Denying Thermopylae - taken from the Newsfeed section

[floofthegoof]

Philip Haithornwight wrote in the "Napoleonic Sourcebook" that unless their armory was blown up wooden vessels did not sink.

Just for the record - they did! In extremely large numbers all over the world.

The Uluburun wreck, Vasa, Mary Rose and Batavia spring immedately to mind and there are countless other examples. However, whether we would expect to find wrecks of Greek triremes conveniently littered on the sea bed off Thermoplylae or Salamis is another matter entirely.

A thing will sink if its mass is greater than the water displaced by its volume. A wooden ship loaded with iron or bronze cannon would have a much better chance to sink than a tririme I would think.

However, the reason ships in Napoleon's time tended not to sink is because the weaponry of the time generally did not do damage below the water line. If there was irrepairable damage beneath the water line, or if the lower gunports were left open in heavy seas, the ship would sink quite readily. These ships were loaded down with metal of course.

Since we have no idea what the exact nature of the trireme's cargo might have been, obviously we cannot use the absence of a ship graveyard as evidence of absence of a great sea battle. Also, without alot of ship damaging weaponry besides the ram, I would imagine that the key to victory would be killing the men on board, in most cases leaving the ship mostly intact. There could well be a couple of sunken ship parts down there somewhere, but even with several hundred triremes fighting it out I can't imagine more than one or two sinking if any. I think even at Trafalgar only one ship actually sunk during the battle.