by Roy Adkins
The main aim in all battles, whether against merchant ships, privateers or large enemy fleets, was not to sink ships, but to capture them and take the crew prisoner. That way prize-money could be earned, and any useful warships were incorporated into the Royal Navy. The purpose of firing shot from cannons and carronades was therefore not to hole and sink a ship but to kill and maim the enemy crew, either directly or else indirectly by splinters and falling debris, and to put the enemy cannons out of action and destroy their ability to control their ship.
In wooden sailing ships, splinters – jagged pieces of wood of all sizes – were most feared. When shot smashed through the ship, a shower of splinters was spewed across the deck, which was more than enough to injure or kill anyone in the way, as Dillon witnessed in the Defence: ‘I had never seen a man killed before. It was a most trying scene. A splinter struck him in the crown of the head, and when he fell the blood and brains came out, flowing over the deck. The Captain went over, and, taking the poor fellow by the hand, pronounced him dead.’26 At a close range of 30 yards or less, even the relatively small cannonballs from 18-pounder guns could penetrate oak planks 30 inches thick – the approximate thickness of the largest warships just above the water-line. The sides were thinner at the level of the gun decks, and so at close range the seamen had very little protection. When ships were fighting only a few feet from each other, the shot could easily pass through one side of a vessel, spraying deadly wood splinters, before it carried on across the deck and through the opposite wall of the ship, destroying anything and anyone in its path. As opposing ships drew closer, the gunners reduced the amount of gunpowder in the cartridges to try to avoid the shot passing through both sides of the enemy ship, because it did far more damage ricocheting around the cramped space of a gun deck.
One gun crew was assigned to each cannon, and the way they were organised varied from ship to ship. The largest guns weighed nearly three tons and required at least six men to load and fire them. If the cannons on both sides of the ship were being fired, the total number of men available for each gun was halved, and once the fighting started gun crews were depleted by casualties. The seaman Robert Wilson said that on board his ship there was ‘a captain, a sponger and boarder, a fireman, and a sail trimmer to each gun’.27 He explained their roles:
The captain of the gun has to fight her, or fire her off; the sponger and boarder (one person) has to sponge the gun in action and to be ready to board an enemy vessel; the fireman with his bucket is to attend in case of fire; the sail trimmers are to trim the sails when required. There are also pumpers and swabbers, who pump out the ship, or free her from water, in case of a leak springing in action. The powder men or boys are those who supply the guns with powder; there are also some on the lower deck who pass along the powder from the magazine up to the powder men on the upper deck.28
The powder men, also called powder monkeys, were responsible for carrying gunpowder cartridges from the magazine to each cannon, a job usually delegated to boys and women.
For gun crews to be effective they needed good training and frequent practice, and it was this above all else that gave the Royal Navy an advantage over most other maritime nations. Each evening the crew was beat to quarters – summoned by beating on a drum to their battle stations. They then went through the routine leading up to the firing of a gun, as Samuel Leech on board the Macedonian described: ‘When at sea, the drummer beats to quarters every night … At the roll of this evening drum, all hands hurry to the guns. Eight men and a boy are stationed at each gun, one of whom is captain of the gun, another sponges and loads it, the rest take hold of the side tackle-falls, to run the gun in and out, while the boy is employed in handing the cartridges, for which he is honoured with the singularly euphonious cognomen of powder-monkey.’29
Francis Spilsbury, the surgeon of the sloop Favourite, emphasised the importance of training and practice:
Our men were regularly trained, as is customary, to the exercise of great guns and small arms. It is perhaps the great attention to this most useful regulation on board British ships of war, which gives us a decided superiority over our enemies. On the beat of a drum, the men immediately fly to their quarters; and their being so constant in that point of duty, increases their agility, gives them confidence in their own powers, and prevents much of that confusion, which with those less disciplined must necessarily ensue – even the little powder-boy would be ashamed of being reproached by his ship mates, for not knowing his duty. On these occasions a general silence prevails, all attentively listening for the word of command.30
On board his new frigate, the Sybil, in March 1780, Captain Thomas Pasley noted that ‘Today being … exercising day, I gave orders that the men should fire three rounds of powder and ball (great guns, tops, and everywhere) to accustom them to sponge, prime, and load, their guns in reality. A little confusion and irregularity there was; but on the whole they performed well, some incomparably so; a real little brush or two would bring them into excellent order.’31 Pasley referred frequently to such exercises, though he despaired of improving the marines, as on 7 April: ‘Exercised great guns and small arms – Damned rascals, those marines.’32
Some captains made use of captured gunpowder for live firing exercises, because the Admiralty only allowed a very small amount for this purpose. On 6 November 1781 Captain Pasley, now in the Jupiter, wrote in his journal: ‘Today being according to my invariable custom exercising day, I resolved to fire both upper and lower deck guns, as they had been long loaded. Besides I had got a quantity of Dutch powder out of the prize which I esteemed greatly superior to our English, and therefore proposed loading the guns with it making use of no other till the whole of it was expended.’33 The exercise was not carried out properly, with tragic results:
Great God, how shall I narrate the dreadful shocking accident that happened at the 7th gun on the lower deck? Re-charging the gun, two men were ramming home the cartridge when it caught fire – the gun went off and the two men were never more seen; in a thousand pieces they must have been blown, as some parts of their skulls were found twenty yards distant. The captain of the gun, a clever fellow, had obliged them to sponge the gun twice to prevent accidents. They boisterously called for the cartridge, saying the gun was all clear, and they desired the man who handed it to bite the cartridge that the pricker might more readily get to the powder – to this request alone they, poor fellows, owe their fate. The heat of the gun, or perhaps some triffling invisible spark, touched that part where the powder was laid bare, and fired it – neither exceeded 22 years.34
It was just such dangerous short cuts, often leading to accidents, that the exercising of the guns was designed to minimise, by instilling in the gun crews a routine that became a series of natural reflex actions, even in the exhaustion of a prolonged battle. Such exercising was also designed to improved their speed and accuracy without resorting to dangerous practices.
