THE CARRONADE
AT the monthly meeting of the Carron Company, a Scotch iron-founding
and shipping firm, which was held in December, 1778, the manager
informed the board that, in order to provide armament for some of the
Company’s sailing packets, he had constructed a very light species
of gun, resembling a cohorn, which was much approved by many people
who had come on purpose to inspect it. So favourable, indeed, was
the impression given by the inspection of this weapon that, with the
company’s permission, he could receive a great many orders for them.
Whereon it was resolved to authorize the manufacture of the new species
in quantity; and to call all such guns as should be made by them of
this nature, Carronades.
Such were the circumstances in which the carronade first came into
use. And the following advertisement, appearing in Edinburgh shortly
afterwards, sufficiently explains the incentive for exploiting the new
type of ordnance, and the reason of its popularity among shipowners,
passengers and crews. “To sail March 5, 1779, the _Glasgow_,
Robert Paterson master, mounting fourteen twelve-pounders, and men
answerable.... N.B.--The Carron vessels are fitted out in the most
complete manner for defence at a very considerable expense, and are
well provided with small arms. All mariners, recruiting parties,
soldiers upon furlow, and all other steerage passengers who have been
accustomed to the use of fire-arms, and who will engage in defending
themselves, will be accommodated with their passage to and from London,
upon satisfying the masters for their provisions, which in no instance
shall exceed 10s. 6d. sterling. The Carron vessels sail regularly as
usual, without waiting for the convoy.”
The carronade was a very short, light, carriage gun of relatively
large bore, made to take a standard size of long-gun shot and project
it, by means of a small charge of powder, against an enemy at close
range. Its proprietors soon found a market for the produce of their
foundry, not only for merchant ships but for men-of-war. The reputation
of the new ordnance quickly spread; carronades found a place almost
immediately among the orthodox armament of the greater number of our
fighting ships; and kept their place till, after a chequered career of
half a century, during which they contributed both to victory and to
defeat, they were finally discarded from the sea service.
The story of the carronade begins some little time before the meeting
of the Carron board in the year 1778. It will be remembered that in
1747 Mr. Benjamin Robins had advocated, in a much-talked-of paper,
an increase in the calibre of warships’ guns at the expense of their
ranging power, and that in support of his argument he had drawn
attention to two features of ship actions--first, that the great
majority of duels were fought at close quarters; secondly, that the
destructive effect of a cannon-ball against an enemy’s hull depended
largely on the external dimensions of the ball, the larger of two balls
producing an effect altogether out of proportion to the mere difference
in size.
However invalid may have been the arguments founded on these
assertions--and that there was a serious flaw in them time was to
show--there could be no doubt that, so far as considerations of defence
were concerned, the conclusions reached were of important value. In
the case of a merchant packet defending herself from boarding by a
privateer, for example, a light, short-ranging gun throwing a large
ball would give far more effective protection than a small-calibre
long gun. And if, moreover, the former involved a dead weight less
than a quarter, and a personnel less than half, of that involved
by the latter, the consideration of its superiority in action was
strongly reinforced, in the opinion of shipowners and masters, by
less advertised considerations of weight, space, and equipment--very
important in their relation to the speed and convenience of the vessel,
and hence to all concerned.
