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Journal for Maritime Research

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The military revolution in warfare at sea during the early modern era: technological origins, operational outcomes and strategic consequences
John F. Guilmartin Jr.
a a

Ohio State University , Columbus, Ohio, USA Published online: 19 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: John F. Guilmartin Jr. (2011) The military revolution in warfare at sea during the early modern era: technological origins, operational outcomes and strategic consequences, Journal for Maritime Research, 13:2, 129-137, DOI: 10.1080/21533369.2011.622890 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21533369.2011.622890

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Journal for Maritime Research Vol. 13, No. 2, November 2011, 129 137

The military revolution in warfare at sea during the early modern era: technological origins, operational outcomes and strategic consequences
John F. Guilmartin, Jr.
Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

It has been over 125 years since Charles Oman referred to the developments that enabled the armies of Habsburg Spain and Austria to halt the westward advance of the Ottoman Turks between 1529 and 1532 as the military revolution of the sixteenth century.1 The term was reintroduced into the historical lexicon in 1955 in Michael Robertss inaugural lecture at Queens University Belfast, The military revolution, 1560 1660 and the term came to be used in general history texts.2 The debate about whether or not Europe experienced a military revolution in the early modern era was initiated by Geoffrey Parker tentatively in his 1976 article The military revolution, 15601660 a myth?3 and resoundingly in 1988 with The military revolution: military innovation and the rise of the West, 15001800.4 The ensuing debate has only recently begun to die down in a tacit agreement between believers and non-believers to disagree. That having been said, use of the concept of a military revolution as an explanatory device to clarify our understanding of a series of developments that profoundly changed the course of history, or to underline their importance, while not universally accepted is well established. Curiously, however, historians of the military revolution have generally ignored developments at sea. When Parkers book appeared in 1988, it stood alone in military revolution literature in including naval developments, and naval historians have, with few exceptions Jan Glete, Nicholas Rodger and me have had little to say about the military revolution and its relevance to their eld. That is not to say that naval and maritime historians have not chronicled revolutionary developments. Although he did not use the term, Carlo Cipollas Guns, sails and empires addressed developments that were clearly revolutionary.5 Similarly, much of Nicholas Rodgers work chronicles revolutionary change in warfare at sea.6 So does that of Jan Glete who, refreshingly, devoted considerable critical attention to the relevance of the concept to the study of maritime history.7 No one, however, has until now picked up the challenge that Glete laid before us to explore systematically the question of whether or not there was a military revolution at sea and, if so, of what it consisted. This roundtable discussion will go a long way towards responding to Gletes challenge. I believe, moreover, that we are not talking simply about denitional issues; rather, I am condent that we are exploring the causal mechanisms behind developments in warfare and commerce at sea that had profoundly important consequences. That my last reference was not to warfare alone, but to warfare and commerce, suggests a partial reason for the dearth of attention to a military revolution at sea. Whereas the military revolution on land can be usefully addressed as a fundamentally military question with, to be sure,

