The Evolution of Naval Armament

by Frederick Leslie Robertson

These are the circumstances in which a certain vessel in the royal navy exhibits such a superiority in gunnery over her contemporaries as to render her conspicuous at the time and, for several decades afterwards, the accepted model by which all such as care may measure themselves.

The Shannon, nominally a 38-gun frigate, carried twenty-eight 18-pounder long guns on her gun deck and fourteen carronades, 32-pounders, upon her quarter-deck and forecastle; in addition to four long 9-pounders. She was commanded by Captain Philip Broke, whose fame as a gallant commander is secure for all time but whose attainments in the realm of gunnery have been less widely appreciated. Captain Broke, possessing a keen insight into the possibilities of the Shannon’s armament, set himself to organize, from the first day of his ship’s memorable commission, her crew and material for the day of battle. No other ship of the time was so highly organized. For all the guns sighting arrangements were provided by him. To each gun-carriage side-scales of his own design were attached, marked with a scale of degrees and showing by means of a plumb-bob the actual heel of the ship; so that every gun could be laid by word of command at any desired angle of elevation. For giving all guns a correct bearing a circle was inscribed on the deck round every gun-port, degrees being represented by grooves cut in the planks and inlaid with white putty; by which device concentration of fire of a whole battery was rendered possible, the sheer of the ship being compensated for by cutting down the carriages and adjusting them with spirit-levels.

METHOD OF GUN-EXERCISE IN H.M.S. “SHANNON”

From a pamphlet by Captain S. J. Pechell, R.N.

Beside these improvements applied to his material—steps which seem simple and obvious to-day, but which were far-sighted strides in 1812—the training of his personnel was a matter to which he paid unremitting attention. His gunners were carefully taught the mysteries of the dispart. Gun drill was made as realistic as possible and prizes were given out of his private purse for the winners of the various competitions. Often a beef cask, with a piece of canvas four feet square attached to it, was thrown overboard as a target, the ship being laid to some three hundred yards away from it. The captain’s log was full of such entries as: “Seamen at target,” “fixed and corrected nine-pounder sights,” “mids at target and carronade,” “swivels in maintop,” “practised with musket,” “exercised at the great guns,” etc. etc. Systematic instruction in working the guns, fixing sights and reading scales, was carried out. And a method of practising gun-laying, which later came to be used in other ships from the example set by the Shannon, is illustrated by the accompanying sketch. A gun was taken onto the quarter-deck and secured; a spar was placed in its muzzle with a handspike lashed across it; and then two men surged the gun by means of the handspike to imitate the rolling of the ship, while the captain of the gun, crouching behind it, looked along his line of sight for the target (a disc placed in the forepart of the ship) and threw in the quoin when he had taken aim.

With such a training did the captain of the Shannon prepare for the duel which fortune was to give him with the Chesapeake. The pick of the British fleets was to meet an American of average efficiency. Superiority of gunnery would have decided that famous action in favour of the former, it may safely be said, whatever the conditions in which it had been fought. At long range the deliberate and practised aim of the Shannon’s 18-pounders would have overborne even the good individual shooting of an American crew. At night or in foggy weather or in a choppy sea the Shannon’s arrangements for firing on a given bearing and at a given elevation would have given her the superiority. As it happened, the combined and correct fire at pistol range, of long gun and carronade—the long gun, double-shotted, searching the Chesapeake’s decks with ball and grape, the carronade splintering her light fir-lined sides and spreading death and destruction among the crew—quickly secured a victory, and showed the naval world the value of high ideals in the technique of gunnery.

In the Shannon we have the high-water mark of smooth-bore gunnery. From that time onward, in spite of the precedents which her captain created, little appears to have been done in the way of extending his methods or of applying his improvements to the armament of the navy generally. As a consequence, relatively to the continuously improving defensive efficiency of the ships themselves there was an actual decline in the efficiency of the truck gun after the American War: a decline which culminated in Navarino. It was a time when “new-fangled notions,” developments of method and material, were viewed with strong suspicion, even with resentment, by many of the most influential of naval officers. In the case of the truck gun, strong prejudices reacted against the general introduction of such refinements as had admittedly been found effective in exceptional cases, and the demand still went up for everything in connection with gunnery to be “coarsely simple.” To many it doubtless seemed impolitic, to say the least, that anything should be done in the way of mechanical development which would have the effect of substituting pure skill for the physical force and endurance, in the exertion of which the British seaman so obviously excelled. The truck gun was merely the rough medium by which this physical superiority gained the desired end, and it had been proved well suited to the English genius. Nothing more was asked than a rough equality of weapons. The arguments used against such finesse in gunnery as that used by the commander of the Shannon were much the same, it may be imagined, as those used at an earlier date (and with better reason) to prohibit the use of the mechanically worked crossbow in favour of the simple longbow, strung by the athletic arm of the English archer.

That little was done for years to improve the truck gun equipment, is evident from a letter, written in 1825 by Captain S. J. Pechell and addressed to the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean squadron, deploring the defective equipment of ships’ guns. Even at this date, it appears, few of the guns were properly disparted, few had sights or scales fitted to them. No arrangements had yet been generally adapted for permitting horizontal, or what Captain Broke had called “blindfold” firing; or for laying all the guns together by word of command. The truck carriages still gave insufficient depression, preventing a ship from firing her weather guns at point-blank when listed more than four degrees. The quantity of powder and shot allowed for exercise only amounted to one shot for each captain of a gun in seven months. No instruction was given in sighting or fixing sights, no system of instruction in principles was followed. And once again, as in the seventeenth century, the disadvantage under which naval gunnery laboured by reason of the dual control in all matters pertaining to the ordnance was strongly felt. “It is singular,” wrote Captain Pechell, “that the arming of a ship is the only part of her equipment which has not the superintendence of a Naval Officer. We have no sea Officer at the Ordnance to arrange and decide upon the proper equipment of Ships of War; or to carry into effect any improvement which experience might suggest. It is in this way that everything relating to the Ordnance on board a Man of War has remained nearly in the same state for the last thirty years; and is the only department (I mean the naval part of it) that has not profited by experience or encouraged Officers to communicate information. Much might be done now that the Marine Artillery are stationed at Portsmouth. At present it is not even generally known that a manual exercise exists.... If some such system were adopted, we should no longer consider the length of an action at its principal merit; the Chesapeake was beat in eleven minutes!”

Captain Pechell was a firm believer in the desirability of developing to its utmost British material. He had an enthusiastic belief, moreover, in the possibilities of his personnel; and stated his conviction that officers were only too anxious to be given the chance of instruction, prophesying an emulation among them and as great a desire to be distinguished “in gunnery as in Seamanship.” His advocacy of a system of gunnery training bore fruit later in the establishment of the Excellent at Portsmouth. The scheme for the development of a corps of scientific naval officers, which had been foreshadowed by Sir Howard Douglas in his classic treatise on Naval Gunnery and which was formulated later in detail by Captain Pechell, was one of the reforms brought to maturity by Sir James Graham in the year 1832.