So the arguments of Robins, though propounded solely with reference to
warships, yet applied with special force to the defensive armament of
merchant ships. A conception of this fact led a very able artillerist,
General Robert Melville, to propose, in 1774, a short eight-inch gun
weighing only thirty-one hundredweight yet firing a nicely fitting
sixty-eight pound ball with a charge of only five and a half pounds of
powder. This piece he induced the Carron company to cast, appropriately
naming it a Smasher. Of all the carronades the Smasher was the
prototype. It possessed the special attributes of the carronades in the
superlative degree; the carronade was a reproduction, to a convenient
scale, of the Smasher. That General Melville was the prime inventor
of the new type, has been placed beyond doubt by the inscription on
a model subsequently presented to him by the Carron Company. The
inscription runs: “Gift of the Carron Company to Lieut.-General
Melville, inventor of the Smashers and lesser carronades for solid,
ship, shell, and carcass shot, etc. First used against French ships in
1779.”[85]
In almost every respect the Smasher was the antithesis of the long
gun: the advantages of the one were founded on the shortcomings of
the other. For instance, the smallness of the long gun’s ball was a
feature which, as ships’ sides came to be made stronger and thicker,
rendered the smaller calibres of long guns of a diminishing value as
offensive armament. It was becoming increasingly difficult to sink a
ship by gunfire. The round hole made near the enemy’s water-line was
insufficient in size to have a decisive effect; the fibres of the
timber closed round the entering shot and, swelled by sea-water, half
closed the hole, leaving the carpenter an easy task to plug the inboard
end of it. The large and irregular hole made by a Smasher, on the other
hand, the ragged and splintered opening caused by the crashing of the
large ball against the frames and timbers, was quite likely to be the
cause of a foundering. Again, the high velocity of the long gun’s ball,
while giving it range and considerable penetrative power, was actually
a disadvantage when at close quarters with an enemy. The maximum effect
was gained, as every gunner knew, when the ball had just sufficient
momentum to enable it to penetrate an opponent’s timbers. The result of
a high velocity was often to make a clean hole through a ship without
making a splinter or causing her to heel at all. Hence the practice of
double-shotting: a system of two units which, as we have just seen,
was less likely to prove effective than a system of a larger single
unit. On the other hand the Smasher vaunted its low muzzle velocity. As
for the relative powder charges, that of the long gun was wastefully
large and inefficient, while that of the Smasher was small and very
effective. It was in this respect, perhaps, that the Smasher showed
itself to the greatest advantage. And as this feature exerted from
the first an important influence on all other types of ordnance, we
will examine in some detail the means by which its high efficiency was
attained.
Apart from the inefficiency inherent in the small-ball-and-big-velocity
system the long gun laboured under mechanical disadvantages from which
its squat competitor was happily free. In the eighteenth century the
state of workshop practice was so primitive as to render impossible any
fine measurements of material. Until the time of Whitworth the true
plane surface, the true cylinder and the true sphere were unattainable
in practice. For this reason a considerable clearance had to be
provided between round shot and the bores of the guns for which they
were intended; in other words, the inaccuracies which existed in the
dimensions of guns and shots necessitated the provision of a certain
“windage.” But other considerations had also to be taken into account.
The varying temperatures at which shot might require to be used; the
fouling of gun-bores by burnt powder; the effect of wear and rust on
both shot and bore, and especially the effect of rust on the shot
carried in ships of war (at first enlarged by the rust and then, the
rust flaking or being beaten off with hammers, reduced in size)--all
these factors combined to exact such disproportionate windage that, in
the best conditions, from one-quarter to one-third of the force of the
powder was altogether lost, while, in the worst conditions, as much as
one-half of the propulsive force of the powder escaped unused. Not only
was a large charge required, therefore, but the range and aim of the
loosely fitting shot was often incorrect and incalculable; the motion
of the shot was detrimental to the surface of the bore and the life of
the gun; while the recoil was so boisterous as sometimes to dismount
and disable the gun, injure the crew, and even endanger the vessel.
The inventor of the Smasher, by eliminating this obvious deficiency of
the long gun, gave to his weapon not only a direct advantage due to the
higher efficiency of the powder-charge, but also several collateral
advantages arising from it, such as, economy of powder, ease of recoil,
and small stresses upon the mounting and its supporting structure.
It had been laid down by Dr. Hutton in 1775, as one of the chief
results of the systematic experiments carried out by him at Woolwich
in extension of the inquiries originated by Robins, that if only the
windage of guns could be reduced very important advantages would
accrue; among others, a saving of at least one-third of the standard
charges of powder would result. General Melville determined to give the
Smasher the very minimum of windage necessary to prevent accident. The
shortness of the bore favoured such a reduction. The large diameter,
though at first it might appear to render necessary a correspondingly
large windage, was actually an advantage from this point of view.
For, instead of adhering to the orthodox practice with long guns, of
making the windage roughly proportional to the diameter of the bore, he
gave the Smasher a windage less than that of a much smaller long gun,
arguing that though a certain mechanical clearance was necessary, yet
the amount of this clearance was in no way dependent on the diameter
of the shot or piece. The large size of the Smasher acted therefore to
its advantage. The windage space through which the powder gases could
escape was very small in relation to the area of the large ball on
which they did useful work.
But this divergence from the standard practice would appear to
necessitate the provision of special ammunition for use with the
Smasher: the nicely fitting sixty-eight pound ball would require to
be specially made for it? And this would surely militate against
the general adoption of the Smasher in the public service? No such
difficulty confronted the inventor. For, curiously enough, the
principle on which the dimensions of gun-bores and shot were fixed
was the reverse of the principle which obtains to-day. Instead of the
diameter of the _gun_ being of the nominal dimension and the diameter
of the shot being equal to that of the gun minus the windage, the
diameter of the _shot_ was the datum from which the amount of the
windage and the calibre of the gun were determined.
