HMS Royal George, right, shown fictitiously at the launch of HMS Cambridge in 1755.
The Portuguese pioneered the use of great guns at sea, and in a battle off the Malabar Coast in 1501, Vasco da Gama, using line-ahead, stand-off gunfire tactics, destroyed a great Arab sailing dhow fleet using such artillery-without the loss of a single Portuguese ship.
Single line-ahead tactics eventually followed from the use of heavy guns as the prime weapon of war at sea, for it enabled warships to concentrate their gunfire without shooting over their consorts. Rowing warships began to disappear from the fleets of the naval powers, for they were too lightly built to handle more than a couple of heavy guns, they were unsuited for the Atlantic’s tempestuous waters, and oarsmen could be urged to their task only for so long.
The last great galley-ram boarder battle was that of Lepanto in 1571, between the Venetians and the Turks. By the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the large warship propelled by sail and mounting heavy guns along the broadside dominated naval warfare. The ram had vanished and would not be resurrected for some 300 years.
But nonetheless, guns lacked the fatal destructive power of the ram. Even in the Armada battles, the defeat of the Armada was due more to stormy weather than to English gunnery. (Queen Elizabeth I, aware of this natural phenomenon, ordered a medal struck to commemorate the great victory, with the Latin inscription translated as “God Blew and They Were Scattered.” God apparently was a Protestant.)
The principal capital ship of the sixteenth century was the galleon, a three-masted, full-rigged ship of war, mounting its ordnance on gun decks within the hull, firing through hinged, relatively watertight gun ports rather than from high fore and aft platforms. The galleon also marks a distinction between cargo ships and warships that had been blurred since the days of the galley-ram. By this time as well, the great naval guns had gone over to muzzle-loading for the sake of simplicity.
The long and eventful history of the big-gun capital ship may be said to have opened with England’s grandly named Sovereign of the Seas, built in 1637, of 1,466 gross tons, mounting 100 guns, and costing £40,000. It was built “to the great glory of the nation and not to be paralleled in the whole Christian world,” in the words of a contemporary. (The Masters of Trinity House had earlier argued that a three-decker was “beyond the art or wit of man to construct.” Both quotations in Charles N. Robinson, The British Fleet: The Growth, Achievements, and Duties of the Navy of the Empire. London: Geo. Bell & Sons, 1894, pp. 222-223.) Sovereign of the Seas set the pattern for the wooden sailing ship for the next 200 years, with the main armament arranged along the broadside in three (and on only one occasion, four) decks, the heaviest guns on the lower deck, and the smaller and lighter guns on the middle and upper decks. It was propelled by an array of square-rigged sail paraphernalia.
Naval battles of the time were still dominated by the line-abreast chase and boarding, but the Battle of the Gabbard, sixteen years after the launching of Sovereign of the Seas, saw the introduction of line-ahead, broadside-to-broadside battle, which would prevail to the end of the battle fleet in the twentieth century. The minimum number of guns required to fit a warship to lay in the line grew from 30 in 1650, 50 to 74 in 1800, and finally 80 in 1840.
By the later seventeenth century, the newly centralizing nation-states of Europe had established a monopoly on organized violence, and the great warship was a tangible expression of that monopoly. (Piracy had been practically eliminated from European waters, and privateering was strictly regulated.) Not until the end of the nineteenth century would any non-European power (Japan) build great capital ships. The greatest of these “wooden walls,” the three-decker line of battleships, were hugely expensive and time consuming to construct. The Royal Navy itself could muster no more than a dozen or so at any time, even during war. At the penultimate Battle of Trafalgar (1805), of the 27 British and 33 French and Spanish ships-of-the-line, only four ships on either side mounted 100 or more guns; most ships-of-the-line were two-deckers.
Sovereign of the Seas was soon followed by even larger ships-of-the- line, such as Britannia of 1,700 tons, costing £30,000. Gradually, the term “ship-of-the-line” emerged, referring to those warships that were deemed strong enough by virtue of their up to 30 inches of planking and, of course, their thunderous gun power, to lie in the line of first-rate ships (which had to mount at least 60 guns) and endure an enemy’s broadside. The capital ship had replaced Europe’s cathedrals as the most complex and expensive construction of the time.
They were remarkably impervious. Slow-velocity cannonballs rarely penetrated such warships. Rather, the great splinters unleashed by their impact winged down the gun decks, felling gun crews at their stations but leaving hulls basically unharmed. For obvious reasons, those decks were painted red, and sand was scattered over the floors before an impending battle. On more than one occasion it was reported, quite literally, that “the scuppers ran red with blood.” As the effective range of the heaviest shipboard gun was about 100 yards, the clashing lines in a naval battle were quite close, and boarding, in which specially equipped sailors attempted to seize an enemy vessel by force, was commonly practiced. Horatio Nelson himself led a band of boarders to seize two Spanish first rates at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent on 14 February 1797.
Unless they were set afire and their magazines exploded, these wooden warships usually survived even the most bloody of battles. Very few foundered as a result of enemy bombardment. Those that were destroyed were most often the victims of onboard conflagrations or of enemy fireships. Throughout the period, the fireship was by far the most dangerous weapon afloat, and it seems odd that more attention was not paid to these lowly but deadly weapons. (Most likely, then as now, admirals were attracted to the big ships.) Only the coming of the metal warship would usher in the modern phenomenon of the near-instantaneous destruction of a major ship of war by gunfire, torpedo, or naval mine.
But the Royal Navy, by the first years of the eighteenth century, was hobbled by the overgunning of its warships, leaving them hampered in their sailing and lying too low in the water or heeling over, unable to use the lower gun ports even in mildly rough weather. This state of affairs can be traced to the 1719 decision of the Navy Board to establish a standard scale of dimensions, officially fixing the existing tonnage for each class at the existing levels. This decision had the unfortunate effect of practically locking in ship designers to existing dimensions, regardless of the advances of other maritime nations, particularly France and Spain. By 1745, a member of the Admiralty was complaining that “our 70-gun ships are little better than their 50-gun ships,” and a Spanish officer dismissed Royal Navy as “three-deckers on the dimensions of two-deckers” (Robinson, p. 236). HMS Royal George of 1790, for example, weighed only 365 more tons than Royal William of three-quarters of a century earlier! As late as the wars with France at the end of the eighteenth century, the British learned, to their chagrin, that captured frigates were bigger and better than most smaller RN first-rates and, indeed, of some first-class rates.
Ship-of-the-line dimensions gradually increased through the eighteenth century, with Royal Navy first-rates generally topping off at 110 guns, although a few 116-120-gun warships were built. Nelson’s 104-gun Victory weighed in at 3,500-4,000 tons. But Britain’s foes were constructing still larger comparable warships. The largest sailing ship ever in the U. S. Navy, Pennsylvania, mounted 116 guns.
