Chapter 548: Some Fancy Iron Rods
Some always say that the most romantic thing for a sailor who lives his life on the seas is to be buried by the sea through sprinkling his ashes into the seas.
I am no sailor, so I don’t know if it is true.
But those sailors who are already beneath the water certainly might not agree to this, as some of them still have their eyes wide open, even after they have lost their very last grip of air, laying low on the sea bed, with a bunch of herrings swimming in circles around these giant creatures wandering where did they ever come from.
Above the surface of the sea, the two gigantic fleets, the largest in the entire east Mediterranean, has come clashing with one another. The one on the left is the Venetians approaching in a V shaped formation trying to form an encirclement to the Romans on three sides, while the Romans still kept their arrow formation trying to maximise their contact area to enlarge the effect of their artilleries. Antonius has tossed in every single warship he has onto this gambling table called war, and there can only be two outcomes with this, either Abraham successfully defeats this Venetian fleet and pushes the Venetian influence out of Romania, or Abraham gets defeated and the past fifteen plus years of hard work by Antonius and his crew in building the navy shall perish alongside with these ships, and then the Romans would never be able to compete with the Venetians on the seas for the next hundred years to come.
Abraham gulped as he watches the two fleets comes in closer and closer, before him numerous scout ships and pioneer ships have already started clashing trying to push the other side out of the way, there have already been appalling news coming from the other ships that these Venetians do have Greek fire siphons too mounted on their ships, which does not come as a surprise at all to Abraham, as he has already been warned by Abdullah about this.
"Don admiral..." A fellow captain under Abraham’s command approached nervously. "Look..."
"I know." Abraham interrupted.
Abraham knows what his captain wants to say, because he too saw the Venetians tossing numerous wooden barrels into the seas. Of course, these barrels don’t contain milk and honey inside them to be sent to the Romans as a gesture of good will, there got to be something much more sinister inside them; either gun powder or oil.
"What do we do?" The captain asked again.
"The enemies are obviously trying to mess up our formations, gentleman." Abraham raised his spear and pointed ahead. "Do not worry about these wood barrels, our ships have been reinforced with specially made lumbers from Africa on the front hulk that are fireproof, I don’t believe that the Venetians have someone who can invent a kind of sea mine that is even more damaging than our mastermind Orhan and Jacob."
"But sir, they have Greek fire, and if these barrels do contain oil..."
"Continue sailing, captain, we cannot afford to get our formation messed up, remember we will surely be defeated if the enemies screwed up our battle formations and push us into a situation of one ship against multiple enemy ships. Even if these barrels contain oil, we must persist."
"Aye sir!"
The gigantic ships sailed pass these wooden barrels knocking them into pieces, nothing happened, and no one can really see what these wooden barrels contains under the pitch darkness. It almost seemed like these wooden barrels are just tossed here to scare the Romans a bit.
By now the fight between the smaller ships have already ended, with the Romans managing to achieve a bitter victory for the first half of the battle by pushing these Venetians out of the way, ramming one after another ship into half, leaving the stage set for the bigger fellas. The Venetians started tossing even more wooden barrels into the seas that came cracking open, and finally one wooden barrel came into contact with the flagship and Abraham finally managed to smell what is really inside these barrels, just as he expected, it is oil.
"Archers get ready!" Abraham yelled, even before the ship have entered a valid range. "Target the front deck of enemy ships, one round per twenty seconds, don’t stop till contact!"
The signallers had to use a primitive method to pass the admiral’s orders: by shouting. And looking at the sheer size of Abraham’s fleet it took almost ten minutes for this piece of order to be passed to every single ship. By the time the last ship has received the order and has entered their range, the lead ship has already finished more than five rounds of shooting.
Although Abraham has stated to this captain that their ships are made of fire proof materials, but one thing he did not mention is that most of the gun powder used to fire projectiles in the artilleries are in fact, stored in one of the separate cabin in the base hulk of the ship just slightly above the water level according to the design. It is intended that through this design the gun powder would not have any violent reactions creating a spark that might detonating the entire ship.
However, things might not be the same if the Venetians starts to use their version of Greek fire, as although the wood itself might be fireproof, the temperature of the water will still rise up due to the Greek fire’s special ability to burn on water surface, and the heat will be transformed to the wood eventually through thermal conduction, which in turn, will be transferred to these highly instable gunpowder lying there quietly in that cabin.
Thus, Abraham made this order to make his archers pour their arrows onto the front decks of the Venetians, it is to form a suppressive barrage to stop these Venetians from being able to use the Greek Fire Siphons mounted on the front deck of their ships, until his fleet arrives at the broadside position and start destroying these Venetians with their artilleries.
Ever after seeing the sheer size of the Venetian fleet coming in two directions, Abraham has betted all of his hope on his line of artilleries mounted at the side of his ship. Other than this, he see no way he can possibly win this battle.
One might say that ’Hey, you still got Greek fire! Those Venetians are not Greek, you are the true Greek!’ But the wind direction at the current moment is completely not in the favour of Abraham and his fleet and looking at how closely packed his ships are, if he is to use Greek fire now, the fire would most likely be spreading among his own fleet first before it reaches the Venetians.
In the end Abraham reached his goal, the Venetians did not manage to start their Greek fire successfully, and their archers are obviously suppressed being unable to launch an organised return fire on their decks. This all must be thanked to Orban’s invention of a way to mass produce a simple structured crossbow for the sailors, that enables them to require less training and much less strength when reloading and firing as compared to their archers’ counterparts.
Perhaps the Venetians can only answer for themselves why did they not add a roof or barrier on top of their Greek fire siphons protecting their operators.
In fact, that is exactly what Benedetto is doing now, as he is using his clear rowdy Italian vulgarities to accuse each and every ship manufacturer in the island for not adding a shield or something resulting in the mass elimination of his treasured chemists and operators. Although he is clear that the Venetian ship manufacturers run their business on the value of ’although quality is a must, but quantity is a priority’ because these ships are all used as armed merchants ship during peace times, only used for war when mobilised. Which ship manufacturer would want to waste additional wood and time to build an additional roof on their ships to lose their efficiency to their competitors.
But it is clear, the Venetians are now unable to use the siphons mounted at their front deck, and now they shall have to embrace for impact, Benedetto is still confident though, for he believes that these fellow Venetian sailors who spent their life making a living running trades on the seas, are natural warriors when it comes to exchanging blades on the decks as well, at least better than those sitting ducks on those Greek ships who might not even know how to swim.
Filled with confidence, Benedetto ordered his ships to get ready for close quartered battle.
But soon he saw a line of sticks being pushed out of what is seems to be windows opened on the sides of the Greek ships that is black in colour, a thing he has never seen before.