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Email: guilmartin.1@osu.edu

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important social, economic and political dimensions and repercussions, the course of the military revolution at sea is inseparable from changes in the economics of maritime commerce and, as Nicholas Rodger underlines in his contribution to this discussion, the economics of governance. The problem, in short, is more complex. This is something that Frederic Lane, historian of Venetian commerce and warfare at sea, understood very well: his concept of protection rent neatly connects the two.8 Jan Glete made good use of it in his Warfare at sea, 1500 1650, which, while primarily concerned with commercial and political change, especially state formation, addresses the consequences of the military revolution at sea. It is to that revolution that I now turn. Between the turn of the sixteenth century and the nal decades of the seventeenth, use of the sea for commerce and warfare by certain of the nations of Europe underwent a series of changes so profound in their effects and far-reaching in their consequences as to merit labelling the process a military revolution at sea. The term is not a perfect t, for changes in commerce and war were inextricably intertwined, but by and large military factors led the way, so military revolution will do. The changes in question were driven and shaped by a variety of forces and impulses ranging from economic through political to cultural and religious. That said, the impetus for change more often than not revolved around technological considerations, dening technology broadly as the application of an idea to achieve a physical effect by means of an object, artefact or thing. More precisely, Europe underwent four discrete military revolutions at sea that proceeded sequentially at times and in parallel at others. In the nal analysis, these combined in their effects to create the rst global maritime empires, to remake the political and economic map of Europe, both in terms of national boundaries and in terms of internal organisation, and to create a global maritime economy run along European lines. The rst of these revolutions was Iberian and had its wellsprings in a fusion of Mediterranean and Atlantic ship technology that got under way in the early fteenth century, and produced the rst truly trans-oceanic European sailing vessels, rst the caravel and then the full-rigged ship. These developments, which transported Portuguese mariners and merchants to the Indian Ocean and Spaniards to the New World, were given staying power by the simultaneous development of gunpowder weapons adapted to a maritime environment and shipboard use. The developments in question can be traced back to the appearance of the Catalan forge in western Europe around the turn of the fourteenth century. In essence a self-sustaining blast furnace, the Catalan forge made possible the manufacture of high-quality wrought iron in unprecedented amounts, not only in total production but in the size of the bloom, the pool of molten iron on the furnace oor. Wrought iron was the strongest structural material of its day in tensile strength and is impressive even by todays standards.9 In addition, it had the useful nautical property of being resistant to corrosion.10 Wrought iron was used for the ttings that secured back- and forestays to vessels hulls, for anchors and for rudder gudgeons, the parts of sailing vessels that were subject to the greatest stress. The bigger blooms of the Catalan furnace made it possible to produce these items in larger sizes, facilitating both an increase in the scale of sailing vessels and their capacity for trans-oceanic navigation. It also made possible the manufacture of the wrought iron breech-loading cannon ring stone projectiles that were the rst practical sea-going guns. Coincidentally, a decade or so later Europeans learned to make saltpetre, the essential ingredient of gunpowder, from potassium nitrate rather than calcium nitrate as had been the case previously.11 This was relevant since calcium nitrate is highly hygroscopic, readily absorbing atmospheric moisture and rendering the resulting gunpowder unt for service aoat. Perhaps this was not so coincidental: the sophisticated use of high-quality charcoal was integral both to gunpowder manufacture and to the operation of a Catalan forge. The two developments in combination made sea-going gunpowder ordnance a practical reality. The take-off point of our rst revolution came in the form of an Iberian fusion of Atlantic and Mediterranean shipbuilding technology, with Portugal taking the lead. Mediterranean carvel-built

