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 assistants, 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 ship, 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 ships were five long galleys commanded by an Amazon queen, Artemisia of Halicarnassus, 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 ship was taken, and the victors celebrated their success by hanging the commander over the prow of his ship, cutting his throat and letting his blood flow into the sea, an offering to the gods 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.