Maybe pine was used for the masts?
Anybody who is really interested in this stuff should check on a book called The Anatomy of Nelson’s Fleet by an Englishman who built a highly detailed model of HMS Victory before and after WWII. The model is in some museum and is to my present recollection some 10 feet long and maybe eight feet high. It’s scratch built, every plank, every rope and pulley.
In the Napoleonic period all the European powers were masting their ships with fur. Almost everyone got their fur wood (and their pine pitch) from Scandinavia. In addition the British got a fair amount from North America. The upper masts and spars tended to be single pine/fur trees, like telephone poles. The lower masts which could be three feet thick were composition masts – several trees squared off and bound together. That is what the rings around the lower masts are about.
Psst.
The tree is spelled ‘fir’. Although I do love the image of a ship masted with fur, I am also a little worried that the phrase “fur wood” is going to trigger some kind of NSFW filter.
And, this is maybe a translation issue, but there aren’t any real native fir trees in New England/Eastern Canada, so any N American wood for masts was white pine.
My bad. Damned spell check.
I’ll add on that hulls were made of oak. And yes splinters generally caused a lot more causalties than a direct shot by a cannonball. Not necissarily death, but incapaciating the sailor to take him out of the battle.
Touring the USS Constitution in Boston they explained how the ship got it’s nickname of Old Ironsides was because of the three layers to the hull. The inner and outer ones run from stem to stern, (the length of the ship.) The inner layer runs from the keel to the deck edge, (up and down.) Supposedly a british sailor saw a ball bounce off the side and yelled, Look she’s made of iron.
I’m now remembering the pile of oak logs stacked near the drydock in Boston as well. They are aging and can be used 10-20 years in the future if and when more repairs are needed. They said on the tour that at one time or another all the original planking inside and out have been replaced, but the inner verticle planks are original.
I would think that cannon balls would be stuck in the oak.
Here’s a question - as noted above, the British army adopted shrapnel ammo in 1803. Did the British navy ever consider using it? I’ve never seen any references to it, so I assume the answer is “no”.
If you look in the lower-right corner of this Louis Lejeune painting of the 1812 Battle of Borodino, you can see a guard kicking a burning-fuse shell into the water to put it out: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Battle_of_Borodino_1812.png
Why would that be notably more dangerous than the powder room itself? If a spark gets down there the ship is done for, shells or no.
I’d guess not. Roundshot’s already a dangerous anti-personnel weapon at the ranges shrapnel would be effective at, because of the splintering issue, while being able to damage hull and superstructure as well. For added anti-personnel effect close up, and minor damage to wood, there is always grape-shot. Shrapnel is more for dropping onto infantry squares a furlong or two away - densely-packed targets just asking for more damage than a bouncing roundshot will manage, but at too great a range for grape.
From the poem “The Defense of Fort McHenry” written in 1814 about the War of 1812:
“And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air … .”
The “bombs bursting in air” were fired by the mortars of the HMS Meteor. However those weapons were a recent retrofit. She did not have that armament in 1805.
Mercer, Journal of the Waterloo Campaign
Hornblower, tight ass that he was, picked a mortar shell up and rubbed out the fuse.
Yes, in the Hotspur novel cited earlier. His men were very unhappy that he made no mention of his daring in his written account to the Admiral. Fortunately, the Admiral heard the story through ship’s gossip, and later commented to Hornblower that the wildest stories were circulating in the fleet as to how the mortar shell was put out. Hornblower taciturnly replied that he was not responsible for ship’s gossip, causing a twinkle in the old Admiral’s eyes.
Powder rooms / magazines were pretty well protected – situated below the water line on the center line of the ship, lit by a lantern set in a glass window from outside the magazine, equipped with doors that were hinged to close if there was an over pressure from outside, the door draped with wet blankets when cartridges were distributed, the men who worked in the magazine wore felt slippers to prevent sparks, powder barrels hooped with copper, an armed guard at all times. Cartridges were distributed one at a time into special cases and were not allowed to accumulate at the gun stations. Access to the magazine was restricted to the gunner and his mates. To receive a cartridge (a flannel bag containing enough powder for one discharge --the cannon balls were in racks next to the guns themselves) you had to line up at the magazine door and the cartridge was handed out to you through the wet blanket drape.
Cannonballs, (and presumably shells) were stored in bins and open racks by the guns. Excess balls were kept in open bins low in the ship where they helped with the ballast. In terms of weight and space needed and security gun powder in bulk and make into cartridges was a manageable problem. Loaded shells on the other hand were heavy, bulky and not as easily protected as bulk powder in kegs, barrels and cartridges.
Precisely, and there’s the answer to TSBG’s question : a man’o war’s powder room was very well protected by design, and it’s a really lucky shot that hit it (though it’s not unheard of - statistics and large numbers of hot balls of iron being fast friends).