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hulls of plank on frame construction with multiple masts and lateen sails were combined with the Atlantic square sail and sternpost rudder. The rst product of this process was the caravel, derived from Atlantic shing vessels. With a comparatively high length to beam ratio, caravels were exceptionally seaworthy and stable for their size, typically from 30 to 100 tons displacement.12 They generally had three masts tted with lateen sails, square sails or some combination thereof. Fitted with lateen sails, they could sail close to the wind and proved ideally suited for long runs out into the Atlantic and back, which were needed to make good progress down the west coast of Africa. These developments were accelerated by a research and development programme mounted by Portugals Aviz monarchs which included the development of superior navigational techniques and guns of a uniquely Portuguese design. Called camelos and cameletes, these were relatively long muzzle-loading stone throwers with a powder chamber of reduced diameter. They could be made of wrought iron or cast bronze. Those mounted on caravels in the early 1500s seem to have red balls of 12 to 18 pounds.13 Pound for pound and gun for gun, these were probably the most effective naval ordnance of their day.14 The Portuguese breakthrough in gunnery aoat began with the appreciation that a large stone ball could do signicant 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 ring on the broadside though open ports in the bulwarks of a low-lying caravel. When this was rst done is unclear, but before 1440 is a reasonable guess, and it is clear that the Portuguese had learned the destructive effect on a ships hull of heavy shot red ao lume do agua at the waterline long before they reached Asian waters.15 Useful as it was for exploration and as successful as it was in battle against Indo-Muslim forces in the Indian Ocean, the caravel was an evolutionary dead end in that its capacity for stores and cargo was limited and it could not be scaled up in size. It is indicative that caravels on Portuguese voyages of exploration were often accompanied by supply ships which were abandoned after their stores were used to replenish the caravels. By contrast the ship, the denitive product of the Iberian fusion of Mediterranean and Atlantic naval technology, had ample stowage capacity. Ships, naos in Spanish and Portuguese, had shorter hulls than caravels relative to their beam and fuller lines. Like caravels they were of carvel construction. Their design was amenable to increases in size. The evolved design had three masts, four counting the bowsprit: foremast, main mast and mizzen, with the largest ships having two or even three mizzens. A square sail was carried beneath the bowsprit; the fore- and main masts carried two square sails of which the topsail was the larger. The mizzen mast carried a lateen sail, used as much for steering as for propulsion. The multiplicity of masts and sails gave ship-rigged vessels superior manoeuvrability in a wide variety of wind and sea states. A product of their high freeboard, ships were at rst armed with relatively light ordnance, small bombards and breech-loading swivel guns, carried high in the hull, particularly in bow and stern castles. Large ships, tted with a high overhanging forecastle to permit plunging re on lower-lying vessels and to support boarding, were called carracks. These were for a time the premier armed merchant vessels. Getting ahead of our story, carracks would be the rst oceangoing vessels to mount heavy guns. This took place in the nal years of the fteenth century with the development of the watertight gun port and involved ordnance mounted at the stern on the lowest deck above the waterline. This was an inherently defensive arrangement with only modest tactical impact. The nal stage of the beginning of this rst revolution was marked in the western hemisphere by the appearance off San Salvador in 1492 of Christopher Columbuss otilla, appropriately of two caravels and a nao, and the return of the two caravels to Spain. It was marked in the east by Vasco da Gamas victory in February 1503 off Calicut over an Indo-Muslim force of some

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60 local prahus and 20 Red Sea dhows. Da Gama organised his eet in two squadrons, the rst of ve broadside-armed caravels and two or three weatherly naos and the second of six carracks and one or two naos. Broadsides from the caravels holed many of the Indo-Muslim vessels and threw their squadrons into confusion, preventing attempts to board, while plunging re from the following carracks and naos wrought havoc on the survivors.16 There ensued a century and a half of Portuguese dominance of the Indian Ocean and such of its commerce as the Portuguese sought to control. The second of our revolutions began with the development in the early 1510s of a means to fuse the tactical mobility under oars of an ordinary Mediterranean war galley with the repower of heavy gunpowder ordnance, a fusion rst achieved by Venetian shipwrights towards the end of the Ottoman War of 1499 1503.17 The stimulus for the fusion lay in an Ottoman victory in August 1499 over a Venetian eet at Zonchio, off the south-western coast of the Morea. The battle marked the failure of an attempt by a Venetian eet to block the passage of an Ottoman eet bearing an invading army and siege train, leading to the surrender of the fortied Venetian port of Lepanto. The contending eets consisted of a few very large carracks, in the Ottoman case armed with a small number of large muzzle-loading, stone-throwing bombards; naos or the equivalent; and heavy galleys and light galleys. In numbers and size of vessels, the Venetians were outnumbered about two-and-a-half to one. In addition to the Ottoman bombards, the carracks on both sides were armed with swivel guns, some ring from the tops; small bombards ring through ports in the fore- and stern castles; and a wide array of individual missile weapons ranging from composite bows, to rearms, to gads (steel javelins) and stones thrown from the tops. Both the heavy and light galleys seem to have been armed with nothing heavier than swivel guns.18 The battle was marked by the reluctance of many of the Venetian captains to bring their ships to close quarters with the enemy, deterred by the impact of 150-pound stone bombard balls;19 by the inability of light galleys to overcome the height advantage of heavy galleys and sailing vessels; and by the dramatic destruction by re and explosion of two Venetian carracks and the largest Turkish carrack.20 The Venetians had been unable to bring their superior seamanship effectively to bear. Superior Ottoman numbers, equivalent technology and adequate seamanship had prevailed. The following summer saw another face-off at the same place with the same result. Modon and Coron, Venices last remaining positions in the Morea, fell. The Venetians sued for peace in 1502, and concluded a treaty with the Ottomans that restored Venices all-important commercial privileges. The tactical portents for the future were clear: the Ottoman bombards had had their effect but had not been decisive in themselves; Venice could not hope to prevail over the Turks in eet actions dominated by swivel guns, small bombards and individual missile weapons. Seeking a means to counter superior Turkish numbers, the Venetians turned to heavy gunpowder ordnance. Guns had been mounted on the bows of galleys since the early fteenth century, but the vessels in question were heavy galleys, neither fast nor very manoeuvrable under oars; the guns were relatively small.21 Just how and when the shipwrights and gun founders of the Venetian Arsenal arrived at the solution we cannot say, but the rst unequivocal evidence of a really powerful gun being mounted on the bow of a galley involves a basilisk the generic term for a long gun of exceptional power ring a ball of 50 pounds or more and weighing in the order of 7 8000 pounds mounted on a Venetian heavy galley in 1501.22 It must have been mounted on the centreline on a non-traversing forward-ring mount: there would have been no other place to put it that made sense. It must also have had a recoiling mount, otherwise it would quickly have done serious damage to the hull. The arrangement was clearly an experiment, for a heavy galley was too slow and sluggish under oars to be an effective gun platform. It must have been a technical success, providing a test bed for what would become the standard mount for the Mediterranean

