from the small truck, trochos, or wheel on which it ran, the four-wheeled carriage which served for centuries as a mounting for the long guns of fighting ships has come to be known as a truck carriage: the gun, with trunnions cast upon it, as a truck gun.
artillery being from the first an affair common, in almost all respects, to land and to sea service, and being applied to ships as the result of its prior development on land, it would be expected that naval practice should in its evolution follow in the wake of that on land. and so it has, in the main, until the time of the crimean war; since when, completely revolutionizing and in turn revolutionized by the rapid development of naval architecture and material, it has by far surpassed land practice both in variety and power. but while the wooden ship imposed its limitations no branch of affairs, perhaps, appeared to be more conservative in its practice than naval gunnery. no material seemed less subject to change, no service less inclined to draw lessons from war experience. and in recent years the truck carriage has often been taken as typifying the great lack of progress in all naval material which existed between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
whether there was in fact so great a stagnation as is commonly supposed, and to what causes such as existed may have been due, we may discern from an examination of the truck carriage itself and of its development from the earliest known forms of naval gun mounting.
§
the first large ordnance to be used on land, having as its object the breaching of walls and gates and the reduction of fortresses, was mounted solidly in the ground in a way which would have been impracticable on board a ship at sea. in141 time, as the energy of discharge increased, this method of embedding the gun in soil grew dangerous: a certain recoil was necessary to absorb and carry off the large stresses which would otherwise have shattered the piece. in time, too, as the power of explosives and the strength of guns increased, their size diminished; cannon, as we have seen, became more portable. no longer embedded in earth or fixed on ponderous trestles, they were transported from place to place on wheeled carriages. and on these carriages, massive enough to stand the shock of discharge and well adapted to allow a certain measure of recoil, the land ordnance were fired with a tolerable degree of safety.
both of these methods were followed in principle when guns came to be used at sea.
in the early mediterranean galley the cannon was mounted in a wooden trough placed fore and aft on the deck in the bow of the vessel. the trough was secured to the deck. in rear of the cannon’s breech and in contact with it was a massive bitt of timber, worked vertically, which took the force of the recoil. later, as force of powder increased, this non-recoil system of mounting ordnance failed. the cannon had to be given a certain length of free recoil in order that, by the generation of momentum, the energy which would otherwise be transmitted to the ship in the form of a powerful blow might be safely diverted and more gradually absorbed. hence free recoil was allowed within certain limits, the cannon being secured with ropes or chains.
but, as had doubtless been found already with land ordnance, the violence of recoil depended largely upon the mass of the recoiling piece; for any given conditions of discharge the heavier the gun, the less violent was its recoil. it was a natural expedient, then, to make the recoiling mass as large as possible. and this could be effected, without the addition of useless and undesirable extra deadweight, by making the wooden trough itself partake of the recoil. the cannon was therefore lashed solidly to the trough, and both gun and trough were left free to recoil in the desired direction. the primitive mounting helped, in short, by augmenting the weight of the recoiling mass, to give a quiet recoil and some degree of control over the piece.
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 from142 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 limit143 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 on144 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 truck145 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 of146 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.
the design of the carriage was in no way influenced, apparently, by a desire to obtain a minimum area of port opening in combination with a maximum traverse of the gun. for the broad span of the front part of the carriage soon caused the gun to be “wooded” when slewed off the beam. and a further disadvantage of this broad span was in the effect it had of automatically bringing the gun right abeam every time it was hauled out after loading: the front span of the carriage coming square with the timbers of the port-sill.
