The Evolution of Naval Armament

by Frederick Leslie Robertson

Throughout the long war which broke out ten years later the carronade played a considerable part in the succession of duels and actions which had their climax off Trafalgar. It was now generally adopted as a secondary form of armament, captains being permitted, upon application, to vary at discretion the proportion of long-gun to carronade armament which they wished to carry. In the smaller classes especially, a preponderance of carronades was frequently accepted; the accession of force caused by the substitution of small carronades for 6-and 9-pounder long guns in brigs and sloops could hardly be disputed. In ships-of-the-line the larger sizes continued in favour. The French now benefited, too, by their adoption; on more than one occasion their poop and forecastle carronades, loaded with langrage, played havoc with our personnel. Spaniards and Dutchmen did not carry them. How far their absence contributed to their defeats it is not now to inquire; but how the tide of battle would have been affected by them—if the Dutch fleet, for instance, had carried them at Camperdown—may be a not unprofitable speculation.

Early in the war the carronade system was to score its greatest defensive triumph, and this, by a happy coincidence, in the hands of the old Rainbow’s commander.

The Glatton, one of a few East Indiamen which had been bought by the admiralty, was fitted out in 1795 as a ship of war, and left Sheerness in the summer of the following year under the command of Captain Henry Trollope to join a squadron in the North Sea. At her commander’s request she was armed with carronades exclusively. She was without ahead or astern fire, without a single long bow or stern chaser; she carried 68-pounder carronades along her sides, whose muzzles were so large that they almost filled the small port-holes of the converted Indiaman and prevented more than a small traverse. Off the Flanders coast she fell in one night with six French frigates, a brig-corvette, and a cutter; and at ten o’clock a close action began. The Glatton was engaged by her antagonists on both sides, her yard-arms almost touching those of the enemy. She proved to be a very dangerous foe. Her carronades, skilfully pointed and served by supply parties who worked port and starboard pieces alternately, poured out their heavy missiles at point-blank range. So heavy was her fire that one by one the frigates had to haul off, severely damaged, and the Glatton was left at last to spend the night repairing her rigging unmolested, but in the expectation that the French commodore would renew the attack in the morning. To her surprise no action was offered. The blows of the 68-pounders had done their work. Followed by the Glatton with a “brag countenance,” the enemy retired with his squadron in the direction of Flushing.

The action had more than one lesson to teach, however, and no more ships, except small craft, were armed after this upon the model of the Glatton.

We must at this point mention an experiment made in the year 1796, at the instance of Sir Samuel Bentham, in the mounting of carronades on a non-recoil system. Sir Samuel, who in the service of Russia had armed long-boats and other craft with ordnance thus mounted, produced arguments before the navy board for attaching carronades rigidly to ships’ timbers; so as to allow of no other recoil than that resulting from the elasticity of the carriage and the materials connecting it to the ship. The ordnance board reported against the new idea. Sir Samuel pointed out that the idea was not new. Both the largest and the smallest pieces used on board ship (viz. the mortar and the swivel) had always been mounted on the principle of non-recoil. He showed how bad was the principle of first allowing a gun and its slide or carriage to generate momentum in recoil and then of attempting to absorb that momentum in the small stretch of a breeching-rope. He argued that a rifle held at the shoulder is not allowed to recoil: if it is, the rifleman smarts for it. He instanced the lashing of guns fast to the ship, especially in chase, for the purpose of making them carry farther. No; the novelty consisted in preparing suitable and appropriate fastenings for intermediate sizes of guns between the mortar and the swivel. The adoption of his proposal, he contended, would result in smaller guns’ crews, quicker loading, and greater safety.

As a result of these arguments certain sloops designed by him were armed on this principle; and in other cases, notably in the case of the boats used at the siege of Acre, the carronades and smaller types of long gun were successfully mounted and worked without recoil by attaching their carriages to vertical fir posts, built into the hull structures to serve as front pivots. But, generally, the system was found to be impracticable. The pivots successfully withstood the stresses of carronades fired with normal charges of powder; no permanent injury resulted to the elastic hull structures over which the blows were spread. But the factor of safety allowed by this arrangement was insufficient to cover the wild use of ordnance in emergencies. The regulation of charges and the prevention of double-shotting was difficult in action, and pieces were liable to be over-charged in the excitement of battle in a way which Sir Samuel Bentham had failed to realize. Pivots were broken, ships’ structures strained, and the whole system found ill-adapted for warship requirements.

