A most beautiful model of this vessel is to be seen in the
Science and Art Department of the South Kensington Museum.
The nef in its later manifestations became a much more seaworthy vessel
than this, with four masts, the two foremost ones square-rigged and
carrying courses and topsails, the two after ones carrying lateen sails;
the latter from their small size and their proximity to one another could
not have had much effect on the sailing qualities of the ship. The nefs in
the fleet of Don John of Austria in 1571 were rigged in this fashion and
comprised vessels of eight hundred, nine hundred, and even one thousand
tons, while a contemporary English vessel, the _Great Harry_ or _Henri
Grace a Dieu_, was as much as fifteen hundred tons, and carried no less
than one hundred and eighty-four pieces of ordnance. It was from the nef
and the galeasse that the sailing man-of-war arrived by the process of
evolution. The galley in the first instance was the vessel of men who
fought hand to hand, the men in whom personal strength and desperate valour
were blended, who desired nothing so much as to come to close grips with
their enemy. Such rude engines of war as the pierriers, or short cannons
which discharged some forty or fifty pounds of broken stone upon the enemy,
were first mounted in the galley; these were followed by improved artillery
as time went on. But although the galleys eventually carried quite big
guns, as instanced by the forty-eight pounder in the galleys of the Knights
of St.
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