as for the system of recoil, while the recoiling of the carriage with the gun had an advantage in reducing the stresses brought on the hull structure, yet this arrangement had the correlative disadvantage that the carriage as well as the gun had to be hauled out again. and, as regards safety, it is a matter for surprise that the system of chocking recoil by means of large147 ropes—of absorbing the momentum of a heavy gun and its carriage in a distance corresponding to the stretch of the breechings under their suddenly applied load—was not far more injurious than experience proved to be the case. even so, the results obtained from it were far from satisfactory. “it is a lamentable truth”—we quote sir william congreve, writing in 1811—“that numbers of men are constantly maimed, one way or another, by the recoiling of the heavy ordnance used on board ships of war. most of the damage is done by the random recoil of the carriage which, moving with the gun along no certain path, is much affected by the motion of the vessel and the inequalities of the deck. it is difficult to know, within a few feet, to where the carriage will come, and the greatest watchfulness is necessary on all hands to prevent accidents.” this refers, observe, to the truck gun under control. how terrible an uncontrolled gun could be, may be read in the pages of victor hugo’s quatre-vingt-treize, of which romance the breaking loose of a piece on the gun-deck of a frigate forms a central incident. it was conjectured that the old victory, admiral balchen’s flagship which went down off the casquets in 1744, “mouse and man,” was lost through the breaking loose of her great guns in a gale.95
a truck gun
the accessories of the truck carriage were a source of frequent accident. the attachment of breechings and tackles to the ship’s side often involved disablement in action, the numerous bolts being driven in as missiles among the crew, who were also in danger of having their limbs caught up in the maze of ropes and trappings with which the deck round the gun was encumbered. considered as a mechanism the148 whole gun-equipment was a rude and primitive affair; the clumsy carriage run out to battery by laborious tackles, the cast-iron gun laid by a simple wedge, the whole equipment traversed by prising round with handspikes—by exactly the same process, it has been remarked, as that by which the savage moved a log in the beginning of the world.
why, then, did the truck carriage maintain its long supremacy?
the answer is, that with all its acknowledged defects it had merits which universally recommended it, while its successive rivals exhibited defects or disadvantages sufficient to prevent their adoption to its own exclusion. it was a case, in fact, of the survival of the fittest. and if we examine its various features in the light of the records of its performances in action (the truck carriage appears in the background of most of our naval letters and biographies), we shall understand why it was not easily displaced from favour with generation after generation of our officers and seamen.
in the first place the truck carriage, a simple structure of resilient elm, with bed, cheek-plates, and trunnions strongly fitted together and secured by iron bolts, was better adapted than any other form for the prevention of excessive stresses, resulting from the shock of recoil, on either gun or ship’s structure. by the expedient of allowing the whole gun equipment to recoil freely across the deck, by allowing the energy of recoil to assume the form of kinetic energy given to the gun and carriage, the violent reactionary stresses due to the sudden combustion of the gunpowder were safely diverted from the ship’s structure, which was thus relieved of nearly the whole of the firing stresses. moreover, by allowing the gun to recoil readily under the influence of the powder-gases the gun itself was saved from excessive stresses which would otherwise have shattered it. from this point of view the weight of the carriage, relatively to that of the gun, was of considerable importance. if the carriage had been at all too heavy it would not have yielded sufficiently under the blow of the gun, and, howsoever strongly made, would eventually have been destroyed, if it had not by its inertia caused the gun to break; if too light, the violence of the recoil would have torn loose the breechings. actually, and as the result of a process of trial-and-error continuously carried on, the weight of the finally evolved elm carriage was so nicely adapted to that of its gun that a recoil of the most suitable proportions149 was generally obtained, a free yet not too boisterous run back. this, of course, upon an even keel. conditions varied when the guns were at sea upon a moving platform. with the ship heeled under a strong wind the weather guns were often fired with difficulty owing to the violence of the recoil. on the other hand the listing of the ship when attacking an enemy from windward favoured the lee guns by providing a natural ramp up which they smoothly recoiled and down which they ran by gravity to battery, as in a shore emplacement. of which advantage, as we know, british sea tactics made full use at every opportunity.