So, the size of the shot being fixed, a reduction of windage was
obtainable in a new design of gun by boring it to a smaller than the
standard diameter. And this was what the inventor of the Smasher
did. The large ball, in combination with the restricted windage and
the small charge of powder, gave the Smasher ballistic results far
superior, relatively, to those obtained with the long gun. Its lack of
ranging power was admitted. But for close action it was claimed that it
would prove an invaluable weapon, especially in the defence of merchant
ships.[86] Not only would its large ball make such holes in the light
hull of an enemy privateer as would break through his beams and frames
and perhaps send all hands to the pumps; but, projected with just
sufficient velocity to carry it through an opponent’s timbers, it would
thereby produce a maximum of splintering effect and put out of action
guns, their crews, and perhaps the vessel itself.
§
On the lines of the Smasher the “lesser carronades,” more convenient in
size and more easily worked, were cast, and quickly made a reputation
in merchant shipping. The Smasher itself was offered to the admiralty,
but was never fitted in a royal ship; though trials were carried
out with it later with hollow or cored shot, to ascertain how these
lighter balls compared in action with the solid 68-pounders. Meanwhile
the Carron Company found a large market for the lighter patterns of
carronade; the 24, 18, and 12-pounders were sold in large numbers to
private ships and letters-of-marque, and to some of the frigates and
smaller ships of the royal navy. The progress of the new ordnance was
watched with interest by the board of admiralty. In 1779 we have Sir
Charles Douglas writing to Sir Charles Middleton in full accord with
his views on the desirability of mounting Carron 12-pounders on the
poop of the _Duke_, and suggesting 24-pounders, three a side, upon
her quarter-deck. To the same distinguished correspondent Captain
Kempenfelt writes, deploring that no trials have yet been made with
carronades. Shortly afterwards the navy board discusses the 68-pound
Smasher and desires the master-general of ordnance to make experiment
with it. A scale is drawn up by the navy board, moreover, and
sanctioned by the admiralty, for arming different rates with 18-and
12-pounder carronades. The larger classes of ships, the first, second,
and third rates, have their quarter-decks already filled with guns; but
accommodation is found for a couple of carronades on the forecastles,
and for half a dozen on the poop, which for nearly a century past has
served chiefly as a roof for the captain’s cabin. This is now timbered
up and given three pairs of ports, making a total of eight ports
for the reception of carronades. In the case of smaller ships less
difficulty is experienced. Ports are readily cut in their forecastles
and quarter-decks, and in some cases their poops are barricaded, to
give accommodation for from four to a dozen carronades.[87]
The new weapon found its way into most of our smaller ships, not always
and solely as an addition to the existing long-gun armament, for use
in special circumstances, but in many cases in lieu of the long guns
of the establishment. The saving in weight and space gained by this
substitution made the carronade especially popular in the smaller
classes of frigate, the sloops, and brigs; many of which became almost
entirely armed with the type. The weak feature of the carronade, which
in the end was to prove fatal to it--its feeble range and penetrating
power--was generally overlooked, or accepted as being more than
compensated for by its many obvious advantages. The carronade, it was
said by many, was the weapon specially suited to the favourite tactics
of the British navy--a yard-arm action.
There were others, however, who were inclined to emphasize the
disability under which the carronade would lie if the enemy could
contrive to avoid closing and keep just out of range. And on this
topic, the relative merits of long gun and carronade as armament
for the smaller ships, discussion among naval men was frequent and
emphatic. The king’s service was divided into two schools. The
advocates of long guns could quote many a case where, especially in
chase, the superior range of the long gun had helped to win the day.
The advocates of the carronade replied with recent and conclusive
examples of victories won by short-gun ships which had been able to
get to grips and quickly neutralize the advantages of a superior enemy
armed with long guns. When challenged with the argument that, since
the advantages of the carronade entirely disappear at long ranges it
is essential that ships armed with them should be exceptionally fast
sailers, they replied, that the very lightness of a carronade armament
would, other things being equal, give ships so armed the property
required. As for out-ranging, they were even ready to back their
carronades in that respect, if only they were well charged with powder.
It was a matter of faith with many that, in spite of Dr. Hutton’s
published proof to the contrary, a considerable increase of range could
be obtained by the expedient of shortening the gun’s recoil; so that in
chase it was a common procedure to lash the breechings of carronades to
the ship’s timbers, to prevent recoil and to help the shot upon its way.
