Calendar Ships Guns

About the Georgian Calendar

This Naval History continues on from "Armada Going Home"

New Style dates, that is, according to the Georgian calendar which everybody uses now and which, although it had only been proclaimed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Most of western Europe was aleady using by 1587. England, of course, was not.

With sturdy conservatism the English resisted the innovation, and their Spring date continued for more than another century to occur on March 11th instead of March 21st as it did across the Channel.

Consequently English historians always say that the first day's battle betwen the English and Spanish fleets took place on July 21st 1588, while the Spanish always date it on the thirty-first of the month.

This puts any historian who is writing partly about English and partly about Continental events in a quandary. Some historians escape by writing 21/31 July, but most people find dates repulsive enough without encountering them disguised as fractions.

Consquently, since the sequence of events in England and on the Continent is often important, and to go back and forth between two calendars would become confusing, and at some seasons ten days can make a difference in how much daylight there is and what kind of weather one may expect.

Days of the week, of course, remained the same. Sunday was still Sunday, in Rome as in London.

Armada Going Home

Ships of all sizes and types

Although the Armada campaign involved, on one side or the other, partically every kind of ship known to Europe, a confusing variety of types with an even more confusing variety of names, it is possible to describe them by reasonably simple categories.

The galleon was the standard fighting ship of Atlantic waters. It was likely to have two decks from stem to stern with its main batteries in broadside and castles fore and aft bristling with lighter quick-firing pieces. Galleons were longer, narrower in the water than merchantmen of the same tonnage, though still stubby and high built by later standards.

Armed merchant ships supplemented galleons in the battle line; those of about three-hundred tons and over and so capable of mounting culverins and deni-cannon were commonly styled great-ships.

The most formidable great-ships, were those of the Levant Company, they were built for speed and ease of manoeuvre and carried heavy batteries to repel corsairs so that they were sometimes mistaken by their pirate foes for galleons.

The biggest Mediterranean ships, carracks, had lofty, overhanging bow and stern castles with deep holds; some were three-deckers like those used by the Portuguese for the East India trade.

Working ships of various kinds

Baltic hulks, "urcas" were not often as big as carracks or as high built. Their butter-tub shape made them seaworthy and were very spacious but slower and even clumsier than carracks.

Small craft meant for reconnaissance, dispatch service and inshore work, the English generally called them 'pinnaces' mo matter what their rig. I have used the term for such craft in both fleets of the Armada.

The Spanish distinguished 'zabras', 'fregatas' and 'patajes' or 'pataches' in decending order or size. All, like the English pinnaces, were low in the water, faster and handier than big ships, and capable of using oars at need.

Besides pinnaces seperately commissioned, both fleets called their large ships' boats pinnaces. These were either towed astern or carried on deck and so do not appear individually since they had no seperately assigned crews.

Hoys and caravels, crumsters and galliots were both types of small coasters, sometimes used in war. They were usually fore and aft rigged; crumsters and galliots were frequently rowed.

Ship purely for wars

Galleys and galleasses were warships purely; they usually cruised under sail, but used oars in battle, and when they were becalmed. The galley was long, narrow, low in the water, and lightly gunned, but very manoeuvrable in battle.

The galleasses were an attempt to combine the speed of a galley with the fire power and sea-keeping qualities of a galleon. The attempt was not altogether successful, but they were formidable ships.

The great galleasses of Naples with the Armada mounted fifty guns apiece, some quite large, and were manned by three hundred soldiers and sailors and another three hundred rowers.

Guns and Pieces

Sixteenth-century guns were even more various than the ships. Both the heavy, muzzle-loading ship-killers of the main batteries and the small, breech-loading man-killers were divided into three general types.

The Guns arrival on board ship was its ultimate destiny; it revolutionized both the Ship and all sea-warfare. It quickly became the most important sea-weapon there had ever been.

From the middle of the sixteenth century, and for the next three-hundred years, it was the chief weapon of sea-warfare, through its supremacy.

As soon as man had discovered the ingredients, when mixed, gave the explosive which we know as gunpowder, it was inevitable he would create machines which could use it as a propellent for missile weapons.

Man then wanted his ship and his weapon to go as fast, and as far, as possible. In both cases he could use Nature to help him-the wind for the ship and gravity for the missile. But nature will not always help; her breezes sometimes blow in the wrong direction, and gravity always acts downwards.

