The length of the galleon was three times that of her beam, whereas the ordinary merchantman was only twice her own beam, thus preserving the old distinction that we saw in classical time existing between the long ship and the round ship. Yet the newer class of Elizabethan merchantman was getting longer, influenced by the experience gained on the long voyages across the Atlantic. It had been in Italy, the great home of maritime matters in earlier days, that the galleon had first been built. The galleon was in fact the child of necessity. The Mediterranean possessed the galley-type from very early times as we have already seen; she had, as we have also seen, the “round” merchant type. But as time went on a demand arose for a compromise between the two. Able to hold as much cargo, and more, than the old rounships, yet not utterly helpless like them in calms and narrow waters, the galleons were yet to be of such a kind as to be capable of acting with the galleys in war time. So they were made not as long but with more beam than the galleys, with a built-up structure fore and aft and—let us note this carefully—though they were sailing ships they had at first auxiliary oar-propulsion. The smaller English galleons also retained their oars for a long time. [Illustration: FIG. 52. THE SPANISH ARMADA COMING UP CHANNEL.] The immediate ancestor of the English galleon was the Italian merchantman that traded between Venice and London. This had three masts with a square sail on the foremast, but lateen on the main and mizzen. She carried also oars as auxiliaries. Afterwards, by degrees the oars were dispensed with, so that by the end of the sixteenth century the galleon was a purely sailing vessel with sometimes two and sometimes three decks, while the galleasse had oars as well. Her special claim was that she was both faster and more weatherly than the older type of warship. English shipwrights understood a galleasse to be similar to a galleon but with more length in proportion to her beam, though strictly speaking the galleasse should designate a large ship with high freeboard, using oars as well as sails. The ships, however, that fitted this description were known to them by the name of “bastard galleasses.” The galleasse was sometimes flush-decked and minus both poop and forecastle and never so highly charged (_i.e._, with such high decks at stern and bow) as the galleon. A good illustration will be found in the foreground of Fig. 52, which contains two of these with their oars out. This picture represents the Spanish Armada coming up channel when first sighted off the Lizard. The illustration has been taken from one of the plates in “The Tapestry Hangings of the House of Lords,” engraved by John Pine, London, in 1739. If the reader will pardon a short digression it may not be out of place to say a few words in explanation of these engravings.