At first mechanical difficulties occurred in the fitting of the new
carronade mountings which, though not due to any defect inherent in
the equipments, nevertheless placed them under suspicion in certain
quarters. Though the prototype had trunnions like a gun, the carronades
afterwards cast were attached by lugs to wooden slides which recoiled
on slotted carriages pivoted to the ship’s side timbers, the slide
being secured to the carriage by a vertical bolt which passed down
through the slot. The recoil was limited by breechings; but as these
stretched continuously the bolt eventually brought up with a blow
against the end of the slot in the carriage: the bolt broke, and
the carronade was disabled. This happened at Praya Bay, where the
carronades broke their beds, owing to slack breechings, after a few
rounds. Captains complained, too, that the fire of the carronades was a
danger to the shrouds and rigging.
[Illustration: A CARRONADE]
In spite of these views the popularity of the new ordnance increased so
rapidly that in January, 1781, there were, according to the historian
James, 429 ships in the royal navy which mounted carronades. On the
merits of these weapons opinion was still very much divided. The board
of ordnance was against their adoption; the navy board gave them a mild
approval. In practice considerable discretion appears to have been
granted to the commanders of ships in deciding what armament they
should actually carry.[88] But the uncertainty of official opinion
gave rise to a surprising anomaly: _the carronade, although officially
countenanced, was not recognized as part of the orthodox armament of a
ship_. What was the cause of this is not now clear. It has been said
in explanation, that the carronade formed too fluctuating a basis on
which to rate a ship’s force; that a long-gun basis afforded a key to
the stores and complement of a ship, whereas carronades had little
effect on either complement or stores; or that it may have been merely
inertia on the part of the navy board. Whatever the cause, the ignoring
of the carronade, in all official quotations of ships’ armaments, led
to great uncertainty and confusion in estimating the relative force of
our own and other navies, to suggestions of deception on the part of
antagonists, to the bickering of historians and the bewilderment of the
respective peoples. This extraordinary circumstance, that carronades
with all their alleged advantages were not thought worthy to be ranked
among the long guns of a ship, is commented on at length by James.
“Whether,” he says, “they equalled in calibre the heaviest of these
guns, added to their number a full third, or to their power a full
half, still they remained as mere a blank in the ship’s nominal, or
rated force, as the muskets in the arm-chest. On the other hand, the
addition of a single pair of guns of the old construction, to a ship’s
armament, removed her at once to a higher class and gave her, how novel
or inconvenient soever, a new denomination.”
While the products of the Carron firm were gaining unexpected success
in the defence of merchant shipping, their value in ships of the line
was not to remain long in doubt. Some of the heavier carronades had
been mounted in the _Formidable_, _Duke_, and other ships, and their
presence had a material effect in Admiral Rodney’s action of April,
1782. As had been generally recognized, the carronade was especially
suited to the British aims and methods of attack--the destruction of
the enemy by a yard-arm action. To the French, whose strategy and
methods were fundamentally different, its value was less apparent. So
that for long this country reaped alone the benefit of its invention;
until in somewhat half-hearted way France gradually adopted it, and
then mostly in the smaller sizes, and more apparently with a view to
defence than for offensive purposes. In the action with de Grasse the
carronades of the British fleet operated, in the opening stages, as an
additional incentive to the enemy to avoid close quarters. And later,
at the in-fighting, their weight of metal contributed in no small
degree to the superiority of fire which finally forced him to surrender.
It was later in this same year that the carronade won its most dramatic
victory as armament of a small ship. In order to give a thorough trial
to the system the navy board had ordered the _Rainbow_, an old 44, to
be experimentally armed with large carronades, some of which were of
as large a calibre as the original Smasher; by which her broadside
weight of metal was almost quadrupled. Thus armed she put to sea and
one day fell in with the French frigate _Hébé_, armed with 18-pounder
long guns. Luring her enemy to a close-quarter combat, the _Rainbow_
suddenly poured into the Frenchman the whole weight of her broadside.
The resistance was short, the _Hébé_ surrendered, and proved to be a
prize of exceptional value as a model for frigate design. The capture
was quoted as convincing proof of the value of a carronade armament,
and the type continued from this time to grow in popularity, until the
termination of the war in 1783 put a stop to further experiments with
it.
