Oared Galleass

A galleass distinguished by its retained banks of oars, which let it move and turn in a calm or against the wind where a pure sailing warship lay helpless. Its oars were worked several rowers to an oar (a scaloccio) rather than one man per oar, because the hull was too heavy for the older alla sensile arrangement. That independence from the wind let the four galleasses England faced in the 1588 Spanish Armada campaign work the Channel calms, though their bulk still left them slow under oar alone. The pure sailing galleon displaced the type by the early seventeenth century.