If recounting the events of Norman naval history is challenging owing to the lack of maritime expertise among the relevant chroniclers, then describing the naval infrastructure, that is, the fleet itself, is problematic in the extreme. First of all, there is very little documentation on the matter specific to the Normans. There are no medieval equivalents to the Royal Navy's Admiralty Manual of Seamanship or Jane's Fighting Ships. There is no extant handbook of naval organization from the period and, pending further analysis of the Yenikapi galleys, no warship of the eleventh or twelfth century has ever been discovered. The few pictorial representations of medieval ships that exist are simplified, primitive and not to scale. Verbal descriptions are equally scarce and uniformly inadequate, because contemporary authors almost invariably lacked a knowledge of things nautical and had a penchant for using anachronistic and inaccurate terminology. In other words, we have no precise picture of what Norman vessels of war were like or how they were crewed and commanded. The answers, then, must lie within the Norman modus operandi. These clever, resourceful adventurers were not innovators; they rarely developed techniques and tactics on their own. They were, instead, masters of accommodation and adaptation. They took whatever was available, borrowing or commandeering it from others to make it their own. Accordingly, any understanding of the Norman fleets of the Hauteville era must be inferred from clues gleaned from a number of indirect sources such as Byzantine and Muslim naval practices, medieval maritime archaeology and contemporary documentation on Norman naval campaigns in the Mediterranean.