formed in several lines extending from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, could only be attacked by equal numbers.

Only the leading s.h.i.+ps of the attack would be in action at any given moment, and it would not matter how many hundred more were crowded behind them. With a column of spearmen on land the weight of the rearward ranks, formed in a serried phalanx, would force onward those in front. But with a column of s.h.i.+ps formed in several successive lines in narrow waters any attempt of the rearward s.h.i.+ps to press forward would mean confusion and disaster to themselves and those that formed the leading lines. This would have been true even of s.h.i.+ps under sail, but in battle the war galleys were oar-driven, and as the s.h.i.+ps jammed together there would be entangled oars, and rowers flung from their benches with broken heads and arms. Better discipline, more thorough fighting-power on the Greek side, would mean that the leading s.h.i.+ps of their fleet would deal effectually with their nearest adversaries, while the rearward s.h.i.+ps would rest upon their oars and plunge into the melee only where disaster to a leading s.h.i.+p left an opening.

A doubtful story says that Themistocles, foreseeing that if the battle was long delayed the Spartan party would carry their point and withdraw to the isthmus, ran the risk of sending a message to King Xerxes, urging him to attack at once, hinting at a defection of the Athenian fleet, and telling him that if he acted without delay the Greeks were at his mercy, and that they were so terrified that they were thinking chiefly of how they might escape. Herodotus tells of a council of war of the Persian leaders at which the fighting Queen Artemisia stood alone in advising delay. She told the King that in overrunning northern Greece he had done enough for one campaign. Let him settle down for winter quarters in Attica and he would see the Greek armament, already divided by jealousies and quarrels, break up and disperse. He could then prepare quietly for the conquest of the Peloponnesus in the spring. But Xerxes was more flattered by the opinion of the satraps who told him that he had only to stretch out his hands to destroy the Greek fleet and make himself undisputed master of the sea. And, just as Themistocles was despairing of being able to keep the fleet at Salamis, news came that the Persians had decided to attack. The news was brought by Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, who had been unjustly exiled from Athens some years before, but now in the moment of his country's danger ran the blockade of the Persians in a s.h.i.+p of aegina, and came to throw in his lot with his fellow-citizens. For the Greeks to set out for the isthmus under these circ.u.mstances would be to risk having to meet superior numbers in the open sea. All now agreed that the fate of Greece was to be decided in the waters of Salamis.

Xerxes looked forward to the coming struggle with a.s.sured hope of victory, and prepared to enjoy the spectacle of the disaster that was about to fall upon his enemies.