Spanish artillery in the age of sail

[paul.mercer]

I've read that the Armada sailed with cannons in field livery, full-sized wheels and limbers. Is this factually correct?

Do you mean the 1588 Armada? Don´t know for sure, but they may be intended for the land campaign to follow.

I believe that they did, there have been several programs over the years about the Armada and over time several bits of sunken ships have been found off the coast of Ireland containing cannon which could only have bee destined for land use because they were supposed to join up with the rest of the Spanish forces who were waiting for them in the Netherlands, fortunately bad weather and English fire ships put paid to that adventure!

[Byron Angel]

Gentlemen, A very interesting discussion.
What does puzzle me is why they bothered to fit a flintlock firing mechanism at all, surely in the heat of battle a small amount of powder around the touch hole and fires with a lighted taper would be much faster, particularly when all the business of sponging out and reloading had to be done at speed having to re-cock and prime a flintlock with the risk of a flint or lock breakage would slow the firing rate down?

Hi Paul,
If you have a copy of "Guns at Sea" by Peter Padfield lying around, he gives a pretty good account of Douglas and his gun-locks. An important ancillary item that went hand-in-hand with the gun-lock came with the development of the priming tube - originally a tin tube packed with extremely fine ground gunpowder, later superseded by priming tubes using goose quills in place of tin. These would be thrust into the priming vent of the cannon and poked directly into the cartridge bag; the primer powder was always nice and dry and the tube delivered a concentrated flame directly into the cartridge.

Testing and experience demonstrated that ignition was much more immediate and reliable than could be achieved with loose powder in the vent hole and a linstock (essentially a smoldering fuze). It also, I imagine, avoided a lot of loose priming powder accumulating on the deck around the gun.

FWIW,

B

[marcelo_malara]

If you have a copy of "Guns at Sea" by Peter Padfield lying around,

I do! Fine book, but with its limitations. I expected fullest and more detailed coverage of the subject, specially the mid XIX century transition era. Certainly all this will require more than one volume.

Related to the 1588 Armada, it is very interesting that the author says that in that era guns were not hurled inside the ship to reload, but that the job was done by a sailor riding on the tube over the sea. DId ever find any other source coincident with this?

Regards

[OpanaPointer]

Related to the 1588 Armada, it is very interesting that the author says that in that era guns were not hurled inside the ship to reload, but that the job was done by a sailor riding on the tube over the sea. DId ever find any other source coincident with this?

Regards

I read that when I was an undergrad at Purdue. That was "a few years" ago, so from memory.

((I was doing a paper on comparative shipboard diets.) Yeah, weird, but I passed the class.))

[Byron Angel]

If you have a copy of "Guns at Sea" by Peter Padfield lying around,

I do! Fine book, but with its limitations. I expected fullest and more detailed coverage of the subject, specially the mid XIX century transition era. Certainly all this will require more than one volume.

Related to the 1588 Armada, it is very interesting that the author says that in that era guns were not hurled inside the ship to reload, but that the job was done by a sailor riding on the tube over the sea. DId ever find any other source coincident with this?

Regards

Hi Marcelo,
Hah! My copy of "Guns at Sea" is celebrating its fiftieth year on my bookshelf. And I do agree with your assessment - it was largely written for the popular market rather than the academic community. But, IMO, the military history book market back then was quite different. I spent most of my time scouring the shelves of antiquarian bookshops in order to find any decent military history books. The market today is orders of magnitude better, both in variety and in quality ..... not to mention what can be found via the internet!

Speaking of the internet, have you visited this site - https://ethos.bl.uk/Home.do ?

Byron

[Byron Angel]

Related to the 1588 Armada, it is very interesting that the author says that in that era guns were not hurled inside the ship to reload, but that the job was done by a sailor riding on the tube over the sea. DId ever find any other source coincident with this?

Regards

I read that when I was an undergrad at Purdue. That was "a few years" ago, so from memory.

((I was doing a paper on comparative shipboard diets.) Yeah, weird, but I passed the class.))

"The lesser of two weevils" .....

B

[marcelo_malara]

Hi Marcelo,
Hah! My copy of "Guns at Sea" is celebrating its fiftieth year on my bookshelf. And I do agree with your assessment - it was largely written for the popular market rather than the academic community. But, IMO, the military history book market back then was quite different. I spent most of my time scouring the shelves of antiquarian bookshops in order to find any decent military history books. The market today is orders of magnitude better, both in variety and in quality ..... not to mention what can be found via the internet!

Speaking of the internet, have you visited this site - https://ethos.bl.uk/Home.do ?

Byron

Hi!

1 and 2-Yes, you can easily see the difference between old classics and today´s. Today´s are far more detailed, in every sense. And the public has grown more mature and exigent. God knows which is first in this bettering, egg or chicken.

3-Amazing!

What about the overboard gun tube riding for reloading described by Padfield? Did you read in any other source? Opana says he was aware of it.

Regards

[OpanaPointer]

Related to the 1588 Armada, it is very interesting that the author says that in that era guns were not hurled inside the ship to reload, but that the job was done by a sailor riding on the tube over the sea. DId ever find any other source coincident with this?

Regards

I read that when I was an undergrad at Purdue. That was "a few years" ago, so from memory.

