| CHAPTER | | PAGE |
| I. | The Sailing Ship | [1] |
| II. | The Smooth-bore Gun | [61] |
| III. | The Steam Engine | [93] |
| IV. | “New Principles of Gunnery” | [112] |
| V. | The Carronade | [125] |
| VI. | The Truck Carriage | [140] |
| VII. | The Shell Gun | [160] |
| VIII. | The Rifled Gun | [181] |
| IX. | Propelling Machinery | [210] |
| X. | The Ironclad | [246] |
| | Index | [303] |
PLATES
| A Sixty-gun Ship of late Seventeenth Century | [Frontispiece] |
| To face page |
| A Tudor Ship of Period 1540–50 | [60] |
| Tudor Ships under Sail | [124] |
| The Speaker, a Second-rate of the Commonwealth | [180] |
| The Comet of 1812 | [224] |
| Rattler versus Alecto | [240] |
| The Warrior | [260] |
| The Monarch | [280] |
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
| Page |
| Diagram illustrating Distortion of Frames under Load | [52] |
| Diagram representing a Ship with Trussed Frames | [53] |
| Typical Sections of “Symondite” and contemporary Ships | [59] |
| Turkish Bronze Cannon | [68] |
| French Twenty-four Pounder, with Spherical Chamber | [84] |
| Savery’s Engine | [101] |
| Newcomen’s Engine | [104] |
| Connecting-rod | [111] |
| A Carronade | [133] |
| A Truck Gun | [147] |
| Method of Gun-Exercise in H.M.S. Shannon | [155] |
| A Paixhans Gun | [173] |
| Bullet Mould | [187] |
| Rifleman Presenting | [189] |
| “Carabine à Tige” | [195] |
| Minié Bullet | [195] |
| Whitworth Rifle Bullet | [198] |
| Ship and Galley | [211] |
| The Charlotte Dundas | [219] |
| Pettit Smith’s Propeller | [235] |
THE EVOLUTION
OF NAVAL ARMAMENT
CHAPTER I
THE SAILING SHIP
To attempt to trace in any detail the evolution of the sailing warship is a task, it must be at once admitted, far beyond the scope and intention of the present essay.
The history of naval architecture is, of course, a vast and many-sided subject. Few are the writers who have dealt with it, and, for reasons which will appear, few of those have written in the English language. Such books as treat of it are too cumbrous and technical for easy reading; they are not written in the modern style; by the frequent digressions of their authors on matters of general history, high politics, battles, economics, commerce, and even sport, they bear witness to the difficulties of the task and the complexity of the subject. The history of naval architecture still remains to be written. In the meantime the student will find the monumental Marine Architecture, of Charnock, and the smaller Naval Architecture, of Fincham, invaluable fields of inquiry; among the historians the works of Nicolas, Laughton, Corbett and Oppenheim, will furnish him with the materials for the complete story of the evolution up to the end of the eighteenth century.