Later, this trough or baulk of timber performed an additional function when used as a mounting for a certain form of gun. When the piece was a breech-loader—like those recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose—the trough had at its rear end a massive flange projecting upwards, forming the rear working face for the wedge which secured the removable breech chamber to the gun. “The shot and wadde being first put into the chase,” wrote Norton in 1628, “then is the chamber to be firmly wedged into the tayle of the chase and carriage.” The mounting was, in fact, an integral part of the gun. In the 8-inch breech-loading equipment of the Mary Rose which lies in the museum of the Royal United Service Institution in Whitehall there is evidence of two small rear wheels. Most of these early ship carriages had two wheels, but for the more powerful muzzle-loaders introduced toward the middle of the sixteenth century, four came into favour. With four wheels our timber baulk has become a primitive form of the truck carriage of the succeeding centuries.[90]
But perhaps the truck carriage may more properly be regarded as a derivative of the wheeled mounting on which, as we have seen, land ordnance came eventually to be worked. The ship being a floating fort, the mode of mounting the guns would be that in vogue in forts and garrisons ashore, and the land pieces and their massive carriages would be transferred, without modification, for use on shipboard. How different the conditions under which they worked! The great cannon, whose weight and high-wheeled carriages were positive advantages when firing from land emplacements, suitably inclined, were found to work at great disadvantage under sea conditions. Their great weight strained the decks that bore them, and their wheeled carriages proved difficult to control and even dangerous in any weather which caused a rolling or pitching of the gun platform. With the introduction of portholes their unfitness for ship work was doubtless emphasized; there was neither height nor deck-space enough to accommodate them between decks. Hence the necessity for a form of carriage suitable for the special conditions of sea service, as well as for a size of gun which would be within the capacity of a ship’s crew to work. In the early Tudor ships the forms of mounting were various: guns were mounted on two or four-wheeled carriages, or sometimes, especially the large bombards, upon “scaffolds” of timber.[91] By Elizabeth’s reign the limit had been set to the size of the gun; the demi-cannon had been found to be the heaviest piece which could be safely mounted, traversed, and discharged. This and the smaller guns which were plied with such effect against the Spanish Armada were mounted on low, wheeled, wooden carriages which were the crude models from which the truck carriage, the finished article of the nineteenth century, was subsequently evolved. Even then the carriages had parts which were similar and similarly named to those of the later truck carriage; they had trunnion-plates and sockets, capsquares, beds, quoins, axle-trees, and trucks.[92] On them the various pieces—the demi-cannons, the culverins, the basilisks and sakers—were worked by the nimble and iron-sinewed seamen; run out by tackles through their ports, and traversed by handspikes. Loaded and primed and laboriously fired by means of spluttering linstocks, the guns recoiled upon discharge to a length and in a direction which could not be accurately predicted. The smaller guns, at any rate, had no breechings to restrain them: these ropes being only used for the purpose of securing the guns at sea, and chiefly in foul weather.[93]
On the whole these low sea carriages appear to have proved satisfactory, and their continued use is evidence that they were considered superior to those of the land service pattern. “The fashion of those carriages we use at sea,” wrote Sir Henry Manwayring in 1625, “are much better than those of the land; yet the Venetians and others use the other in their shipping.” In essentials the carriage remained the same from Elizabeth to Victoria. Surviving many attempts at its supercession in favour of mechanically complicated forms of mounting, it kept its place in naval favour for a surprising length of time; challenging with its primitive simplicity all the elaborate mechanisms which pitted themselves against it.
An illuminating passage from Sir Jonas Moore’s treatise on artillery, written in 1689 and copied from the Hydrographie of the Abbé Fournier, shows at a glance the manner in which the armament of small Mediterranean craft of that period was disposed, and the method on which the guns were mounted. “At sea the ordnance are mounted upon small carriages, and upon four and sometimes two low wheels without any iron work. Each galley carries ordinarily nine pieces of ordnance in its prow or chase, of which the greatest, and that which delivers his shot just over the very stem, and lies just in the middle, is called the Corsiere or ‘cannon of course’ or ‘chase cannon,’ which in time of fight doth the most effectual service. It carries generally a shot of thirty-three or forty pounds weight, and are generally very long pieces. It recoils all along the middle of the galley to the mast, where they place some soft substance to hinder its farther recoil, that it might not endamage the mast. Next to this Corsiere are placed two Minions on each side, which carries a five or six-pound ball; and next to these are the Petrieroes, which are loaded with stone-shot to shoot near at hand. Thirdly, there are some small pieces, which are open at the breech, and called Petrieroes a Braga, and are charged with a moveable chamber loaded with base and bar shot, to murder near at hand. And the furthest from the Corsiere are the Harquebuss a Croc, which are charged with small cross-bar shot, to cut sails and rigging. All these small pieces are mounted on strong pins of iron having rings, in which are placed the trunnions with a socket, so that they are easily turned to any quarter.
