BATTERIES SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
When the nineteenth century began, batteries of ships were composed of two principal classes of guns: the long gun and the short gun, or carronade. The difference between these lay in the way the weight of metal allowed for each was utilized. The long gun, as its name implies, was comparatively long and thick, and threw a small ball with a heavy charge of powder. The ball, therefore, flew swiftly, and had a long range. A carronade of the same weight was short and comparatively thin, could use only a small charge of powder, lest it burst, and threw a large ball. Its shot, therefore, moved slowly and had short range. Fired at a target—a ship’s side—within range of both guns, the shot from the long gun penetrated quickly, the wood had not time to splinter badly, and a clean hole was the result. The carronade’s shot, on the contrary, being both larger and slower, penetrated with difficulty, all the surrounding wood felt the strain and broke up into splinters, leaving a large jagged hole, if the shot got through. These effects were called respectively piercing and smashing, and are reproduced, in measure, upon targets representing the side of a modern ironclad. They have been likened familiarly to the effect of a pistol-ball and of a stone upon a window pane: the one goes through clean, the other crashes.
The smashing of the carronades, when fully realized, was worse than penetration, and was greatly dreaded; but, on the other hand, a ship which feared them in an opponent might keep out of their range. This expedient was so effective that carronades, which did great damage until their tactics were understood, gradually fell into disfavor. Nevertheless, they remained in use till after the peace of 1815. In 1814 the battery of the U. S. S. Essex was chiefly carronades, and their inadequate range was a large factor in her defeat.
At the period in question guns of all sorts fired only non-explosive projectiles, solid or hollow shot. The destructive shell of the present day was used only by pieces called mortars, in vertical firing, which will be spoken of farther on. Such were not mounted on the ships of the fleet generally, nor used against shipping, except when packed in a small harbor. They did not enter into naval warfare proper. The ram and the torpedo of present warfare were unknown. On the other hand, there was practised a form of fighting which is thought now to have disappeared forever, namely, boarding and fighting hand-to-hand on the deck. Even then, however, boarding did not decide the main issue of a sea-fight, except occasionally in very small vessels. The deck of a large and fresh ship was not to be reached easily. Boarding was like the cavalry charge that routs a wavering line; the ship had been beaten at the guns before it occurred.
The real fighting was done by the long guns and carronades disposed in the broadsides. Besides rapidity and precision of fire, always invaluable, the two opponents sought advantage of position by manœuvring. They closed, or they kept apart, according to their understanding of the other’s weight and kind of battery. Each tried, when possible, to lie across the bow or the stern of the enemy, for then his guns ranged from end to end of the hostile ship, while the latter’s broadside could not reply. Failing this extreme advantage of position, the effort was made so to place one’s self that the opponent’s guns could not bear—for they swept only a few degrees before and abaft the broadside—while your own could. If this also was impossible, the contestants lay side to side at a greater or less distance, and the affair became an artillery duel.
BRITISH AND FRENCH STYLES OF FIGHTING
Besides these recognized advantages of position, there was also a question upon what part of the enemy the fire should be directed. In this there were two principal schools of tactics, one of which aimed at the hull, to break down the fire of the hostile ship and destroy her fighting men, while the other sought, by pointing higher, to cut away the sails, rigging, and masts, rendering the foe helpless. The latter, in general, was the policy of the French; the former, and, it may be affirmed, the more surely successful, was the practice of the British. The two schools find their counterpart in the tactical considerations which now affect the question of rapid-fire and of heavy guns, each of which has its appropriate target, covering in the latter case the motive power, in the former the personnel.
These three leading classes of vessels, with their functions, armaments, and tactics of the single ship, as described, performed in their day and during the great maritime contests of two centuries all the duties that at any time can be required of a maritime fighting organization. By them the control of the sea in the largest sense was disputed and was determined; by them commerce was attacked, and by them it was protected. They themselves have passed away, but the military factors remain the same. The mastery of the sea and the control of its commerce—of which blockade is but a special case—are now and must remain always the chief ends of maritime war. The ends continuing the same, the grand disposition of navies—their strategy—reposes upon the same principles that it ever did. Similarly, while the changes in the characteristics of ships will cause the individual vessel to be fought in manners different from its predecessors, the handling of masses of ships in battle—fleet tactics—must proceed on the same general principles as of old. The centre and the two extremities of all orders are always the points of danger; concentration upon one or two of the three, however effected, must be always the principle of action. These things, which cannot vary, form, therefore, no part of a paper which deals with changes.
THEY HAD THEIR BREAK-DOWNS THEN, TOO
There should be added for the general public the caution that the difficulties, the imperfections, and the frequent halting state of ships-of-war in commission for sea service at the present day are no new things. To the naval historian familiar with the correspondence of the past they are the inevitable attendants of all government action, wherein the most economical methods are always dominated, historically, by considerations of expediency which are political in character. The necessity of keeping the public in good-humor, and of not laying open points upon which opposition can enlarge, induces apparent economies, which sacrifice not only economy, but the best results. This is a great evil, as yet apparently inseparable from public enterprises as distinguished from private ones. If any one supposes that the ships with which Great Britain overthrew Napoleon, and with which Nelson and his contemporaries won their as yet unparalleled victories, were always or generally in good material condition, he is greatly mistaken. What is different in our day, apparently, is a tendency in ships to rely for their repairs and material efficiency more upon dock-yards and workshops than upon their own resources, a disposition also to be unduly discouraged by imperfections in the motive enginery. War will correct this or war will fail. In maintaining efficiency while keeping the sea, quite as much as in fighting skill, lay the supreme excellence of officers like Nelson and Jervis. Men now ought to appreciate better than they do what difficulties of this sort seamen underwent a hundred years ago and how they refused to yield to them. “The difference between myself and the French marshals,” the Duke of Wellington is reported to have said, “was as when a man starts on a journey with a new harness. What if something gives way, as in war something is sure to go wrong? Shall you stop or go back for a workman? Not so; hitch up the break with a bit of rope, or whatever comes handy, and go on. That is what I did.”