Gunnery and Fighting
GUNNERY WAS A complex discipline, and gunners had a number of increasingly scientific manuals available to them. John Smith included an extensive treatise on gunnery in his Seaman’s Grammar of 1627, and from the 1660s to the 1680s there were several editions of A Light to the Art of Gunnery by the Scot Captain Thomas Binning, who had served chiefly on land but was also gunner of a Dutch ship in the 1650s. Smith demanded that gunners should be competent in both geometry and arithmetic,‘both vulgar and decimal’, and able to calculate square and cube roots. Binning placed a similar emphasis on quite complex mathematical knowledge, without which a gunner could not properly calculate weight of shot, the diameters of gun barrels or trajectories.1
PREPARING TO FIRE
According to Binning’s advice to naval gunners, at least twenty-four cartridges of powder ought to be placed by each gun, half of them filled and half empty. The different types of shot would be laid out in different, easily identifiable cases; ropes, rammers and sponges would be to hand; and bails of water would be placed between the guns. The trucks (wheels) of the gun carriage would be covered in soap.2 More cartridges could be brought up from the powder room by ship’s boys or (from the 1670s) the maimed men allocated to each vessel if their disabilities permitted it.3
AIMING AND RANGE
John Smith suggested aiming the gun by setting up the dispart (aiming device) on the muzzle ring, just above the centre of the gun’s mouth, then making a mark on the highest part of the base ring and, from about two feet behind the breech, bringing the mark on the base ring, the top of the dispart and the target all into one line.4 However, Binning thought it impractical for gunners to employ at sea the sighting tools that their military counterparts used on land, and omitted all mention of the dispart. Instead, Binning suggested that the captain of each gun crew should stand to the left of the gun, place his right foot within the carriage, look down his piece to line up the breech, muzzle and mark, take account of the motion of both his own ship and the enemy (something which Smith ignored), ‘and according as he sees occasion give fire’, remembering hastily to withdraw his right foot before it was trapped by the recoil. The complex mathematical formulae that Binning provided elsewhere in his treatise were clearly of little use in such circumstances; indeed, he devoted only four pages out of 172 to naval gunnery, suggesting it was a rather less scientific exercise than that practised by gunners ashore.5 Nonetheless, even naval gunners would sometimes have to make quite complex geometrical and trigonometrical calculations. Binning cited the example of the bombardment of a fort, with the ship lying about a third of a mile off shore. After calculating the distance from the topmast head to the waterline, the gunner needed to go to the topmast head itself to take a quadrant sighting on the fort, after which he would calculate that he needed to elevate the gun by two degrees to get near the mark.6
The artillery duels of the Anglo-Dutch wars were conducted at very short range, which was usually estimated in terms of musket range rather than yardage. At Solebay in 1672, the two centre squadrons were said to be ‘about a musket shot distance from each other’, so probably well under 300 yards, and a disabled Dutch ship was captured after‘coming within half musket shot of us’.7 The term ‘point blank range’ was used in the seventeenth century, but had a somewhat different meaning from that generally accepted today. It was at most 350 paces, with one pace taken to be five feet, giving a distance of about a third of a mile. With a larger gun ‘point blank’ would be much less; for a demi-cannon it was taken to be 200 paces. It was assumed that gunners would fire only when they were within ‘point blank’ range, and Captain Nathaniel Boteler, writing in the 1630s, claimed that the maximum range for a broadside ought to be ‘musket shot at point blank’.8 The maximum range was academic in practice, as such a shot was hardly likely to be effective. Nevertheless, in one experiment cited by John Smith (albeit one conducted on land), an eight-foot-long saker loaded with three pounds of powder fired a ball 1,125 feet at one degree of elevation, 2,180 feet at five degrees, and 3,150 feet at ten degrees.9
Gun captains using linstocks to fire guns aboard a Fourth Rate.
Gunpowder was mixed from three ingredients, saltpetre (which formed 75 per cent per cent of the whole by 1670), sulphur and charcoal. Attempts to manufacture saltpetre in England were unsuccessful; consequently, it was imported or purchased from those who already held substantial stocks, notably the East India Company, which furnished £10,000 worth in 1666.10 The three ingredients were combined in a complex and dangerous process which involved several stages of crushing, mixing, grinding, pressing, glazing and drying, all carried out in different buildings adjacent to a substantial supply of water, to reduce the risk of explosion.11 Thomas Binning suggested that powder barrels ought to be turned over once a month to ensure that the saltpetre did not sink to the bottom.12 The size of the powder charge required depended on the type of gun: by 1672 a cannon used powder half the weight of the shot, a culverin two-thirds. Charges were usually made up in advance and sealed in cartridges made from canvas or paper, though saltpetre tended to make the latter moist and contributed to a preference for canvas.13 Round shot, in the form of iron cannonballs, was the most common projectile, but ships also carried ‘bar shot’, dumbbell-shaped and for use against rigging; ‘chain shot’, two balls joined by a chain, again for use against rigging; and ‘grape shot’ and ‘case shot’, small balls placed in a canvas bag and a can respectively, which were used against personnel.14 Even older technology was still employed: 400 ‘fire arrows’ were ordered in June 1666.15 Incendiary shells known as ‘fire shot’ were also used in some ships during the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars, and they successfully destroyed two ships, the Hof van Zealand and Duivenvorde, during the Four Days’ Battle of 1666.16
PERFORMANCE