It was not till the war of 1812 that the fatal weakness of the carronade, as primary armament, was fully revealed. The Americans had not developed the carronade policy to the same extent as ourselves, for transatlantic opinion was never at this period enamoured of the short-range gun. Their well-built merchant ships, unhampered by tonnage rules or by the convoy system which had taken so much of the stamina from British shipping, were accustomed to trust to their speed and good seamanship to keep an enemy at a distance. Their frigates, built under less pedantic restrictions as to size and weight, were generally swifter, stouter and more heavily armed than ours. And, though they included carronades among their armament, these were not generally in so large a proportion as in our ships, and in part were represented by a superior type—the colombiad, a hybrid weapon of proportions intermediate between the carronade and the long gun. Our ships often depended heavily upon the carronade element of their armament. Experience was soon to confirm what foresight might, surely, have deduced: namely, that when pitted against an enemy who could choose his range and shoot with tolerable accuracy the carronade would find itself in certain circumstances reduced to absolute impotence.

This was to be the fate and predicament of our ships on Lakes Erie and Ontario, in face of the Americans. “I found it impossible to bring them to close action,” the English commodore reported. “We remained in this mortifying situation five hours, having only six guns in all the squadron that would reach the enemy, not a carronade being fired.” The same lesson was to be enforced shortly afterwards on the Americans. One of their frigates, the Essex, armed almost exclusively with carronades, was fought by an English ship, the Phœbe, armed with long guns. The Essex, it should be noted, possessed the quality essential for a carronade armament, namely, superior speed. But the Phœbe fell in with her in circumstances when, owing to damage, her superior speed could not be utilized. The captain of the Phœbe was able to choose the range at which the action should be fought. He kept at a “respectful distance”: within range of his own long guns and out of range of his opponent’s carronades. Both sides fought well, but the result was a foregone conclusion. The Essex, disabled and on fire, had to surrender. From that time the carronade was discredited. For some years after the peace it found a place in the armament of all classes of British ships, but it was a fallen favourite. The French commission which visited this country in 1835 reported that, although still accounted part of the regular armament of older ships, the carronade was being replaced to a great extent by light long guns in newer construction. Opinion certainly hardened more and more against the type, and, gradually falling into disuse, it was at last altogether abandoned.

There was a feature of the carronade, however, which if it had been exploited might have made the story of the carronade much longer: might, in fact, have made the carronade the starting-point of the great evolution which ordnance was to undergo in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. We refer to the large area of its bore, as rendering it specially suitable for the projection of hollow spheres charged with powder or combustibles: in short, for shells. Although, as shown by the inscription on the model presented to him, General Melville’s invention covered the use of shell and carcass shot, yet there was no general appreciation in this country, at the time of its invention, of the possibilities which the new weapon presented for throwing charges of explosive or combustible matter against the hulls of ships. Empty hollow shot were tried in the original Smasher for comparison against solid shot, in case the latter might prove too heavy;—and these, as was pointed out by an eminent writer on artillery,[89] possessed in an accentuated degree all the disadvantages of the carronade system, their adoption being tantamount to a reversion to the long-exploded granite shot of the medieval ordnance—but the use of filled shell in connection with carronades does not appear to have been seriously considered. The disadvantages of filled shell as compared with solid shot were fairly obvious; their inferiority in range, in penetrative power, in accuracy of flight, their inability to stand double-shotting or battering charges—all these were capable of proof or demonstration. Their destructive effect, both explosive and incendiary, as compared with that of uncharged shot, was surprisingly under-estimated. Had it been otherwise, the carronade principle would have led naturally to the introduction of the shell gun. “The redeeming trait in the project of General Melville,” wrote Dahlgren, “the redeeming trait which, if properly appreciated and developed, might have anticipated the Paixhans system by half a century, was hardly thought of. The use of shells was, at best, little more than a vague conception; its formidable powers unrealized, unnoticed, were doomed to lie dormant for nearly half a century after the carronade was invented, despite the evidence of actual trial and service.”

In other respects the carronade did good service in the development of naval gunnery. Its introduction raised (as we have seen) the whole question of windage and its effects, and was productive of general improvement in the reduction and regulation of the windage in all types of gun. By it the advantages of quick firing were clearly demonstrated. And by its adoption in the ship-of-the-line it contributed largely to bring about that approach to uniformity of calibre which was so marked a feature of the armament schemes of the first half of the nineteenth century.