I too have also read that the British tended to aim at the hull, or more accurately at the deck - not to sink the ship but to damage the guns and kill as many crew as possible prior to boarding, while the French aimed at the rigging to disable the ship to enable boarding.
The variety of anti rigging shot in this thread is amazing. If the aiming strategy is correct then I wonder if the majority of this type of shot was of French/European manufacture rather than British.
It is also surprising that there is not more evidence of the use of fire projectiles to burn sails and rigging. There are some drawings of 'frisbees' and fire arrows launched from small arms but not much else. Does anyone know anything more about fire projectiles?
Remember that it was very hard to sink a wooden ship with the weapons of the day. There was nothing that could penetrate below the water and any shot coming through at the waterline could be plugged with wood and canvas and warships carried ready made plugs of the diameter of common sizes of shot. This probably only applied to smaller ships anyway. The Victory had sides two foot thick of solid oak and the USS Constitution was nicknamed 'old ironsides' for good reason.
At the Battle of Trafalgar the British captured 20 ships but of the 73 ships involved in the battle only two were sunk and these by fire and explosion. Interestingly nature is not so limited as many ships that had been damaged in the battle were sunk in a storm a few days later.
As early as 1807 Robert Fulton was testing, not very successfully, the first experimental torpedoes at the Washington Navy Yard.
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