Usual disclaimer: I’m a not a historian or an expert on any specific period or aspect of history. I’m just an all-round history buff, trying to educate and interest people in the parts of history which I find fascinating and exciting. Enjoy the article and feel free to post comments.

During the ‘blackpowder era’ of firearms warfare, battle on land could be terrifying, with cannons and shells and musket-balls flying all over the place, and sure it was terrifying, but try doing it two hundred miles out in the middle of the ocean onboard a rocking, rolling wooden warship where defeat meant drowning in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean or the English Channel. These were the very real dangers faced by sailors and marines of the British Royal Navy during the period from 1792 until 1815, starting with the French Revolution and ending with the end of Napoleon’s conquest of Europe in the mid 1810s. What was battle like, out on the high seas back then and what happened during and after battle?

Ships of the Period

The first, all-metal ships did not appear until the mid 19th century. Before then, all vessels were made of wood. A warship of the 1790s, as typified by the ‘Man-o’-War’, was a multi-decked, three-masted affair with cannons and ropes and sails and all manner of other things onboard. Ships were wind-powered by massive sails and Mother Nature. The majority of the construction was of wood hammered onto wooden frames, with the gaps between the wood filled in with pitch (a black, tarry substance) and oakum, which was the broken-down fibres of old ropes. Oakum and the pitch were absorbent and sticky; contact with water made the hulls of the ships (mostly) watertight. While ships were able to deliver considerable firepower from either their starboard (right) or larboard (left, later changed to ‘port’) ‘batteries’ of guns (cannons), they were very vulnerable to attack from the front or back. The front, consisting of the bowsprit and the strengthened, curved, angled hull, was harder to destroy with cannonfire, but the stern of the ship, where the Great Cabin (also called the captain’s cabin) was located, was about as weak as soggy tissue-paper. With big, glass windows and few cannons, the stern was the weak-point of all vessels of the period.

Weaponry

Weapons to be found on ships during the Age of Sail consisted of bladed weapons such as boarding-axes, cutlasses, rapiers, daggers and bayonets, and firearms, such as pistols, muskets, rifles (what few that there would have been), and blunderbusses. There were also the various classes of large guns (cannons). These guns were massive, iron beasts which fired a variety of shot (ammunition) at any enemy ships. Firearms of this period were all single-shot, flintlock or matchlock weapons. They were slow to reload and inaccurate beyond a few hundred yards, for the cannons, and a few dozen yards, for smaller firearms.

Clearing for Action

If you were a captain onboard a British Man-o’-War during the Revolutionary or Napoleonic wars, and you saw an enemy, French warship sailing towards you, you had two options. To either prepare for battle, or to high-tail it out of there. When escape was impossible (due to being unable to pick up enough speed, or from being out-gunned), the order would be given to ‘clear for action’, or to ‘beat to quarters’.

‘Beating to quarters’ literally meant beating on a drum. The drummer set the pace of how fast everyone was expected to move. On the order to beat to quarters or to clear for action, everyone was expected to be in their places as soon as possible. The surgeon and his mate and the loblolly-boy were roused or set on alert to recieve injured sailors. Powder-monkeys (young boys, or even women!) were sent down to the powder-magazine at the bottom of the ship to fetch up gunpowder, and cannons were loaded and readied for action. The captain ordered his officers around to make sure that everything went smoothly. Officers were in charge of such things as organising the firing of the guns, relaying orders and helping to move away injured sailors. At the start of battle, the ship’s colours (national flag) were raised on one of the masts, to clearly identify the nationality of the ship (in case of mistaken identity) and valuables were put safely away.

The Heat of Battle

A real naval engagement was a terrifying thing to be in on. While in movies it looks glamourous and exciting, there was very little glamour about all the smoke and blood and guts and bullets whizzing around everywhere. As the two combatant ships drew up alongside each other, they would attempt to broadside (fire their full complement of guns on one side of the vessel) each other to cause the most damage. Although they were simple machines, naval cannons could pack a mighty punch. A single cannonball could blast a hole in a ship big enough for a man to crawl through. During combat, more sailors died from their injuries or infections, than actually died from being struck by cannon-blasts. In most cases, it was not the cannonball which killed you. It was the thousands of splinters of wood which the cannonball blasted aside as it smashed into the ship, that would slice into your body like knives and kill you through infection.