OTOH, store a small pyramid of explodey shells next to each and every cannon aboard and you multiply the risk of a sudden and unexpected boom by a whole lot, not just from enemy fire but also from mishandlings on the part of the crew. Which is why they by and large didn’t really do it (special projects aside).
Early bursting shells were fine on land (for experimental amounts of “fine”) where a critical mishap only meant you lost a cannon and its crew, and maybe the ones next to it. At sea, that could very well mean the whole ship.
I am going to retract my comment about Tolstoy being mistaken. I had forgotten that shells were being fired by howitzers by the end of the eighteenth century. As noted by Gorsnak, the use of shells, (or “bombs”) dates to the fourteenth century.
However, the original use of such bombs was, as noted, via mortars, and later, (as I now recall), by howitzers.
Basically, (and very loosely), a mortar fires a projectile in a very high arc that is capable of being landed behind a high wall. A howitzer has a longer range than a mortar using a shallower arc that is capable of being thrown over hills. A cannon fires a much flatter trajectory and is used to fire at targets that the gunner can see.
The original bombs shot by mortars had a longer fuse (to avoid having them explode as they left the barrel, killing the gun crew). When howitzers began to use bombs, they still relied on the longer fuse for the same reason. In either case, the purpose was to put an explosive device into a mass of troops or a fortification where the explosion would do the most good. Hornblower, (or Travis in the recent Alamo movie), notwithstanding, pulling or extinguishing fuses was generally not recommended and most soldiers would have been simply diving away from them rather than risk being blown up while playing with the fuse. One problem with using such long-fused bombs in cannons is that if fired at a fortification, the higher velocity of a cannon round would tend to cause it to shatter, splattering its powder around, uselessly, before it the fuse ignited the powder. If fired at troops, the lack of control of the timing with a long fuse meant that it would pass through the troops, (doing the same damage as a solid ball), but then continue on beyond them to explode with no effect behind them, wasting the powder. It was not until Bormann perfected a fuse that could be set with a degree of accuracy that shells could be fired at troops in the field.
The slower velocity of rounds fired from mortars and howitzers meant that if they fell on earth, (as opposed to being slammed up against fortifications), they would not shatter and they would still be effective when they did explode among the troops at which they were aimed. This is why we do have reports of bombs or shells fizzing on the battlefield in the Napoleonic wars–they had been fired from howitzers using long fuses.
In land forces in the 18th, 19th Centuries (and to some extent to day, although in trucks) field artillery ammunition was carried in ammunition chests carried on the gun limber and caissons that moved with the guns and in action were parked to the rear of the gun line but close enough that ammunition could be quickly fused and carried to the guns. When a chest was struck by gun fire and exploded it was pretty spectacular and, at best, burnt the tails off the wheel horses. A miss-fused shell that exploded at the gun muzzle was no picnic, either. Again, in the field artillery ammunition was issued to the gun one round at a time and, except in real emergencies, not stacked at the gun trail.
I think this is probably the biggest reason why naval guns didn’t use exploding shells – if they hit rigging or a person above decks, they’ll keep right on going over the other side of the target ship, so no better than a solid shot. If they hit the side of the ship, the shell would probably break apart, so worse than a solid shot. Even worse, they might stick there or bounce off and explode, threatening the firing ship. There’s also the issue that on a ship, there’s often a lot of water flying around, which can negatively affect burning-match type fuzes (sometimes if waves were high, ships with more than one deck of guns couldn’t use the lower deck because if they opened the gun ports, too much water would come in). They’d only be better than solid shot if they managed to go through the solid wood side of a ship with the fuze still intact and burning, not break apart when they hit something inside the ship, not have so much time left on the fuze that Hornblower could put it out, and wind up in a place where explosion would do extra damage.
And the drawback is that they’re much more dangerous to the firing ship than solid shot-- with the other guy shooting at you at the same time, there’s a really good chance of something going badly wrong between lighting the fuze and successfully firing it out of our gun.
Plus using hand-lit fuzes would slow things down considerably. I think the standard for ships was something like firing three rounds in two minutes (maybe vice versa, but you get the idea). Adding a step where someone lights the fuze would increase the cycle time considerably.
Now, few of these issues would apply to something like bombarding forts from a distance with mortars – the shells will land more gently (comparatively) and stay there until they go off, there’s much less water on the top deck of a mortar ship compared to the lower dun deck of a Man O War, and you can be more deliberate and safe in firing since nobody is shooting back at the gun crew. Which I assume is why navies did in fact use exploding shells in their ships firing mortars at Fort McHenry or other places.
Minor point, here. Fuses were not hand lit by the eighteenth century. Sometime between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, artillerymen figured out that the flash from the charge firing the weapon was sufficient to ignite the fuse.
Fuses, by the way, were not the sort of long twisted cords that we associate with dynamite. They were wooden tubes, filled with gunpowder, that were fitted into the top of the shell. In the nineteenth century, the gunpowder was replaced by various chemical mixtures and the wooden tube by a metal tube that could be screwed into the shell, rather than being tapped in.