“All the guns are mounted upon wheels and carriages; moreover the Petrieroes, which are planted in the forecastle and quarter to defend the prow and stern, are mounted upon strong pins of iron without any reverse; the greatest pieces of battery are planted the lowest, just above the surface of the water, the smallest in the waist and steerage, and with the Petrieroes in quarter-deck and forecastle. Upon the sea, to load great ordnance they never load with a ladle, but make use of cartridges, as well for expedition as security in not firing the powder, which in time of fight is in a continual motion.”
Before passing to a consideration of the truck carriage in detail there is an important circumstance to be noted with regard to the conditions under which its design and supply to the naval service were regulated. It is a remarkable fact that, during almost the whole of what may be called the truck carriage era, the arming of ships with ordnance, the supply of the requisite guns and their carriages, the design of the guns and their mode of mounting, was no part of a naval officer’s affair. The Board of Ordnance had control both of land and of sea artillery. From the death of Sir William Wynter onwards the mastership of the ordnance by sea was absorbed into the mastership of the ordnance by land. From this arrangement, as may be imagined, many inconveniences arose, and many efforts were made at various times to disjoin the offices and to place the armament of ships under naval control. For, apart from the fact that at an early date the ordnance office acquired “an unenviable reputation for sloth and incapacity,”[94] the interests of the sea service were almost bound to suffer under such a system. And in fact the inconvenience suffered by the navy, through the delays and friction resulting from the system whereby all dealings with guns and their mountings and ammunition were the work of military officials, was notorious. The anomalous arrangement survived, in spite of the efforts of reformers, till far into the nineteenth century. Probably the Board of Ordnance argued honestly against reintroducing a dual control for land and sea artillery material. They had, at any rate, strong interests in favour of the status quo. For, writing in the year 1660, Sir William Slingsby noted regretfully that “the masters of the ordnance of England, having been ever since of great quality and interest, would never suffer such a collop to be cut out of their employment.”
The arming of ships, therefore, apart from the original assignment of the armament, remained in the province of the military authorities.
§
An examination of the design of the perfected truck carriage and a glance at the records of its performances in action show that the advocates of rival gun mountings were not altogether incorrect in their contention that the manner in which the broadside armament of our ships was mounted was wrong in principle and unsatisfactory in actual detail. The many defects of the truck carriage were indeed only too obvious.
In the first place, the breechings were so reeved that the force sustained by them in opposition to the recoil of the gun tended inevitably to cause the piece to jump. The reaction of the breeching acted along lines below the level of the gun-axis; the breeching therefore exerted a lifting force which, instead of pressing down all of the four trucks upon the deck and thus deadening the recoil, tended to raise the fore trucks in the air and reduce the friction of the carriage upon the deck. The larger the gun and the higher the gun-axis above the trucks, the greater was this tendency of the gun to lift and overturn. If the rear trucks, about which the gun and carriage tended to revolve, had been set at some distance in rear of the centre of gravity of the equipment, it would have been rendered thereby more stable. But space did not permit of this. And actually they were so placed that, when discharge was most violent, the weight of the equipment was scarcely sufficient to oppose effectively the tendency to jump. Again, the anchoring of the breeching to two points in the ship’s frames, one on either side of the gun, was wrong and liable to have serious consequences. For with this arrangement not only had the breeching to be continuously “middled” as the gun shifted its bearing, but even when accurately adjusted the “legs” of the breeching bore an unequal strain when the gun was fired off the beam. In other words, the horizontal angles subtended between the gun-axis, when off the beam, and the two lines of the breeching were unequal; one side of the breeching took more of the blow of gunfire than the other; and not infrequently the gun carriage was thrown round violently out of the line of recoil, with damage to the equipment and injury to the crew.