[fernando]

A PDF document of a most interesting paper titled:

The Earliest Shipboard Gunpowder Ordnance: An Analysis of Its Technical Parameters and Tactical Capabilities

By John F. Guilmartin, Jr.*

Herewith an (one sided ) extract of some passages, where the tactic of waterline artillery and water tight gun ports played a decisive role in XVI century warfare.

Few technological developments in the history of warfare have been as portentous as the appearance around the turn of the sixteenth century of effective heavy gunpowder ordnance on shipboard, which began a new era in sea warfare. Employed on Mediterranean war galleys and Portuguese caravels, the weapons marked the solution of a series of daunting technological problems discussed in this article, beginning with the appearance of gunpowder in Europe about 1300. Unlike developments on land, change was at first gradual, but shortly after 1400 the pace of development sharply accelerated to culminate in what may legitimately be termed a revolution in firepower at sea.
ROUND the turn of the sixteenth century, gunpowder ordnance of unprecedented effectiveness began to appear aboard European warships. Employed on Portuguese caravels and Mediterranean war galleys, these weapons swiftly and dramatically reshaped the face of warfare at sea.
Strategically, heavy naval guns mounted aboard purpose-built warships gave the Portuguese effective control over as much of the Indian Ocean as they chose to dominate and provided the operational means for the Habsburg-Ottoman struggle for control of the Mediterranean that culminated at Lepanto in 1571.2 Tactically, they challenged the high-sided carrack, until then the premier European sailing warship, and within a few decades would render it obsolescent save as an armed transport in distant and lightly contested waters. They also paved the way for the development of the galleon, the first genuinely transoceanic warship able to bring heavy guns offensively to bear, and—although the process took over a century and a half—the galleon evolved into the ship-of-the-line, the definitive instrument of European world hegemony. These developments are matters of no small historical importance, yet their beginnings have received surprisingly little scholarly attention.
The developments in gun design did not take place in a vacuum. The new ordnance was mounted aboard purpose-built warships that were employed in squadrons using novel tactics, a combination that introduced a new era in warfare at sea. The dawn of that era was demonstrated most spectacularly off the Malabar Coast in early 1503 in Vasco da Gama’s defeat of an Indian-Arab fleet that vastly outnumbered his force in vessels and men. Da Gama formed his fleet into two squadrons, one of caravels and one of carracks. The caravels, though substantially smaller than the carracks, carried the heavier guns, taking advantage of the caravels’ low freeboard to mount them near the waterline in order to inflict maximum damage on enemy hulls. Da Gama’s caravel squadron led the way in what would later be called line ahead, using superior sailing characteristics to work to windward of the Muslims. There, the caravels’ broadside firepower kept the smaller and more numerous Muslim vessels at bay, destroying or disabling them by gunfire before they could close and board, leaving the carracks with their more numerous, lighter guns to mop up. The result was the beginning of more than a century of Portuguese hegemony in the Indian Ocean and the emergence of tiny Portugal as a world power.
Guns protruding through circular ports in the hull begin to appear on depictions of sailing warships in the last two decades of the fifteenth century, suggesting larger guns. That having been said, however, carracks did not commonly mount ordnance capable of doing serious damage to ships’ hulls until a decade or so after the turn of the sixteenth century when, or so we surmise, the invention of the watertight gunport made it possible to mount them low in the hull on what would become the gun deck. In the meantime, the tendency was toward larger numbers of small guns firing above the bulwarks and rails. It was against this background that the Portuguese began arming caravels with heavy ordnance.
On balance, it does not appear that early Portuguese success with heavy naval ordnance was attributable to any one technological breakthrough, for which there are four candidates: the watertight gunport, corned powder, improved gun carriages, and guns of new and superior design. Acting in combination, these would eventually increase the effectiveness of sailing warships dramatically, but the effects are barely visible prior to the Invincible Armada of 1588, and it would be a mistake to read the developments of the late sixteenth century backward in time. The earliest evidence of watertight gunports is in the depiction of a three-masted Flemish vessel on the seal of Maximilian, Prefect of Burgundy, dated 1493, but the first gunports about which we know anything were mounted on ships’ sterns, and it is clear that the heaviest Portuguese ordnance in 1503 fired laterally. While the Portuguese were quick to embrace the watertight gunport and may even have invented it, the concentration of heavy ordnance aboard caravels rather than on the larger carracks argues against its widespread adoption prior to the 1520s.
The Portuguese surely had corned powder by 1500, though whether or not they used it in their largest ordnance is unclear. In any case, there is no need to invoke corned powder, for serpentine continued to be used at sea for many decades and would have served. There is no evidence one way or the other that the Portuguese used novel gun carriages aboard their sailing warships and, as with serpentine powder, sledge carriages, perhaps with a pair of wheels forward to facilitate aiming, would have sufficed.
Finally, it is possible—indeed, probable in my view—that at the turn of the sixteenth century, Portuguese ordnance was the equal of any in the world, though that does not necessarily imply radically new design. It is clear that the design of heavy Portuguese ordnance was distinctive. The term camelo, applied to the standard Portuguese battery piece for shipboard use, has no equivalent in other European languages, and the design of the camelo and smaller camelete is unlike that of other European naval guns with which I am familiar. Camelos were relatively long muzzle-loading stone throwers with powder chambers of reduced diameter; they could be of bronze or wrought iron. Their proportions suggest that they were exceptionally efficient in terms of destructive power as a function of barrel weight, but while the camelo’s performance was no doubt superior, the distinction was one of degree rather than kind. The Portuguese breakthrough in gunnery afloat must have begun with the dual appreciation that a large gun firing a stone ball could do significant damage to the hull of a ship and that heavy shipboard ordnance had to be mounted near the waterline to avoid compromising stability. In practical terms, that meant firing through or over the bulwarks of a low-lying caravel. Since caravels were small, that meant a limited number of large guns, perhaps only one or two. The caravel’s speed and maneuverability maximized its effectiveness as a gun platform and, at the same time, reduced the danger of boarding. The caravel’s small size and efficiency also meant a small crew, an important demographic and economic advantage for Portugal. Numbers of swivel guns were provided to deal with boarders and to wreak havoc on the open decks of low-lying enemy ships, but the Portuguese seem to have understood at an early stage that it was the heavy ordnance, firing low, that counted. As a conceptual breakthrough, this appreciation ranks with the perception that using guns to knock down walls was more decisive than lobbing projectiles over them. As with the earlier breakthrough, the new tactics cannot be separated from the improved matériel that made them feasible. There is a clear parallel between the Bureau Brothers’ celebrated achievements in the Hundred Years’ War and those of the anonymous Portuguese officials who oversaw the design of the camelo, the manufacture of its powder, and its mounting aboard caravels.


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