| Gunnery
101 - The Black Art Exposed
For Centuries, gunnery was seen as
a "black art", understood by nobody except a few
experts, and despised by true soldiers and sailors as slightly
un-chivalrous. Although
this was the case on land, guns had been widely accepted as battle
winners at sea from the late 16th century on. Although
many sea captains still tried to win the day by boarding the enemy
and fighting it out hand-to-hand, gunnery became the arbiter of
victory, and boarding was relegated to a final act, when the enemy
ship had been pounded to the verge of submission by firepower.
The
tools and techniques used by gunners remained surprisingly
constant during the era of muzzle-loading, black powder
(gunpowder) weapons. In
other words, a gunner of 1540 could still recognize the way a sea
battle was fought three centuries later; the basics remained the
same although the style and size of guns changed throughout the
era. After all, the
aim was to fire a large iron ball and slam it into the hull of an
enemy ship, and to repeat the process as rapidly as possible.
In this brutal “black art”, there was little room for
finesse or innovation.
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