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war galleys main centreline bow gun: a box, resembling an eighteenth-century truck carriage but without the wheels, in which the gun was suspended on trunnions, sliding in a trough, restrained and run out by heavy tackle. The next step was a major redesign of the hull of a light galley, up to this point a narrow vessel with parallel sides and roughly equal taper at bow and stern.23 The solution was to ll out the underwater lines forward to support the considerable weight of ordnance at the bow, resulting in a sh-like shape.24 That took time, though how much we cannot say.25 The result was the main centreline bow-gun-armed Mediterranean war galley or ordinary galley. Squadrons and eets of such galleys, particularly when manoeuvring in line-abreast formation, could defeat cannon-armed caravels and effectively engage coastal fortications, producing a fundamental shift in the strategic calculus in waters where they could operate. This manifested itself in two ways. Strategically, from the 1510s squadrons of these ordinary galleys provided the wherewithal for the expansion of the Spanish Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, leading to the effective division of the Mediterranean between them and their lesser client states, with the Venetians using galley squadrons to sustain their chain of fortied port cities which provided shelter for merchant ships. On an operational and tactical level, the ordinary galley quickly ousted the great galley from the line of battle and progressively reduced the tactical viability of the carrack. By the 1570s none were left in the Mediterranean.26 Ultimately, the Mediterranean system of warfare and trade revolving around the symbiotic relationship between eets and squadrons of armed ordinary war galleys and the port cities and fortied anchorages that supported them collapsed under its own weight. An important causal factor was the wave of ination that swept the Mediterranean from west to east in the sixteenth century, in large part a product of our rst revolution in the form of an outpouring of gold and silver from Spanish mines in the New World, sharply increasing the cost of paying and maintaining soldiers, mariners and oarsmen that was to result in the replacement of free, salaried oarsmen with slaves and convicts in the western Mediterranean from around 1550. That accelerated the weight increase; since servile oarsmen were less efcient than free ones, more had to be used. To survive tactically, galleys had to mount greater numbers of heavier guns, but with increased weight came reduced speed under oars. To maintain dash speed under oars, another essential of tactical survival, the size of rowing gangs had to be increased. That worked, but at the cost of sharply reducing the amount of stowage space per man for provisions and water, thus further curtailing strategic radius of action. Finally, and critically, the progressive increases in manning, combined with ination, drove the operating costs of a war galley sharply upwards. By the time of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, these costs had become almost prohibitive, making the strategic utility of large galley eets increasingly problematic, especially in light of the reduction in their radius of action. By the 1580s, squadrons of Mediterranean war galleys, though still tactically viable on their home grounds, were small in size and few in number. Still, the war galley sporting heavy ordnance at the bow had dominated warfare and trade at sea in the Mediterranean for some three-quarters of a century, leaving its imprint on the political boundaries and economic organisation of the region. The third revolution concerned the galleon. Both the origins of the galleon and the timing of its appearance are uncertain. All that can be said with certainty is that it was intended to combine the forward-ring repower of the Mediterranean war galley with the sea-going capabilities of the full-rigged ship, and that it was around for a considerable time before its users realised its full potential.27 Galleons were solidly built, sufciently so to allow their gun decks to accept a considerable weight of guns ring on the broadside, and their recoil as well, although these qualities were, for a considerable time, neither appreciated nor fully exploited (the issue has been clouded by a persistent tendency to view the galleon as a pre-incarnation of the ship of the line when its users saw it very differently).28 Finally, galleons had sufcient stowage capacity to permit