Man however, is clever enough, in both cases, to invent a mechanical apparatus to do his work for him; and to do it better than he can do it, by using his own strength. In one case he harnesses steam; in the other he hits upon the correct mixture of natural products and makes gunpowder.

Gauging the capacity

But in both cases he has done a great deal of prelimary work first, and displayed the utmost ingenuity before he makes his grand discoveries. Long before he discovers steam he can take his ship to sea, and he has learnt to throw things, heavy things, much further than his own unaided muscles allow.

One method was the centuries old sling, another was the securing of tension of a whippy object, with the release of that tension resulting in velocity, like spring traps of various kinds, or bows with arrows.

These principles gave him effective man-killing weapons long before gunpowder's appearance. They had been developed to give him the means to batter down walls. The great stone-throwers were also many centuries old.

So it is more accurate not to regard the gunpowder-propelled weapons as new weapons; but as old weapons launched by a new propellent force.

"Artillery" meant ballistas and tre'buchets before it meant guns; one deviation of of "cannon" is "canna" a reed, a tube for blowing forth the Greek Fire; the word "gun" may be a shortened form of "mangonel."

Some of the biggest guns we know about, are the great siege-pieces, with which the Turks captuered Constantinople in 1453, and the great Dardanelles gun, is now in the Tower of London.

The Gun-Maker

It is often assumed that all early guns were muzzle-loaders; but this is not so. They were nearly all breech-loaders, and all built up guns were such. In fact, the gun-maker had not yet made up his mind whether it was a breech or a muzzle part of the gun that he was making.

In the end it was decided that the open-ended cylinder was going to be the barrel, and the breech was to be a new piece altogether. When this was built, it was blocked up at one end and tapered at the other. In loading, the ball, a small stone at first and eventually iron, was put into the barrel and the powder into the breech-block, which was known as the "chamber."

Originally, it was probably laid in a groove cut in a piece of heavy timber. When all was ready, the gunner applied to the fine powder in the touch-hole a light on the end of a long stick-a very long stick if he were a wise man.

And then the fun began. Man must have discovered very soon, from hard experience, that the natural habit of all explosive gases is to find the easiest way out, and if the gun was secure enough, all would be well?

The Gunner arrives

The gunner might expect that the explosion and the shot would emerge through the muzzle. And even if it did there was still the recoil to take into account. When unable to react in rearward direction, it could only operate upwards.

The early guns were not very efficient man-killers, they had not the range or penetrating power of the long-bow; nor could they compete with the accuracy of the aim.

There is plenty of historical evidence of the effectiveness of the long-bow. It was especially formidable in the hands of the English peasantry, whom generations of practice had made them into magnificent bowmen. It was claimed they could hit a knight at 200 yards' range.

There would appear plenty of justification that the early ship-gun was not the greatest man-killer. But in the end it won, for man is a persistant creature, and he quickly improved his weapon. A far handier weapon resulted.

By the end of the fifteenth century, he had learnt to mount his gun much more effectively. The result was a swivel gun which could be very effectively aimed by turning the gun on a swivel with a handle.

The problem was, breech-loaders could not be made to fire fast enough, or, if so made, could not be relied upon to destroy the right people. The big breech-loaders were scrapped; while the small breech-loders continued for some time; and never quite died out.

The "Cast" Gun

The gun-founders soon discovered that the powder must not be allowed to explode in the breech, or its feeble force would be dissipated through lack of pressure around it. So they cast their bell shaped pices with a funnel at the base, of very small diameter compared with that of the bell itself.

This funnel was called the chamber, and at first its diameter was not more than a quarter of the bell's. The characteristics of this type of weapon is the "Mortar" and it was always a muzzle-loader. This particular form of weapon was named after the chemists mortar.

But the art of casting had gone much further than this before 1500, especially in the eastern Mediterranean. The Turks were trying hard to cast breech-loaders, and they were very nearly successful.

To Englishmen, the best known peice of this type is the famous Dardanelles Gun in the Tower of London. It is dated 1464, it weighs nearly 18.5 tons, is 17 feet long overall, and its barrel has a bore of 25 inches! But, the problem of moving it was actually greater than making it.

It was made of brass, which in those days was held in a more higher esteem than iron. But the great gun failed in her slowness of fire. But at the turn of the fifteenth century the gun-founders of Western Europe had hit upon a more serviceable weapon than the wrought-iron breech-loaders.

