The first great revolution in the art of war was the introduction of gunpowder, both as a propelling agent and also as a charge for shells and bombs. Although the explosive nature of saltpetre when mixed with carbon and charcoal was doubtless known to the Chinese some centuries before the Christian era, our first knowledge of the use of gunpowder as a military agent dates from the seventh century, when it was used by the Byzantine emperors under the name of “Greek fire” in the defence of Constantinople against the Saracens.
“Greek fire,” the invention of which is commonly attributed to Callinichus in 668 A.D., consisted probably of pounded resin or bitumen, sulphur, naphtha, and nitre. There were three ways of employing it: it was poured out burning from ladles on besiegers, it was projected out of tubes to a distance, and it was shot from balistæ burning on tow, tied to arrows. Its effect was probably rather moral than material.
Geoffrey de Vinesauf, in an account of a naval battle in the time of Richard I., writes thus of Greek fire: “The fire, with a deadly stench and livid flames, consumes flint and iron; and unquenchable by water, can only be extinguished by sand or vinegar. What more direful than a naval conflict! What more fatal, when so various a fate envolves the combatants, for they are either burnt and writhe in the flames, shipwrecked and swallowed up by the waves, or wounded and perish by arms.”
Despite the lamentations of the humanitarians of the time, Greek fire and serpents (missiles resembling rockets charged with and impelled by the slow explosion of a certain mixture) continued to be used in the navy until the reign of Richard III.
Another favourite method of early naval warfare was the “fire-ship.” Falkiner, an old writer, tells us that fire-ships were used by the Rhodians in 190 B.C. They were certainly used by the Greeks; they were employed by ourselves against the Armada, and they first appeared in our Navy List in the year 1675; they were used in the Dutch and French wars at the close of that century, but probably fell into disuse in the eighteenth. It is quite clear that with the French, as well as with ourselves, the crews of fire-ships did not expect quarter. Admiral Gambier deprecated fire-ships as being a “horrible and anti-Christian mode of warfare,” while Lord Cochrane said that if any attempts were made upon the British squadron by fire-ships they would be “boarded by the numerous row-boats on guard, the crews murdered, and the fire-ships turned in a harmless direction.”
Lord Dunsany appeared to think that this apparently cruel rule of no quarter to the crews of fire-ships worked well for humanity in practice, and he seemed to be in favour of its being extended to the crews of torpedo-boats and submarines. His Lordship pointed out, in a lecture at the Royal United Service Institution, that the crews of fire-ships would not stick to their ships to the moment of explosion, but had after firing the fuse to make their escape in boats, which boats, as they passed through the enemy’s lines, would naturally become targets, and if meanwhile some ship clasped in the deadly embrace of the fire-ship had exploded, it was all the more likely that the fugitives would be the objects of unsparing vengeance.
“Probably then the vague but fatal epithet ‘un-English’ came to attach to men who used a deadly weapon, but withdrew themselves (sometimes too quickly) from the fray. I cannot produce evidence of the facts, but I believe that officers serving in fire-ships did not stand high with their brother officers. It is some confirmation of this creed that we do not find the Boscawens, Rodneys, Howes, Jervises, Nelsons serving in fire-ships.”
The first use of gunpowder as a propelling agent was in Spain in the twelfth century, at which period both the Moors and the Christians used artillery. It was first employed in warfare in England in 1327 by Edward III. in his war against the Scotch, the cannon from which the shot was fired being termed “Crakys of war.”
There is abundant evidence that the use of artillery in battle was at first thought to be improper. When cannon was employed at Chiaggia in the fourteenth century all Italy made complaint against this manifest contravention of fair warfare; the ruling classes, seeing their armour, lances, and knightly prowess rendered useless, vigorously opposed the newly-invented arms, declaring that they were calculated to extinguish personal bravery. Perhaps this sentiment may have had some weight with our navy, for it was not until towards the close of the sixteenth century that artillery finally assumed the position of the dominant arm in the service and that musketry fire altogether displaced the arrow and the bolt.
Shells appear to have been first used by the Sultan of Gujarat in 1480, and they were in general use about the middle of the seventeenth century.