The largest and the best-armed galley which at that period ploughed the Mediterranean was the one encountered by Richard Cœur de Lion, according to the historian Matthew Paris, on the 3rd of June, 1191, near the coast of Syria, and which was carrying large reinforcements to the camp of the unbelievers, who were besieging at that time the town of Acre. When the sailors of the English fleet first perceived this gigantic vessel, whose vast hull was painted with the most brilliant colours, whose poop was surmounted with a castellated tower, whose three masts unfurled to the wind an immense expanse of canvas, and whose long oars beat the waves with majestic rhythm, they were surprised, and undecided how to act. Richard, however, ordered his men to attack the floating fortress. His lighter galleys surrounded it on all sides, in spite of the arrows and glass vases showered on them by the dromon. These vases broke when they came in contact with the galleys, and enveloped them in Greek fire. The captain of the Arab craft attempted to sail away from his swarm of assailants, but the wind fell, and half his rowers having been slain by the English arrows, he was forced to accept battle. The galleys skirmished around the dromon, striking it repeated blows with their brazen prows, and making large holes in its sides. At last, after a desperate resistance, the giant was engulfed in the waters with all its defenders. [Illustration: Fig. 69.--A Norman Vessel (Eleventh Century).--Restoration from the Bayeux Tapestry.] A companion craft to the dromon, as before mentioned, was the _pamphile_, which, before disappearing in the fifteenth century, frequently changed its shape and character. Nor must we forget the _chelande_ (Fig. 70), or _sélandre_, which a writer of the eleventh century represents as a ship of extraordinary length, of great speed, possessing two tiers of oars, and a crew of a hundred and fifty men, and which, three centuries later, became a large flat sailing vessel, and was termed _chaland_. The _taride_, a kind of merchant galley with oars, and the _huissier_, the name of which was derived from a _huis_, or large door, which opened in its side in front of the poop to allow of the embarkation of horses, were contemporaneous with the pamphile and with the sélandre; as also was the _chat_ or _chatte_, which William of Tyre mentions in connection with a maritime war which took place in 1121. According to him it was a ram-armed vessel larger than a galley, and carried a hundred oars, each of which was handled by two men. Besides all these there were the _bucentaures_ (Fig. 71), large Venetian galleys, and the _sagettes_, or _saïties_ (arrows), whose names denote their slender shape and speed, and which, with their twelve or fifteen oars on each side, played the same part in the twelfth century as the _baliner_, or _barineal_, and the _brigantin_ played from the fourteenth to the seventeenth.