It was the heavy-muzzle loaders, cast throughout in one piece, complete with trunions and cascabels, of very thick metal at the breech end, and tapering to a lesser thickness near the muzzle. This meant that the danger of the explosion coming out any way but through the muzzle was all but eliminated.

A badly cast gun might burst, but there could now be no fear of the chamber flying out into the gunner's face, because in this sense there was no chamber. The loss of the breech-loading principle was in theory, a disadvantage, but in every other way the new sort was a great improvement on the built-up gun. its construction much stronger and its life much longer.

The "Perier" stone-thrower

Though several reasons made it undesirable to mount grotesquely latge cast guns in ships, they could not be big enough to throw shots of a definitely ship-killing nature. Save for a few "freaks," the biggest balls thrown from ship-mounted guns weighed about 60lb, but, after years of experience, a shot of about half that size was found to be the best.

The earliest guns of this type were, still "chambered," in the sense that the mortar was chambered; having, the inner end of the bore, where the powder was, of smaller circumference than the barrel's bore; but the difference between the bores of chamber and barrel was nothing like it had been.

So as long as it remained "chambered," the piece was probably used exclusively for throwing stone, and not metal round shot, the powder-charge being insufficient for launching the heavier projectile. This chambered, stone-throwing type was called the "Perier," and it had a long story of its own, ulimately losing its "chambering" and coming in the end to throw iron shots.

But that was not until the end of the sixteenth century or a little later. It remained for all these years, a formidable weapon at close range, the full ship-perier in England throwing a shot of some 24 lb, weight.

Other smaller guns of the "chambered" perier-type, short both in build and range, were called "Perieraes," "Port-pieces," "Fowlers" and "Slings." The second in the list was usually, and the last two were always, man-killers only.

"Cannon" and "Calverin"

The main line of evolution was through two types of guns called in the sixteenth century "Cannon" and "Calverin." The former was a true "battering-piece," throwing a heavy iron shot for a medium range, and of equal bore throughout.

The cannon threw a shot of about 42 lb, weight. Of this class too was the Demi-Cannon, a smaller edition of the whole cannon, which had a round shot of about 32lb, weight. Some other countries possessed a Quarter-Cannon.

But we in England did not favour it much; nor did we often put the whole Cannon into our ships, though we used it a great deal on land. The Demi-Cannon was by far the commonest representative of this class in English ships.

The ship-guns which won the day were the Calverins; very long pieces compared to other types, of as much as 32 calibres, as to the Cannon's 18 or 20, and the Perier's 8.

The original Calverin, was thirteen feet long, but the English fancied them, and came more and more to arm their ships with them. A close study leads to the conclusion that something like 95 per cent of the guns in the fleet which defeated Spain's great Armada in 1588 were of this type.

It is often asked what was the range of these pieces. There was not much increase in this respect between the defeat of the Arnada and the battle of Trafalgar.

A rough averaging of the figures show that the Calverin's "point-blank" range was about 330 yards and its "random" range was about 1.25 miles, about a fifth longer than a "full" or sometimes "Royal" Cannon.

Modern-day-Pages Fast Boats Pages Joe Wezley Pages

Henry VIII's gun-foundries

The King after testing the guns that he bough he set up gun-foundries, of his own, and encouraged others to do the same. Thereafter the English guns led for the next hundred years and more. They became so popular abroad that succeeding monarchs had to try, to limit the export of them to foreign countries.

The "cast" guns salvaged from the "Mary Rose" include a specimen of both full or "Royal" Cannon, and Demi-Cannon, firing iron shot. The length of the bore was thirty-two times its diameter.

Like the ships they became paramount in sea-fighting, and both remained so for approximately the same length of time-some 300 years. Nor did they greatly change during those centuries. The principles upon which they worked, did not change at all.

In the nineteenth-century, the ship and the gun both go through highly important changes. The weapon's influence on ships and shipbuilding was enormous and the influence that it exerted on War. Was also enormous.

To say that it revolutionized sea-fighting is an understatement; because it ushered in a new kind of sea-fighting: it created, something very new; "Modern-Naval Warfare."

The continuation of this Naval History will be: "Royal Navy at Dunkirk"

Calendar Ships Guns Royal Navy at Dunkirk

"Pirates Trilogy" $20