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genuine trans-oceanic operations. That capacity could be devoted to men, ordnance and ammunition, provisions, cargo or some combination thereof as circumstances required. Galleons were the rst vessels capable of deploying heavy gun power across trans-oceanic distances. Their strategic impact was considerable: English galleons played a dominant role in the repulse of the Spanish Armada of 1588. Dutch galleons, raiding and trading to the limits of the Spanish Habsburg Empire from 1598, played a major role in determining the outcome of the Eighty Years War, giving the Netherlands, for a time, world hegemony. The second of these developments in itself merits the use of the term revolution. Squadrons of Dutch galleons, operating far from home, not only interdicted Spanish and Portuguese trade, they took much of it for themselves, enriching the Dutch and, in the process, defeating and helping to bankrupt their Habsburg enemies. The fourth and nal revolution rested on the development of the ship of the line and pivotally tactics that harnessed its capabilities. The ship of the line was a descendant of the galleon, although the process of development was anything but straightforward. The rst steps revolved around the progressive increase in the size of war galleons and the tendency to mount more guns on them as such weapons became available. Since the free space on board was on the broadside, this is where they went. Still, sea captains clung to traditional galleon ship-to-ship tactics: gaining the wind; bearing down and ring the bow chasers; pulling parallel and ring the lee broadside; bringing the stern chasers to bear; then tacking to re the weather broadside before pulling clear to reload.29 If there was an opportunity to board, it would be taken. To board and capture for prize money and captives was, after all, a prime objective. The rst ships of the line, though they were not called that, were prestige ships: large extrapolations of the galleon given exceptionally heavy armament to burnish the reputations of royal patrons. Since there was only so much room at the bow, the additional ordnance was mounted along the broadside for the reasons mentioned above. The rst of these was the Danish Tre Kroner, shortly followed in 1610 by the English Royal Prince of some 1900 tons displacement carrying 55 guns on two full gun decks and a partial third galleons only had one.30 Royal Prince was followed in 1637 by the even larger Sovereign of the Seas, with 100 guns on three full gun decks and 2700 tons displacement. The French Couronne, launched in 1638, was even larger at 2900 tons, though she carried only 88 guns.31 Sovereign, like Royal Prince before her, was criticised by experienced English sea captains, Sir William Monson among them, as impossibly unwieldy. Such vessels, they argued, could ght only one side and would be outmanoeuvred and outshot by smaller, more nimble warships.32 Given the tactical precepts of their day, Monson and his colleagues were quite right. But the big ships were a reality. The question was how to use them in battle; their repower was on the broadsides and attacking sideways is counter-intuitive. The solution used in Indian waters by the Portuguese in the early 1500s, as mentioned earlier, then abandoned was lineahead tactics. The departure from the status quo came in 1639 in the rst phase of the Battle of the Downs when a heavily outnumbered Dutch squadron under Maarten Tromp fought in a close line ahead with spectacular success. Still, it was well into the rst Anglo-Dutch War (1652 4) before rst the English and then the Dutch adopted the line ahead as standard. The result was a fundamental shift in the strategic role of battle eets. Whereas squadrons of galleons had been highly effective in disrupting overseas empires, as much by trade as by combat, eets of ships of the line proved able to defend them. Moreover, while Dutch galleons had partly paid for themselves in the Eighty Years War, eets of ships of the line were in no way self-sustaining economically, a major departure. To the contrary, ships of the line were exceedingly expensive to build and operate, requiring an extensive and costly infrastructure of dockyards, rope factories, cannon foundries and access to large quantities of high-quality timber. That, in turn, required sophisticated scal machinery capable of raising large amounts of money through the