it was strong, simple, and self-contained. metal carriages, whose claims were periodically under examination, proved brittle, too rigid, heavy, and dangerous from their liability to splinter. gunslides, traverses, or structures laid on the deck to form a definite path for the recoil of the gun (such as the swedish ships of chapman’s time, for example, carried) were disliked on account of their complication, the deck-space occupied, and the difficulty which their use entailed of keeping the deck under the gun dry and free from rotting; though beds laid so as to raise the guns to the level of the ports were sometimes fitted, and were indeed a necessity in the earlier days owing to the large sheer and camber given to the decks. the use of compressors, or of adjustable friction devices, in any form, for limiting the recoil, was objected to on account of the possibilities which they presented for accident owing to the forgetfulness of an excited crew. the truck carriage, being self-contained and independent of external adjustment, was safe in this respect.
the four wood trucks were of the correct form and size to give the results required. the resistance of a truck to rolling depends largely upon the relative diameters of itself and its axle. it was thus possible, by making gun-carriage trucks of small diameter and their axles relatively large, to obtain the following effect: on gunfire the carriage started from rest suddenly, the trucks skidding on the deck without rotating and thus checking by their friction the first violent motion of recoil; during the latter phase of the recoil the trucks rotated, and the carriage ran smoothly back until checked by the breechings.
the friction of the trucks on the deck was also affected, however, by another feature of the design: the position of150 the trunnions relatively to the axis of the gun. how important was this position as influencing the history of land artillery, we have already seen. truck guns were nearly always “quarter-hung,” or cast with their trunnions slightly below their axis, so as to cause the breech to exert a downward pressure on firing, and thus augment the friction of the rear trucks on the deck and check the recoil. the position of the trunnions was studied from yet another point of view: namely, to give the minimum of jump to the gun and ensure a smooth start to the recoil. with this object they were so placed that the two ends of the gun were not equally balanced about the trunnion axis, but a preponderance of about one-twentieth of the weight of the gun was given to the breech-end, thus bringing a slight pressure, due to deadweight alone, upon the quoin.
as for this quoin or primitive wedge by which the gun was roughly laid, this had a great advantage over the screw (which gained a footing, as an alternative, when the carronade came into use) in that it allowed of rapid changes of elevation of the gun. hence, though the quoin was liable to jump from its bed on gunfire and do injury to the crew, it kept its place as an accessory almost as long as the truck carriage itself survived.
there was one advantage possessed by the truck carriage which was perhaps the most important of all: its superior transportability. the gun equipment was easily transferable, and what this meant to the seaman may be gathered from the accounts of the way in which, in sailing-ship days, ships’ armaments were continually being shifted. the armament, we have noted, was not embodied, as it is to-day, as an integral part of the design of the ship. the guns and their carriages were in the nature of stock articles, which could be changed in size, number and position according to the whim of the captain or the service of the ship. and there was every reason why all parties concerned, and especially the ordnance people, should tend to standardize the forms of guns and carriages, to keep them self-contained and as independent as possible of the special requirements of individual ships or positions. the shifting of guns was constantly going on in a commissioned ship. at sea they were lashed against the sides so as to leave as clear a deck as possible. in chase a shifting of guns, among other heavy weights, was resorted to in order that the vessel151 should not lose way by plunging heavily. if she set sail on a long voyage some of the guns were struck down into the hold, to stiffen her and give her an increased stability. and on her return to harbour the guns might be removed for examination and repair by the ordnance officials, the ship being laid alongside a sheer hulk for the purpose. in the days before the sheathing of ships’ bottoms was successfully practised, and in the absence of docks, it was constantly necessary to careen ships for the repair of their ground-timbers, for the cleaning of their sides and the caulking of their seams. this, again, necessitated a shifting or complete removal of most of their stores and ordnance. great advantages were offered, therefore, from having gun-carriages compact, self-contained, and capable of being quickly removed from one place to another.
