CANNONS – PART 3

(This post is a continuation of Cannons – Parts 1 and 2. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

Seventeenth century ships’ guns were potentially deadly weapons with impressive penetrating power. We know this from various sources, one of the most interesting of which was a test firing conducted in 2014.

On August 10, 1628, a brand new Swedish warship named the Vassa set sail in Stockholm harbor, amid much official hullabaloo, on her maiden voyage. Due to serious flaws in the ship’s design, that voyage lasted only about a mile (1.6 kilometers). A gust of wind heaved the Vassa over to port, seawater poured in through the open gunports in the lower gundeck, and the ship sank.

A little over three centuries later, the Swedes carefully raised the Vassa up from the seafloor and restored her to her former glory. She now sits on display in the Vassa Museum on the island of Djurgården, just outside Stockholm proper.

The Vassa was an impressive ship: 225 feet (69 meters) long from the butt of the stern rail to the tip of the bowsprit, with two gundecks, armed with 64 bronze cannon. In 2014, a group of scholars decided to test the armament the Vassa carried. Unlike most other ships of the period, which were armed with a variety of differently sized guns, the Vassa’s guns were all the same: twenty-four pounders. That is, they fired a cannon ball weighing twenty-four pounds (10.8 kilos), with a diameter of 5¾ inches (14.6 centimeters). This group of scholars constructed a meticulously accurate replica of one of these guns. They also constructed an accurate replica of the side of the ship itself. Then they took the recreated gun and the ship’s side out to a firing range.

After firing off a total of 54 rounds, they determined that one of these guns fired point blank—that is, straight ahead—had a range of something over 3,000 feet (about 1,000 meters). With the barrel tilted at the maximum elevation, the gun could lob a ball almost 14,000 feet (4,200 meters)—that’s slightly over 2.5 miles (4.2 kilometers). One of the test balls they fired—a 24-pound sphere of iron 5¾” in diameter, remember—passed entirely through the thick wooden planking of the replica ship’s side, continued on for another 1,640 feet (500 meters), hit the ground, bounced, kept going for another 656 feet (200 meters), and then smashed into the trunk of a pine tree a foot and a quarter (40 centimeters) in diameter, splintering the tree apart and felling it.

So… for the time, these old guns packed a serious punch. However, they were deadly only if they actually hit something. Aiming while on the heaving deck of a sailing ship was far from easy. Yes, you could loft a cannon ball a couple of miles, but at that range the only possible way you might hit anything was sheer blind luck. So naval battles were fought at relatively close quarters.

Even if the ship you were firing at was quite close, though, it was still not simple to hit it.

To begin with, your field of vision was severely circumscribed: your only direct, over-the-barrel view of potential targets was through the restricted framework of the gunport in the ship’s hull through which your gun would fire. Also, you couldn’t swivel your gun from side to side. The wooden carriages on which ship’s guns rested were designed to move forwards and backwards, not to pivot. So essentially you could only shoot straight ahead—that is, straight out from the side of the ship on which your gun was located. This meant, in effect, that you were dependent on the helmsman of your ship to aim for you.

If the helmsman managed to bring your ship about so that you had a perfect shot, you still had to cope with the rolling of the ship itself—with the side-to-side tilting of the ship along its longitudinal axis. From your point of view as a gunner, this role translated into your gun barrel pointing down into the sea at the full downwards extent of the role on your side of the ship, and then upwards into the sky at the other extreme… all while the ship was also heaving upwards and downwards as it plowed through the waves.

The art of accurately firing a cannon aboard a moving ship lay largely in the timing.

Just before the turn of the seventeenth century, an Englishman named William Bourne explained all this in The Arte of Shooting in Great Ordnaunce, Contayning Very Necessary Matters for All Sortes of Servitoures Eyther By Sea or By Llande (The Art of Shooting Large Cannons, Containing Very Necessary Matters for all Sorts of Gunners, either by Sea or by Land):

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There is no better time for to give fire, then when the other Shippe is beginning to rise upon the Sea, that is, when you see her from the trough of the Sea: and you must use that according unto the distance betweene the two Shippes, for you must consider, that the shotte must have a time for to come to the other Shippe… Hee that is at the Helme must bee sure to stirre steadye, and bee ruled by him that giveth the levell, and hee that giveth fire, must bee nimble, and readye at a suddayne… And it is good for the Gunner to koyne the mouth of his peece, somewhat with the lowest, rather then any thing with the hyghest, for if that the shotte flyeth over the other Shippe, then it dothe no good, but if that it commeth shorte of the Shippe, it will graze in the water and rise agayne, and speede well ynough, so that it bee not too muche too shorte of the Shippe, for too muche too shorte dothe kill the shotte in the Sea.

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So everything needed to be timed just right. The helmsman had to bring the ship about to give you the right angle of fire. You then had to wait until just the exact right moment (you had to be “nimble, and readye at a suddayne”), when the other ship was on the crest of a sea swell, and the role of your own ship was bringing your cannon barrel upwards. You had to avoid firing too soon, for then the angle of the barrel of your gun would be pointing too far downwards, and your shot would simply splash into the sea. But as the ascending roll of the ship brought you upwards, it was better to fire sooner rather than later, since a low shot could skip across the surface of the sea—like a thrown rock slipped across the still water of a lake—and smack into the other ship, while a high shot would pass harmlessly though the air above the other ship’s rigging.

As if all this wasn’t challenging enough, every time you and your fellow gunners fired off a salvo, the air would be filled with enormous billowing clouds of acrid white smoke, temporarily blinding and choking everybody. See the illustration below for just how much gunsmoke a seventeenth century cannon could produce.

 

 

 

 

Also, in a naval battle, the other ship(s) would be firing at yours. The cannon balls of middling to large ships’ guns ranged in diameter from about 3 to 8 inches (7.6–20 centimeters) and weighed anything from about 5 to 65 pounds (2.25–30 kilos). None of these was anywhere near large enough by itself to actually sink a ship, but individually they could cause gruesome damage to the crew. When a cannon ball passed through the wooden planking of a ship’s hull, it didn’t just create a hole. It sent a murderous cloud of jagged splinters flying across the deck. Small splinters might be little more than nuisance value—unless you got one in the eye. The large ones could literally eviscerate a man.

The ultimate challenge in all of this, perhaps, was that, except in the smallest sizes, it was impossible for one man to effectively handle a ship’s gun. It took a team of men; the larger the gun, the larger the team.

Imagine standing on a heaving, rolling ship’s deck obscured by acrid clouds of gunsmoke, random blasts of razor-edged splinters tearing through the smoke… and in the midst of such deafening chaos, you have to keep a team of a dozen men acting efficiently in concert, completing the various steps of prepping, loading, and firing, again, and again, methodically, often in coordination with other gun teams so that you can all fire together when a broadside is called for—until the battle is lost or won, one way or another.

Being able to fire a ship’s gun with reliable accuracy took a rare combination of nerve, skill, and leadership, all combined with the expertise derived from hard-won experience. Little wonder, then, that good gunners were among the most valuable members of a ship’s crew.