It was not till near noon that at last the Western fleet closed with the Allies. The ships that first encountered were nearly all Roman vessels, for the Egyptian and Asiatic squadrons were not in the front line of Antony's fleet, and the brunt of the attack fell upon the sluggish giants that had been so elaborately fortified with booms in the water and towers and breastworks on their decks. As the attacking ships came into range, arrows, javelins, and stones flew hurtling through the air from the line of floating castles, missiles that did not, however, inflict much loss, for the men on the decks of the attacking fleet crouched behind bulwarks or covered themselves with their oblong shields, and their bowmen made some show of reply to the heavier discharge of engines of war on Antony's ships and to the more rapid shooting of the Asiatic archers. The days were still far off when sea fights would be decided by "fire," in the sense of the discharge of projectiles. Could the tall ships have rammed the smaller and lower galleys of Octavian and Agrippa they would certainly have sent them to the bottom--a sunken ship for each blow of the brazen beak. But attempts at ramming were soon found by Antony's captains to be both useless and dangerous. It was not merely that their lighter and nimbler opponents easily avoided the onset. The well-trained crews evaded every attempt to run them down or grapple them, chose their own distance as they hovered round their huge adversaries, and presently as they gained confidence from impunity, began successfully to practise the manoeuvre of eluding the ram, and using their own bows, not for a blow against the hull of the heavier ship, but to sweep away and shatter her long oars, that were too heavy to be saved by drawing them in or unshipping them. Successful attack on the oars was equivalent to disabling an adversary's engines in a modern sea-fight. And when a ship was thus crippled, her opponents could choose their own time to concentrate several of their ships for a joint attempt to take her by boarding.