§
Throughout the long war which broke out ten years later the carronade
played a considerable part in the succession of duels and actions which
had their climax off Trafalgar. It was now generally adopted as a
secondary form of armament, captains being permitted, upon application,
to vary at discretion the proportion of long-gun to carronade armament
which they wished to carry. In the smaller classes especially, a
preponderance of carronades was frequently accepted; the accession
of force caused by the substitution of small carronades for 6-and
9-pounder long guns in brigs and sloops could hardly be disputed. In
ships-of-the-line the larger sizes continued in favour. The French now
benefited, too, by their adoption; on more than one occasion their
poop and forecastle carronades, loaded with langrage, played havoc
with our personnel. Spaniards and Dutchmen did not carry them. How far
their absence contributed to their defeats it is not now to inquire;
but how the tide of battle would have been affected by them--if the
Dutch fleet, for instance, had carried them at Camperdown--may be a not
unprofitable speculation.
Early in the war the carronade system was to score its greatest
defensive triumph, and this, by a happy coincidence, in the hands of
the old _Rainbow’s_ commander.
The _Glatton_, one of a few East Indiamen which had been bought by the
admiralty, was fitted out in 1795 as a ship of war, and left Sheerness
in the summer of the following year under the command of Captain Henry
Trollope to join a squadron in the North Sea. At her commander’s
request she was armed with carronades exclusively. She was without
ahead or astern fire, without a single long bow or stern chaser; she
carried 68-pounder carronades along her sides, whose muzzles were so
large that they almost filled the small port-holes of the converted
Indiaman and prevented more than a small traverse. Off the Flanders
coast she fell in one night with six French frigates, a brig-corvette,
and a cutter; and at ten o’clock a close action began. The _Glatton_
was engaged by her antagonists on both sides, her yard-arms almost
touching those of the enemy. She proved to be a very dangerous foe.
Her carronades, skilfully pointed and served by supply parties who
worked port and starboard pieces alternately, poured out their heavy
missiles at point-blank range. So heavy was her fire that one by one
the frigates had to haul off, severely damaged, and the _Glatton_ was
left at last to spend the night repairing her rigging unmolested, but
in the expectation that the French commodore would renew the attack in
the morning. To her surprise no action was offered. The blows of the
68-pounders had done their work. Followed by the _Glatton_ with a “brag
countenance,” the enemy retired with his squadron in the direction of
Flushing.
The action had more than one lesson to teach, however, and no more
ships, except small craft, were armed after this upon the model of the
_Glatton_.
We must at this point mention an experiment made in the year 1796,
at the instance of Sir Samuel Bentham, in the mounting of carronades
on a non-recoil system. Sir Samuel, who in the service of Russia had
armed long-boats and other craft with ordnance thus mounted, produced
arguments before the navy board for attaching carronades rigidly to
ships’ timbers; so as to allow of no other recoil than that resulting
from the elasticity of the carriage and the materials connecting it
to the ship. The ordnance board reported against the new idea. Sir
Samuel pointed out that the idea was not new. Both the largest and the
smallest pieces used on board ship (viz. the mortar and the swivel)
had always been mounted on the principle of non-recoil. He showed
how bad was the principle of first allowing a gun and its slide or
carriage to generate momentum in recoil and then of attempting to
absorb that momentum in the small stretch of a breeching-rope. He
argued that a rifle held at the shoulder is not allowed to recoil: if
it is, the rifleman smarts for it. He instanced the lashing of guns
fast to the ship, especially in chase, for the purpose of making them
carry farther. No; the novelty consisted in preparing suitable and
appropriate fastenings for intermediate sizes of guns between the
mortar and the swivel. The adoption of his proposal, he contended,
would result in smaller guns’ crews, quicker loading, and greater
safety.
As a result of these arguments certain sloops designed by him were
armed on this principle; and in other cases, notably in the case
of the boats used at the siege of Acre, the carronades and smaller
types of long gun were successfully mounted and worked without recoil
by attaching their carriages to vertical fir posts, built into the
hull structures to serve as front pivots. But, generally, the system
was found to be impracticable. The pivots successfully withstood
the stresses of carronades fired with normal charges of powder; no
permanent injury resulted to the elastic hull structures over which the
blows were spread. But the factor of safety allowed by this arrangement
was insufficient to cover the wild use of ordnance in emergencies.
The regulation of charges and the prevention of double-shotting was
difficult in action, and pieces were liable to be over-charged in the
excitement of battle in a way which Sir Samuel Bentham had failed to
realize. Pivots were broken, ships’ structures strained, and the whole
system found ill-adapted for warship requirements.
