Coming to the navy of the Commonwealth, we find the same curiously named guns in use. Here is the battery of the Naseby: Nineteen cannon, nine demi-cannon, twenty-eight culverins, thirty demi-culverins, and five sakers. The same classification lasted till the time of George I, when it became the custom to designate guns by the weights of their projectiles. Thenceforward we find ship-armaments reckoned in 42-pounders, 32-pounders, 24-pounders, 12-pounders, and 6-pounders. The old 60-pounder had disappeared, and before long the 42-pounder followed it into temporary oblivion, so that at Trafalgar our heaviest gun was a 32-pounder.[41] It was not until nearly 1840 that it reappeared, and was followed by a 68-pounder.
During the period between Elizabeth and Trafalgar there were innumerable attempts to invent and introduce improved forms of ordnance, including shell-guns and machine-guns. The idea of the latter was extremely ancient. There are several manuscript illuminations and old wood-cuts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries showing attempts at a "Maxim" gun. The "orgue", consisting of a large number of very small guns or musket-barrels fixed in rows, or revolving rings, or bundles, was a common weapon in those centuries—at least on shore. Then there was something of the kind for which William Drummond was given a patent in 1625, and which he termed a "thunder carriage". Again, there was one Puckle, who in 1781 invented a regular revolving gun mounted on a tripod. It was made in two patterns—one to fire ordinary round bullets, the other to fire square ones—against the "unspeakable Turk". Puckle thought these infidels ought to get as nasty a wound as possible. With his specification he issued a doggerel which ran as follows:—
A DEFENCE!
"Defending King George, your country and Lawes
Is defending yourselves and Protestant Cause".
The invention did not "catch on", and under a picture of the weapon which appeared on the eight of spades in a pack of cards of the period was another attempt at poetry:
"A rare Invention to destroy the Crowd
Of Fools at Home, instead of Foes Abroad.
Fear not, my Friends, this terrible Machine;
They're only wounded that have Shares therein".
Neither machine-guns nor shell-guns were to appear before the Victorian Era, the reason probably being that there was no machinery capable of turning them and their component parts out in payable quantities. As for shell-guns, mortars were found to answer very well; no navy wanted to introduce a form of warfare that would be absolutely destructive of wooden shipping, and so we find that they did not long precede the appearance of the modern ironclad. But towards the end of the eighteenth century a new and practical weapon was invented by General Melville with the idea of producing a gun which should fire a comparatively large projectile for its weight. To effect this, something, of course, had to be sacrificed, and this was length, both of the gun itself and of its range and also penetration. But, as naval actions then took place at close quarters, this did not count for much, and what was lost in penetration was more than made up for by the smashing effect of the heavy shot. In fact, the gun itself was at first termed a "smasher", but, from the fact that most of them were cast at the famous Carron foundry in Scotland, they soon became universally known as "carronades".
In the days of wooden ships the "carronade" became a most useful weapon. The smaller kind were light, took up little space, and were just the things for merchant-men and small craft; while the bigger class—generally 68-pounders—were valuable auxiliaries to the batteries of our line-of-battle ships. The carronade was essentially a British gun, and its efficiency was never more conspicuous than in the fight between H.M.S. Glatton, a converted East Indiaman, and a French squadron of four frigates and two corvettes, which took place off the coast of Flanders on 15th July, 1796.
Photo. Symonds & Co.