§
having inspected the truck carriage in some detail, let us now briefly glance at the development of its use which took place in the last hundred years of its service, between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries.
the stream of improvement in naval gunnery began to flow strongly under the administration of lord anson. new methods of firing, experiments with priming tubes to replace the primitive powder horns and trains of vent powder, and gun locks to replace the dangerous and unreliable slow match and linstock,96 were under trial in the fleets commanded by admiral hawke, but with results not altogether satisfactory. the locks supplied were lacking in mechanical precision, and the tubes—“very pernicious things” they were voted—were apt to fly out and wound the men. but that the unsatisfactory results obtained were not due to defects inherent in the new devices was soon clearly proved. twenty years later an eminent gunnery officer, sir charles douglas, by perseverance and an152 enthusiastic attention to mechanical detail, succeeded in making both locks and priming tubes a practical success, greatly enhancing by their aid the rate and effectiveness of fire of the great guns. flint-locks of his own design he bought and fitted to the guns of his ship at his private expense. flannel-bottomed cartridges, to replace the parchment-covered cartridges which had caused so much fouling, and goose-quill priming tubes, were provided by him, and to him is certainly due the credit for initiating the series of improvements in material which, trivial as they may seem in detail, yet in the aggregate had the effect of placing our gunnery at a relatively high level in the ensuing wars.
in addition to introducing improvements in methods of firing, sir charles douglas did much to improve the efficiency of the truck carriages themselves. on his appointment to the duke in 1779 he at once began to put his schemes in hand. to ease the recoil of the guns and to save their breechings he devised and fitted steel springs in some way to the latter; with such surprising good effect (he reported) that even with a restricted length of recoil no breeching, not even that of a 32-pounder weather gun double-shotted and fired over a slippery deck, was ever known to break. the recoil he further eased by loading the truck carriage with shot, which he slung on it, thereby augmenting the recoiling mass. he also proposed and tried another apparatus having the same effect: suspended weights, secured to the carriage by ropes reeved through fairleads, which on recoil the gun was made to lift. which weights also had an effect in helping to run the gun out again which he calculated to be equal to that of two extra men on the tackles.
perhaps the principal improvements due to sir charles douglas were those which had as their object the firing of ships’ guns on other bearings than right abeam. he realized the importance of possessing a large arc of training for his guns; and with this object he cleared away all possible obstructions on the gun decks of the duke, removing and modifying knees, standards and pillars to allow his guns to be pointed a full four points before and abaft the beam: a degree of obliquity hitherto unknown in the navy for broadside armament. to traverse the carriages quickly to the required line of bearing he had eyebolts fitted in line between the guns for attachment to the tackles; and to shorten and control the recoil and thus153 allow of firing on an extreme bearing in a confined space, and also to improve the rate of fire, he shod the carriage-trucks with wedges designed to act as drags. “we now dare to fire our guns without running them out,” he wrote to lord barham, “and so as to admit of the ports being shut, with certain impunity, even to the obliquity of three points before or abaft the beam. a wedge properly adapted is placed behind each truck, to make up for the reduction of space to recoil in, in firing to windward or in rolling weather. the gun first ascends the wedges by rotation, and when stopped, performs the remainder of her recoil as a sledge, so feebly as scarce to bring her breeching tight. the bottoms of the wedges, to augment their friction against the deck, are pinked, tarred, and rubbed with very rough sand or with coarse coal dust. this method has also, i hear, been adopted in the union.”
it was also adopted in the formidable, in which ship sir charles fought as first captain to admiral rodney in the great fight which took place three years after the above was written. at the battle of the saints not a single goose-quill failed in the formidable, nor did a gun require to be wormed so long as the flannel-bottomed cartridges held out. of the hundred and twenty-six locks fitted in the duke, only one failed; with this exception a single kentish black flint served for each gun throughout the whole engagement. the oblique fire which our ships were enabled to employ so shattered the enemy by the unexpectedly rapid and concentrated fire poured into him, that victory was not left long in doubt; the toll of his killed and wounded was enormous. the duke, it was reckoned, fired twice as many effective shots as would have been possible under the old system. the formidable reported that two, and sometimes three, broadsides were fired at every passing frenchman before he could bring a gun to bear in reply.97 if all the ships of the fleet, it was said, had been able to use their guns as they were used in these two, very few of the enemy would have escaped. the advantage accruing to the british fleets from the improvements initiated and developed by sir charles douglas and other captains of his time was palpable and undisputed. it is possible, however, that the total effect produced by all these developments in gunnery material, both154 in this action and in those of the following war, may have been insufficiently emphasized by historians?