It was not till the war of 1812 that the fatal weakness of the
carronade, as primary armament, was fully revealed. The Americans had
not developed the carronade policy to the same extent as ourselves,
for transatlantic opinion was never at this period enamoured of the
short-range gun. Their well-built merchant ships, unhampered by tonnage
rules or by the convoy system which had taken so much of the stamina
from British shipping, were accustomed to trust to their speed and
good seamanship to keep an enemy at a distance. Their frigates, built
under less pedantic restrictions as to size and weight, were generally
swifter, stouter and more heavily armed than ours. And, though they
included carronades among their armament, these were not generally in
so large a proportion as in our ships, and in part were represented
by a superior type--the colombiad, a hybrid weapon of proportions
intermediate between the carronade and the long gun. Our ships often
depended heavily upon the carronade element of their armament.
Experience was soon to confirm what foresight might, surely, have
deduced: namely, that when pitted against an enemy who could choose his
range and shoot with tolerable accuracy the carronade would find itself
in certain circumstances reduced to absolute impotence.
This was to be the fate and predicament of our ships on Lakes Erie and
Ontario, in face of the Americans. “I found it impossible to bring
them to close action,” the English commodore reported. “We remained in
this mortifying situation five hours, having only six guns in all the
squadron that would reach the enemy, not a carronade being fired.” The
same lesson was to be enforced shortly afterwards on the Americans.
One of their frigates, the _Essex_, armed almost exclusively with
carronades, was fought by an English ship, the _Phœbe_, armed with
long guns. The _Essex_, it should be noted, possessed the quality
essential for a carronade armament, namely, superior speed. But the
_Phœbe_ fell in with her in circumstances when, owing to damage, her
superior speed could not be utilized. The captain of the _Phœbe_ was
able to choose the range at which the action should be fought. He kept
at a “respectful distance”: within range of his own long guns and out
of range of his opponent’s carronades. Both sides fought well, but the
result was a foregone conclusion. The _Essex_, disabled and on fire,
had to surrender. From that time the carronade was discredited. For
some years after the peace it found a place in the armament of all
classes of British ships, but it was a fallen favourite. The French
commission which visited this country in 1835 reported that, although
still accounted part of the regular armament of older ships, the
carronade was being replaced to a great extent by light long guns in
newer construction. Opinion certainly hardened more and more against
the type, and, gradually falling into disuse, it was at last altogether
abandoned.
There was a feature of the carronade, however, which if it had been
exploited might have made the story of the carronade much longer:
might, in fact, have made the carronade the starting-point of the
great evolution which ordnance was to undergo in the second quarter
of the nineteenth century. We refer to the large area of its bore, as
rendering it specially suitable for the projection of hollow spheres
charged with powder or combustibles: in short, for shells. Although,
as shown by the inscription on the model presented to him, General
Melville’s invention covered the use of shell and carcass shot, yet
there was no general appreciation in this country, at the time of
its invention, of the possibilities which the new weapon presented
for throwing charges of explosive or combustible matter against the
hulls of ships. Empty hollow shot were tried in the original Smasher
for comparison against solid shot, in case the latter might prove
too heavy;--and these, as was pointed out by an eminent writer on
artillery,[89] possessed in an accentuated degree all the disadvantages
of the carronade system, their adoption being tantamount to a reversion
to the long-exploded granite shot of the medieval ordnance--but the
use of _filled_ shell in connection with carronades does not appear
to have been seriously considered. The disadvantages of filled shell
as compared with solid shot were fairly obvious; their inferiority in
range, in penetrative power, in accuracy of flight, their inability to
stand double-shotting or battering charges--all these were capable of
proof or demonstration. Their destructive effect, both explosive and
incendiary, as compared with that of uncharged shot, was surprisingly
under-estimated. Had it been otherwise, the carronade principle would
have led naturally to the introduction of the shell gun. “The redeeming
trait in the project of General Melville,” wrote Dahlgren, “the
redeeming trait which, if properly appreciated and developed, might
have anticipated the Paixhans system by half a century, was hardly
thought of. The use of shells was, at best, little more than a vague
conception; its formidable powers unrealized, unnoticed, were doomed to
lie dormant for nearly half a century after the carronade was invented,
despite the evidence of actual trial and service.”
In other respects the carronade did good service in the development
of naval gunnery. Its introduction raised (as we have seen) the whole
question of windage and its effects, and was productive of general
improvement in the reduction and regulation of the windage in all types
of gun. By it the advantages of quick firing were clearly demonstrated.
And by its adoption in the ship-of-the-line it contributed largely to
bring about that approach to uniformity of calibre which was so marked
a feature of the armament schemes of the first half of the nineteenth
century.