Are you sure of that? I think I heard that the life expectancy of a galley slave was only a few months, So while a few might have lived on board for years, most did not last that long. Anybody have a real cite on this?
Nope. Reed Stowespent just over 1,100 days at sea without coming in sight of land. He started out with his girlfriend or wife (I forget which) but she left to have a baby after about a year. He did the rest all by himself.
He was an idiot when he started and even idiotier when he finally got home.
There was certainly a high mortality rate, but I would guess that not literally everybody died within months.
Some surely managed to hang in for a considerable amount of time and thus spent more time continuously on board a ship than sailors. At times, sailors were pressed into service, but at least they weren’t chained to their ship.
(BTW, that’s all speculation. I haven’t done actual research on this.)
My grandmothers grandparents were ethnic Germans who lived in southern Russia, in the Volga River colonies. They(and many others) fled the Czarist repeals of concessions granted to their colonist ancestors.
However after years in Canada, my g-g-grandfather decided he wanted to go back. He missed his old home or whatever. Of course, they were just dumb farmers, and nobody had global news of any precision.
G-g-grandmother did not want to go. She plead with him, to no avail. Of course, all their kids and grandkids were in Canada. He was just being an old asshole. Desperate, she pleaded with the Parish priest to intercede. He told her that a woman’s duty was to her husband, and to follow his orders.
So, off they went. Can you imagine how she must have felt?
They arrived back at their old village. Of course, they were not supposed to be there, having snuck out of the country to avoid military service. That didnt really matter of course, because in the time they were gone, the October Revolution happened, and the soviets were in power.
They were busy scapegoating every ethnic minority they could find.
So as you can imagine, they show up, and immediately are detained: “Who are you? What are you doing here? Where did you come from?”
Protestations that they were simple farmers would have been disbelieved. The attestation that this was their village? Preposterous; its a Russian village! It was years later, the remaining Germans had been deported.
“They must be spies.”, I imagine would be the conclusion. Unlikely, but expedient.
Presumably they put him up against a wall (or whatever) and shot him. Her fate was a little different.
She was shipped into Siberia and put to work in a slave labour camp. If I recall, she survived 7 years of that before succumbing to starvation, exposure or disease.
My point? A young galley slave got treated better than that. So I agree with you.
Also: never take marriage advice from a Catholic priest.
“Yeah, mm-hm. Peter, I’m going to need you to train the new guy before you die. So if you could go ahead and do that, that’d be great.”
Reminds of a cartoon I saw once:
“We, the galley slaves, have formed a union and are fighting for the 100-hour work week!”
the captain agreed, but took up waterskiing…
How sad that the answer may very well be those forced to be galley slaves.
I would say yes as long as it didn’t run aground to the point that the floating island is solidly attached to the earth.