Old-time Naval Gunnery.
From a wood-cut.
If a shot fired at the hull of a frigate happened to fly too high it might still seriously injure the rigging and spars, but if a shot was fired at the gun-boat and bounded over the hull it would do no damage because the spars of the gun-boat were not for use in time of battle.
If a frigate lost her masts or her rudder she was helpless, but a gun-boat, having many oars, could surely be managed as long as she floated.
The gun-boats were cheap to build—seventy-five of them cost no more than one good frigate, or say $4,000 each.
On the whole the building of gun-boats certainly was a plausible scheme in the eyes of a landsman, especially as the first argument—as to the depth of water and sea-room required for a frigate—was unanswerable. But when the men who knew the sea looked upon the plan it made them sick at heart. The mere idea of proposing to protect the lives and liberties of the people of the nation from foreign aggression by inviting the enemy to come into our harbors to fight, was enough to make any patriot sick at heart. But that was only one point against the system.
Considering the physical qualities of the supposed combatants, when forty boats attacked a frigate the ship did, indeed, show a broadside of 2,000 square feet, while the gun-boat was only ten feet wide and two feet high out of water. Even at that the aggregate length of water-line of all the boats when standing precisely end on to the frigate was four hundred feet. But the boats could not and never did remain end on. They had to fire over one bow or the other, so the target that each presented was much more than ten feet wide and two high, and, what was worse, the gunners of the high-decked frigate could look down on the deck of the gun-boat.
Then the men on the gun-boats had to fight out on an open deck, as did Perry’s men on Lake Erie, while those of a frigate fought behind thick timber bulwarks. And because the gun-boats were built with thin plank, a single shot could sink one, as happened to the sloop in the first fight on Lake Champlain, during this war, while a frigate could still float, as the brig Boxer did after it had received many shot below the water-line in the fight with the Enterprise.
More important still was the fact that even the best (widest) gun-boats needed absolutely still water when making a fight—the swell of an ordinary windy day in the lower bay of New York proved enough to destroy their efficiency, while the narrow boats rolled so under the recoil of their own guns even in smooth water that the crews had to wait, after each discharge, for the rolling to cease before firing again.