Dozens of cannons going off all at once produced amazing amounts of smoke, and the noise was literally deafening. Shouted orders were useless in such chaos, so instead, bosuns (boatswains), issued commands to the sailors using “bosun’s pipes”, long, metallic whistles which were capable of letting out piercing, shrill notes, which could be heard through the battle.

How fast a ship could fire its guns (and possibly win a battle), was dependent on many things. First, the skill of the gun-crew. Cannons were incredibly heavy firearms and they took an amazing amount of muscle to operate properly. Secondly, came the speed of the powder-monkeys. Gunpowder for the cannons was stored in the powder-magazine at the very bottom of the ship. The magazine was a large, copper-lined room, below the waterline, where gunpowder was stored in sacks and barrels. The walls were lined with copper because copper didn’t spark, like iron did. Powder-monkeys (usually young boys) had to be very fast in running the powder from the magazine up to the gun-deck as quickly as they could, in a relay fashion, slinging their powder-kegs from one to the other, back and forth, up and down.

A gun-crew firing an 18-pounder cannon. From left to right: The powder-monkey (with his cylindrical powder-keg), the gun-captain (with the burning taper), and the four other members of his gun-crew, waiting to arrest the cannon when it begins its recoil, after firing.

Naval Surgery

Injuries from cannonfire could be horrific. Imagine having your arm blasted away by an 18-pound, solid iron cannonball, travelling fast enough to smash a hole in the side of a ship with bulkheads over a foot thick. Injured sailors were stretchered, carried or dragged from the gun-decks, to the infirmary at the back of the ship, near the Great Cabin. Here, the ship’s surgeon and the surgeon’s mate, together with the loblolly-boy (another assistant), had to look after and treat patients maimed by the battle upstairs. The treatments and surgery available, were mediocre at best and chances of survival or recovery varied wildly. Badly infected limbs would have to be amputated with a knife and hacksaw.

Bullets, shrapnel and other foreign bodies were removed from patients without anasthetic, the same for amputations. A surgeon was considered especially skilled if he could remove an arm or leg within two minutes. The only relief from the pain was lots of grog, or lots of laudanum (which is a mix of rum and opium). It was a kind of painkiller that dulled the pain and made the patient groggy, but it didn’t completely knock them out, so they could still feel a considerable level of pain. The surgeon’s quarters were often so drenched with blood, that he would pour sand (like what you find at the beach), onto the floorboards of his cabin and surgery, to soak up all the pints of blood which were spilling onto the floor and which caused a slipping-hazard.

Ships during the Napoleonic era would have had a surgeon and a mate. Note that: A surgeon. Not a doctor, a surgeon. Because so many of the injuries would have required amputation, it made more sense to have a surgeon onboard instead of a physician. Stephen Maturin in the “Aubrey & Maturin” series by Patrick O’Brian is a physician, and yet takes on the lesser position of surgeon onboard his friend’s ship, when he is in-search of a medical-man onboard his vessel.

The Weather Gage

One key factor in naval battles of the Age of Sail, was of course…the weather. Specifically the wind. How strong it was and in which direction it was blowing. Of course, the wind and its direction wasn’t the end-all of all battles, but it was certainly important. If the wind is blowing from north to south and there are two ships sailing side by side in an either easterly or westerly direction, the nothernmost ship is said to have the weather-gage. The direction of the wind means that it can easily sail away from an attacker, or sail southwards quickly, to engage the enemy. The southernmost ship, having to fight against the south-blowing winds, would have to trim (take in) sails to be able to move upwards to meet the attacking ship, which could, if it desired, sail away and disengage from the action.

This article is continued in Part II, below.