it is to the war which broke out with the united states of america in 1812 that we must turn to see the truck equipment working at its highest point of efficiency. by this time the advantage of gun-sights98 for giving accuracy of aim has been seized by a few individual officers, and sights of various patterns have been fitted by enthusiasts. no official encouragement is given, however, to experiments with sights and scales and disparting devices, and once again it is left to private initiative and expense to make a further advance toward efficiency. applications for gun-sights are rejected during the war on the ground that these novelties are “not according to the regulation of the service.”99
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 were155 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 lashed156 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 pure157 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 that158 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.
through all the subsequent changes of armament up to the crimean war, from solid shot to shell-fire, the truck carriage maintained its place of favour. in 1811 colonel (afterwards sir william) congreve had published a treatise demonstrating the defects of the truck carriage and proposing in its place a far more scientific and ingenious form of mounting. it lacked, however, some of the characteristics which, as we have seen, gave value to the old truck carriage. except where special conditions gave additional value to its rival, the truck carriage kept its place. in 1820 an iron carriage was tried officially, for 24-pounders, but gave unsatisfactory results. in 1829 the marshall carriage was tried, offering important advantages over the standard pattern. its main feature was a narrow fore-carriage separate from the recoiling rear portion, this fore-carriage being pivoted to a socket in the centre of the gun-port. but still the truck carriage survived the very favourable reports given on its latest rival.
as concentration of fire became developed new fittings such as directing bars, breast chocks and training racers made their appearance and were embodied in its design. as the power of guns and the energy requiring to be absorbed on recoil increased, the rear trucks disappeared and gave place, in the two-truck marsilly carriage, to flat chocks which by the friction of their broad surfaces against the deck helped more159 than trucks to deaden the motion of the carriage. the quoin, perfected by the addition of a graduated scale marked to show the elevation corresponding to each of its positions, gave place at length to various mechanical forms of elevating gear. the elm body was replaced by iron plates bolted and riveted together. and then at length, with the continuous growth of gun-energy, the forces of recoil became so great that the ordinary carriage constrained by rope breechings could no longer cope with them. the friction of wood rear-chocks against the deck was replaced by the friction of vertical iron plates, attached to the carriage, against similar plates attached to a slide interposed between carriage and deck, and automatically compressed: the invention, it is said, of admiral sir thomas hardy. the truck carriage, as it had been known for centuries, had at last been left behind in the evolution of naval artillery.
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with the advent of modern gun mountings the old anomaly of the divided responsibility of war office and admiralty became unbearable; the necessity for a close adaptation of each gun to its ship-position, for careful co-ordination of the work of artillerist, engineer and shipbuilder, produced a crisis which had important effects on future naval administration. a single paragraph will suffice to show the position as it presented itself in the early ’sixties. “there were a thousand points of possible collision,” wrote the biographer of captain cooper key, the captain of the excellent, “as it became more and more certain that gun carriages, instead of being loose movable structures capable of being used in any port, were henceforth to be fixed in the particular port which was adapted for them, with special pivoting bolts and deck racers—all part of the ship’s structure. where the war office work began and the controller’s ended in these cases, no one knew, but the captain of the excellent came in as one interfering between a married pair, and was misunderstood and condemned on both sides.”
in 1866 the solution was found. captain cooper key was appointed to the admiralty as director-general of naval ordnance.