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sale of long-term debentures, a process pioneered by the Dutch, then imitated and improved by the English. The results of the Anglo-Dutch Wars strongly hinted at the possibility of dominance of the worlds oceans by the nation that could best build and maintain eets of ships of the line, but that capability was not denitively manifested until British victory in the Seven Years War or was it Trafalgar? Much in the way of technical development went down between the end of the Anglo-Dutch Wars in 1674 and the turn of the eighteenth century. Notably, the monster rst- and second-rates of the seventeenth century gave way to the 74-gun ship of the line. Seasonal naval campaigning gave way to eets, particularly British, that could remain at sea throughout the year, maintaining at least a loose blockade in the dead of winter. The developments in ship technology, while important in cumulative effect, were renements, evolution rather than revolution. The essence of the revolution lay in the emergence of the ship of the line ghting in line ahead a fusion of technology and tactics as master of the seas. And that demanded the creation of a massive scal and productive infrastructure. First England and then Britain did that best, and in so doing frustrated Frances bid for global hegemony, a matter of no small importance. Yet the development of the ship of the line and appropriate means of using it had other, still more important consequences. It is a commonplace in some circles to argue that war and the creation of the wherewithal to wage war are inherently destructive in nature, and inevitably so. To me, certainly in this case, the evidence suggests otherwise that the creation of the cannon foundries, shipyards, dockyards, rope factories, methods of resource extraction and management, and all the rest needed to create and sustain sea power laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution in the British Isles.33 The argument was rst advanced by William McNeill34, then rened in this discussion by Nicholas Rodger. The result was what Nicholas Rodger refers to here as the scal administrative revolution in warfare at sea. He argues that this revolution had profoundly important consequences. I agree, but would point out that Rodgers scal administrative revolution depended upon, and was the end product of, the four revolutions in warfare at sea outlined above. In particular, the scal administrative revolution and the revolution in operations and tactics associated with the appearance of eets of ships of the line were opposite sides of the same coin. The question of which came rst is probably unanswerable and it is in any case irrelevant: neither could have taken place without the other. Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Oman, The art of war, 162. A slightly revised version of the lecture is republished in Rogers, ed., Military revolution debate, 1335. Republished in Rogers, Military revolution debate, 37 54. Parker, The military revolution. Cipolla, Guns, sails and empires. Notably, many of the passages on developing ship technology in Rodger, Safeguard of the sea and especially though he might not agree with my characterisation his Development of broadside gunnery. See Glete, Navies and nations and Warfare at sea, especially chaps 67. Lanes Venice is a compendium of his most important work. Modern wrought iron has a yield point of 31,000 lb/in2 and an ultimate strength of 51,000 lb/in2. Modern hard-worked structural steel has a yield point of 38,000 lb/in2 and an ultimate strength of 60,000 lb/in2; Eschbach, Handbook of engineering fundamentals, Ch. 12, pp. 20 21, 26, 26 Table 4. The qualities of modern and pre-modern wrought iron would not have been appreciably different. This was because silicates in the iron worked their way to the surface during the forging process, creating a corrosion-resistant coating. From the authors observation of cannon recovered in 1978 from the ` o Sant ssimo Sacramento, sunk in 1668, wrought iron structures used to centre the Portuguese galea

10.