In the 1673 campaign, the fleet as a whole seems to have expended only a quarter to a third of its powder in each of the three battles, although the situation varied greatly from ship to ship. Even the Prince, one of the ships most heavily engaged during the battle of the Texel on 11 August, expended only 211 barrels out of 606; on the other hand, the Royal Katherine used all the shot for her two upper tiers during the second battle of Schooneveld (4 June).17 It is difficult to translate these figures into a rate of fire by the hour. Some sources imply that fairly rapid fire was sometimes attained; Barlow observed of the last day of the Four Days’ Battle that the British fleet ‘plied their cannon so quick and fierce’ for five hours that the Dutch turned and fled, and John Narbrough said of the battle of Solebay that the British fire was so fast that the Dutch dared not attempt to board.18 At the Gabbard in 1653, one observer noted that the fleet ‘fired very much . broadside to broadside’, and stated that between thirty-four and thirty-six were plying on the Dutch at once, which suggests a fairly continuous rate of fire.19 At the St James’s Day fight in 1666, the flagship Royal Charles came within ‘minion shot’ before the order to fire was given, ‘which was obeyed by a whole broadside … we continued firing without intermissions for a good space, edging closer and closer till at last we came within half a musket shot or rather more at which time our small shot fired and so continued for a half hour or more’ before a fireship attack took place, after which the cannonade continued for three and a half hours.20 The British fleet in that battle was said to have expended an average of at least twenty rounds per ship; presumably some of those at the heart of the action, like the Royal Charles, fired far more.21
Averages are deceptive, as there were often long pauses during battles (for instance, during the Four Days’ Battle and the Texel) where fleets were manoeuvring to regain position and no firing took place. On the whole, though, the evidence seems to suggest that the most heavily engaged ships may have fired at least half a dozen rounds an hour, probably rather more at the height of an engagement. The bombardments were certainly often ferocious enough to shatter some of the guns. Eleven guns broke on the Second Rate Unicorn during the Four Days’ Battle of 1666, including five of her main armament, the 32-pounder demi-cannon.22 Gunnery was an innately dangerous business, as Pepys found out even before he took up his post at the Navy Board. On 22 May 1660 he was given (or else, being Pepys, demanded) the opportunity to fire the gun closest to his cabin on the Naseby, as part of a royal salute for Charles II: ‘but holding my head too much over the gun, I have almost spoiled my right eye’.23
PRACTICE AND PREPARATION
Peacetime training in fleet manoeuvres was simply unrealistic in the seventeenth century. Significant numbers of the larger ships were set out only in wartime, and the formation of the line of battle and other manoeuvres could be practised only in the weeks or days between the fleet’s sailing from its anchorages and its engagement with the enemy. In 1672 the combined Anglo-French fleet was together for only twenty-one days before it fought the battle of Solebay on 28 May, and seems to have formed its line of battle for the first time only nine days earlier, when it was first in sight of the Dutch.24 The unsatisfactory nature of many of the battles of the period, and the confusion and incompetence that characterised the performance of many ships during them, can probably be attributed to the almost complete lack of practice and prior tactical discussion; in 1666 Sir William Penn suggested to Pepys that captains and flag officers alike were ‘in need of exercising among themselves and discoursing the business of commanding a fleet’.25 Nevertheless, this should not have been the case with the gunnery aboard individual ships, as the General Instructions to Captains laid down a clear training programme (albeit one designed explicitly to avoid wasting powder, rather than to ensure optimum performance by the gun crews). During the first month at sea, men were to be exercised at the guns twice a week; during the second month, once a week; thereafter, only once every two months. Each exercise was to consist of a maximum of six firings.26 Aboard the Grafton en route to Tangier in September 1683, Pepys witnessed a drill of the great and small arms, with the cannon being run in and out, ‘and showing the manner of loading them etc which was very pretty but very confused’.27
Another training drill staged for the benefit of a dignitary took place in February 1679, when the king’s sixteen-year-old son, the Duke of Grafton, commanded two boats against three others pretending to be Algerine corsairs. This turned into a ferocious mock battle with muskets, blunderbusses and squibs imitating grenades; unsurprisingly, there were many injuries, several of them caused by‘fire-balls’.28 When the Assistance was visited by some Turkish officials in 1675, her captain made a show of preparing the ship for a fight: trumpets sounded, pennants and colours were hoisted, guns were run out, shot was laid out, and tubs full of cartridges and wads, together with basins of water, were placed next to the guns. A file of musketeers stretched along the deck. The carefully staged show on the Assistance did not extend to the most essential pre-battle ritual of all, the clearing of the decks. The wooden or canvas cabins were taken down, and the boards stowed in the hold if there was time, or thrown overboard if there was not. Many of the hammocks also went into the hold, though others were lashed up instead; seamen’s chests went either into the hold or into the ship’s boats.29
Sailors of the 1690s, armed for boarding; from a watercolour by N Sotheby Pitcher.
SMALL ARMS
Ships carried a formidable variety of small arms, for although boarding was no longer the tactic of choice, it still sometimes occurred during battle. Alternatively, a ship might sometimes have to repel a fireship attack, to land some of its crew for operations ashore, or take part in some other form of close-quarters fighting. Therefore, gunners’ stores were well enough stocked to arm a large proportion of the crew (see table).
SMALL ARMS ON SHIPS OF VARIOUS RATES, 1685
However, theory and practice did not always concur. When the Kingfisher went into battle against Algerine corsairs in 1681, her officers found that the condition of the muskets, swords, pistols and other small arms was so bad that they could scrape together only enough for six men.30