When First Lieutenant Cumby of HMS Bellerophon was inspecting everything prior to Trafalgar, he remarked that ‘the fifth or junior lieutenant … who commanded the seven foremost guns, on each side of the lower deck, pointed out to me some of the guns at his quarters where the zeal of the seamen had led them to chalk in large characters on their guns the words “Victory or Death” – a very gratifying mark of the spirit with which they were going to their work’.35
Once the fighting started, despite the removal of wooden and canvas partitions, the officers’ unobstructed view of each gun deck did not last beyond the second or third broadside. By this time the whole deck was filled with choking smoke from the guns, which gradually blackened everyone and everything. Because of the smoke-filled atmosphere, James Scott said, drinking water was on hand for the gun crews: ‘Water is always distributed along the decks for the refreshment of the men; the smoke of the powder, added to the exertions of the men, causing an intolerable thirst.’36 The smoke lingered because of the lack of ventilation, which was not helped by the gap between decks being so
small. ‘After a few minutes’ firing,’ Basil Hall commented,
the lower deck becomes so completely filled with smoke that no one can see two yards before him; the noise and apparent confusion swell on the unpractised senses of men, who are brought for the first time into action; and be their courage what it may, they are apt to get so confounded, that their early, and, perhaps, their most precious fire is almost inevitably thrown away. If the men have never been taught the true value of a good aim, nor, theoretically as well as practically, instructed in the method of obtaining it, their only thought will of course be how to blaze away as fast and as indiscriminately as possible.37
On board the Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, Marine Lieutenant Lewis Rotely was ordered to fetch reinforcements from those marines helping to fire the guns. He found the scene overwhelming:
I was now upon the middle deck. We were engaging on both sides, every gun was going off … A man should witness a battle in a three decker from the middle deck, for it beggars all description, it bewilders the senses of sight and hearing. There was the fire from above, the fire from below, besides the fire from the deck I was upon, the guns recoiling with violence, reports louder than thunder, the decks heaving and the sides straining. I fancied myself in the infernal regions where every man appeared a devil. Lips might move, but orders and hearing were out of the question. Everything was done with signs.38
Only two days after seeing a man killed for the first time, fourteen-year-old Midshipman Dillon was in the thick of the fighting at the Glorious First of June: ‘The Lower Deck was at times so completely filled with smoke that we could scarcely distinguish each other, and the guns were so heated that, when fired, they nearly kicked the upper deck beams. The metal became so hot that, fearing some accident, we reduced the quantity of powder, allowing also more time to elapse between the loading and firing of them.’39 Captain Pasley of HMS Jupiter was also relieved that his men successfully avoided accidents during a fierce battle against the French at Porto Praya, Cape Verde Islands, on Easter Monday 1781:
It is impossible for me to speak too highly of the intrepid and cool gallantry of my ship’s company; the fire they kept up was past all conception – not one accident. Two particulars I cannot help mentioning: on the lower gun deck in the heat of the action half a cartridge of powder was scattered, when half a dozen fellows with all possible coolness gathered round and personally watered it to prevent accident; the other my coxswain Harrison … brought me one of the enemy’s shot, and requested my liberty to return it out of his gun – so reasonable a request I could not refuse.40
During a battle, it was only the discipline and training of the men that prevented the inevitable confusion produced by the noise, smoke and streams of blood on the deck from degenerating into chaos. This was an era when naval officers had a paternalistic attitude to their men and a strong sense of honour and chivalry. They led from the front, winning the respect of their crews by an exaggerated disregard for their own safety. At the Battle of Lissa in 1811, Lieutenant O’Brien recorded what happened when one French ship was about to attack his own: ‘She succeeded in passing under the stern, and poured in a raking fire, which would have proved most destructive to the men on the main-deck, had I not ordered them to lie down between the guns, as by standing they were uselessly exposed, it being impossible to bring a gun to bear on the enemy at the moment.’41 This saved unnecessary slaughter, he said, since ‘many of the enemy’s shot rattled along the decks without doing injury to the men thus protected by lying close between the guns’.42 Two midshipmen were not so lucky – they were seriously injured because, out of a sense of honour, they chose to remain standing.