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J.F. Guilmartin, Jr.

bores of cast bronze cannon survived over 300 years of salt water immersion; Guilmartin The guns of ssimo Sacramento. the Sant Hall, Corning of gunpowder, 512. Elbl, The caravel, especially 92. Elbl gives a range of 1860 tons burden (carrying capacity) which I have converted to displacement tonnage using the 1:1.5 ratio given by Glete, Navies and nations, II, 529, rounding up to account for the volumetric inefciency of smaller vessels. Barker, Gun-list, especially 56 60. Guilmartin, Earliest shipboard ordnance, especially 6656. Barker, Gun-list. Correia, Lendas da India, I, 269 70; Padeld, Tide of empires, I, 47 52; Parker, The Dreadnought revolution, 276; and for an analytical narrative, see Guilmartin, Galleons and galleys, 7789. Galley terminology is inconsistent and can be misleading. The terms light galley and heavy galley (generally meaning merchant galley) apply most accurately to the pre-gunpowder era. I have used the term ordinary galley to designate a main centreline bow-gun-armed war galley. Chelebi, Maritime wars of the Turks, 201; Lane, Naval actions, 149. Lane, Naval actions, 155. For an account of the battle, see Guilmartin, Galleons and galleys, 727. The royal galley of Alfonso Vof Aragon mounted two bombards in 1418 Vigon, Historia de la Artilleria Espan ola, I, 845. These were almost certainly small pieces in xed, forward-ring mounts on either side of the galleys beak or spur. The Venetians used galley-mounted bombards during the Siege of Chioggia, 137981, but there is no evidence that they were used outside the Venetian lagoons, almost certainly because they used gunpowder made with highly deliquescent calcium nitrate that deteriorated rapidly on exposure to moist air. Guilmartin, Earliest shipboard ordnance, 658. I Diarii de Marino Sanuto, vol. 3, 510, 968, 1221, cited by Pedrosa, A Artilharia Naval Portuguesa no culo XVI, especially 329. Se See, for example, Whitwell and Johnson, The Newcastle galley. For the lines of a 1598 Dutch galley, see Lehmann, Galleys in the Netherlands, 107ff. The sh-shaped underwater lines would have been essentially the same for all main centreline bow-gun-armed Mediterranean ordinary galleys. That is my supposition based on the logic of structural and hydrodynamic considerations, supported by Rodger, Development of broadside gunnery, 3023. We know that an increase in the weight of ordnance carried on ordinary galleys combined with the disappearance of free oarsmen to force major changes in Mediterranean galley design from around 1550 Guilmartin, Gunpowder and galleys, 282 3; the addition of several thousand pounds of ordnance on a galleys narrow prow must have had at least equivalent impact. Glete, Navies and nations, I, 140; Rodger, Development of broadside gunnery, 303. Ibid., 306. For instance, Barker, Gun-list, lists 21 galeo es serving in Indian waters in 1525, 11 without mention of their armament and 10 with a detailed list of the armament that is found to be necessary for them. Leo es (lions) ring a 50-pound cast iron ball are the heaviest pieces on the list and the only guns specied as bow chasers. The heaviest broadside guns were 18-pound camelos. Clearly, the Portuguese considered forward repower to be the galleons principal tactical strength. Barkers interpretation, emphasising the heavy weight of broadside ordnance on several of the ships without regard to the size of individual guns mounted as bow chasers, differs from mine. Rodger, Development of broadside gunnery, 307. Displacement gures are from Glete, Navies and nations, II, app. 2. Landstro m, The ship, 166; Rodger, Safeguard, 3868; displacement gures from Glete, Navies and nations, II, Appendix 2. Lavery, The ship of the line, 16. This is true even down to the intellectual underpinnings of the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the ballistic pendulum by Benjamin Robins, published in his 1742 treatise on ballistics, led to the development of the science of ballistics and the rst direct impingement of science on design engineering in the form of, rst, improved gunpowder and, later, improved cannon design. It was true in the mechanical arts as well. Cannon boring machinery, developed in Switzerland in the early eighteenth century and used with considerable success at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich in the late eighteenth century, provided the inspiration for the development of the turret lathe which, in turn, made possible the construction of the high-pressure steam engine, all in Britain. See Beer, ed., Art of gunfounding. See McNeill, The pursuit of power, 185 261.

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