The attitude of his fellow officers was something that Captain Edward Codrington cherished. As he wrote to a friend in 1801, ‘There is something very fine in the manner of men of courage to each other before going into action, and the memory of this seems almost to repay one for the danger. The little traits of this sort I have witnessed in the few opportunities which chance has thrown in my way I can hardly ever think of without emotion.’43 A sentence from Nelson’s diary entry on the day of his death at Trafalgar, which is likely to have been written with the knowledge that it might become public if he was killed, probably encapsulates his attitude: ‘May the Great God, whom I worship, grant to my Country, and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious victory; and may no misconduct in any one tarnish it; and may humanity after Victory be the predominant feature in the British Fleet.’44
In every battle there were at least a few casualties and often scenes of dreadful carnage, even in a short duel between two ships. In his memoirs Samuel Leech recorded details of his first battle, saying that ‘it will reveal the horrors of war, and show at what fearful price a victory is won or lost’.45 Even a single cannonball could be devastating. Although he was busy supplying guns with gunpowder cartridges, at one point Leech was shocked to see two boys injured simultaneously:
One of them was struck in the leg by a large shot; he had to suffer amputation above the wound. The other had a grape or canister shot sent through his ankle. A stout Yorkshireman lifted him in his arms, and hurried him to the cockpit [to the surgeon]. He had his foot cut off, and was thus made lame for life … A man named Aldrich had one of his hands cut off by a shot, and almost at the same moment he received another shot, which tore open his bowels in a terrible manner. As he fell, two or three men caught him in their arms, and, as he could not live, threw him overboard.46
The dead man was William Aldridge, from London, while the two boys were Jose de Compass and Joaquin Jase, both from Lisbon.
Midshipman Dillon on the lower deck during the Glorious First of June was soaked by sea water coming in through the gunport, but during the laughter that followed, one of his men was killed:
The men cheered me, and laughingly said, ‘We hope, Sir, you will not receive further injury. It is rather warm work here below: the salt water will keep you cool.’ One of these, John Polly, of very short stature, remarked that he was so small the shot would all pass over him. The words had not been long out of his mouth when a shot cut his head right in two, leaving the tip of each ear remaining on the lower part of the cheek. His sudden death caused a sensation among his comrades, but the excitement of the moment soon changed those impressions to others of exertion … The head of this unfortunate seaman was cut so horizontally that anyone looking at it would have supposed it had been done by the blow of an axe.47
John Polly was a twenty-six-year-old able seaman from Spitalfields in London, who had joined the ship the year before.
Attacking coastal defences could be just as dangerous as a full-scale battle. In 1809, during the Walcheren expedition, HMS Blake ran aground. Now stationary and an easy target, the ship soon came under fire from shore batteries. Marine Captain Wybourn described their perilous position:
We all thought there could be no possibility of escaping. We on the poop, which is the roof of the Captain’s cabin, were in such a line with the guns, that it is amazing any of us escaped. Almost the first shot killed my best sergeant, a fine fellow, it took off both thighs, left arm and right hand. The poor fellow called out to me, but I could not bear to look at him. Fortunately he died in half an hour, under amputation. Five more men [were] wounded by the same shot and you may judge what were our expectations. When this took place five minutes after we began, I confess I never was more alarmed.48
It took an hour to refloat the Blake, during which time Wybourn and his marines were constant targets, but overall the men of this ship were lucky to have relatively few casualties.
With no wind, the frigate Unité was at a similar disadvantage when attacked by gunboats, each with a single gun, in the Adriatic in December 1806. Robert Wilson witnessed the damage they incurred by cannonballs and splinters:
During the action the enemy certainly kept up a brisk fire, and their shot was well directed; in short we being so good an object for them, several of their shot hulled us, particu
larly about our quarter and bow on the larboard side, that being the side we engaged on. We shot away one of their lateen yards, and observed one of the gunboats to be in a sinking condition. Lieutenant William Dredge was the first person that fell on our side, he being wounded in the face by a splinter from the 12th gun-port on the main deck, occasioned by a shot striking there. His breast pin was cut in twain, but his bosom escaped unhurt. A shot came on the quarter-deck, through the bulwark between the 2nd and 3rd carronades; the splinters knocked down four men at 2nd gun, viz. William Winks, James Berron, Thomas Claxton (three seamen) and William Salter (a marine). I, with others quartered at the 3rd gun, helped them up, the two former were wounded severely, the other two slightly. William Winks suffered amputation of his left leg and died shortly after. The shot split one of our 32-pounder shot and went very close to Lieutenant [Matthew] Grigg of Marines. A shot came through the larboard waist netting, and a hammock, and carried away two iron stanchions and went clean over to the other side … One shot struck one of our guns on the main deck and another (spent) struck our rudder. The enemy did not approach within reach of our 32-pounders (carronades) or else, to use a sea-phrase, they would have smelt hell.49
After just over an hour, the gunboats retreated to shallow water, where the frigate could not follow.
Even the force of a passing cannonball could maim or kill, and at the very least it caused a severe shock. When the Defence began to be pounded by a French ship, Dillon observed that