((I was doing a paper on comparative shipboard diets.) Yeah, weird, but I passed the class.))

"The lesser of two weevils" .....

B

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/sp ... sh%20ships.

The Duke of Medina Sidonia was chronically sea sick. He was in command because he was senior, no other qualifications.

I used to play "The Ancient Art of War at Sea."

[marcelo_malara]

The Duke of Medina Sidonia was chronically sea sick. He was in command because he was senior, no other qualifications.

I used to play "The Ancient Art of War at Sea."

Wasn´t Nelson too? Some years ago I used to go sailing, and everywhen I got sick I remembered having read that, and I consoled myself "even Nelson never got used to the sea motion".

[OpanaPointer]

Don't know about Nelson, but Hornblower got seasick in Spithead. Didn't get over that until he made admiral.

[wadinga]

Hi All,

Naval Guns by Hans Mehl has photo and drawing of a Saker 6 pdr bronze naval gun of 1551 cast by Remigy de Halut in Flanders for the Spanish Crown, which is 1.8 metres (5ft 10in) from muzzle to just before trunnions, and 3.8 metres (12ft 5in) overall. The weapon was taken from a privateer off Enkhuizen in 1622, and is now on display outside the Town Hall. Such a beast would have taken up a great amount of space if run inboard for reloading so it might have been more convenient, if not very safe, to send a luckless man outboard for reloading. With a 3m (9ft 10in) long bore it gives the lie to the old canon that the Spanish Armada could not have been equipped for long range fighting.

Apparently gun founders based around Dinant, Brabant and Malines were preeminent in Europe in the mid 1500s and exported weapons to England and other countries. Padfield, still an excellent source, covering from 1340 to the 1940s in a single, profusely-illustrated volume, says that the Armada suffered from the lack of capacity at the foundries of Campo, Barcelona and Seville and those experts in the Low Countries were in revolt by then against Spain.

All the best

wadinga

[OpanaPointer]

I hope we've found and recovered from Armada ships the artillery onboard when they sank. That would answer the question, for that instance(s), as to what kind of carriage were in use. Any bread crumbs for me?

[wadinga]

Hi OpanaPointer,

A Sprinkle of Breadcrumbs.......

A media sacra cannon from El Gran Grifón sunk off Fair Isle is on display in the Shetlands museum on a "recreated" 2 wheel carriage. www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/2010/07/30/cann ... -in-museum

In the Dublin Museum they have two cannons on display. www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Researc ... iage-Wheel

The larger of these cannons, the siege cannon, was recovered from the Spanish Armada wreck of the Trinidad Valencera, off the coast of Co. Donegal. The Trinidad Valencera was a Venetian merchant ship that had been seized in Sicily in 1586 and forced into the service of Philip II of Spain. At 1,100 tonnes she was the fourth largest of the ships of the great armada of 1588, with which Philip tried to invade England. After a battle with the English and a violent storm, many ships from the fleet were wrecked around the Irish coastline.

The siege cannon was cast in 1556 by the Founder Royal, Remigy de Halut, in Brussels. It bears an inscription stating who made it, together with the arms of Philip II and is decorated with dolphins and stylised foliage. It is bronze, weighs 2.5 tonnes and would have fired a 41 lb iron ball. This was one of a number of siege guns that the 130-ship armada carried in preparation for the proposed conquest of England, together with 19,000 soldiers and their supplies.

The smaller ‘pedrero’ cannon from the Juliana was recovered off Streedagh Strand in Co. Sligo. The Juliana was one of three Armada vessels wrecked on this part of the coast in the storm of 21 September 1588, where they broke up and where the bodies of 1,000 crew members were later found.

The pedrero cannon was small and comparatively light in weight. It fired a large stone ball and would have been a ferocious weapon at close quarters in ship to ship fighting.

It mentions an iron-shod wheel but I suspect there is a fair amount of speculation about the carriages of the weapons.

Now to Northern Ireland and the Tower museum in (London)Derry www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland- ... t-56071229

but this again looks like a two wheeled field mount from the La Trinidad Valencera

Once everything has been been scrambled in the spin-cycle of a shipwreck it is difficult to be sure.....

As mentioned above, but still to me a most informative book; Guns at Sea by Peter Padfield gives a series of examples from different nations of muzzle loading guns being loaded whilst still outboard as late as 1622 and quotes a previous writer (Carr-Laughton) suggesting it would have been the normal method in these early times. The suggestion is a ship would fire off her pieces on one side and then tack or more likely wear ship to fire the other side whilst crewmen swarmed over the sheltered side to reload the first set. Padfield suggests this would give these intrepid crewmen as much as 15 minutes to reload before the ship swung back toward the enemy. Padfield describes the method familiar from Nelsonian times of allowing a four wheel trucked cannon to jump back inboard under recoil controlled by complex rope tackle as "recoil loading" and quotes Lord Wimbledon's instructions of 1625 that some guns might require as many as 10 man crews as evidence they would need hauling back to an outboard firing position.

Animations on the Mary Rose website maryrose.org/meet-the-soldiers/#cannons show a four wheel truck cannon being used in recoil loading mode but, to me, surprisingly show a breech loading gun being brought inboard- complicating things unnecessarily to my mind, since reload doesn't require access to the muzzle.

Definitive answers are difficult.....

All the best

wadinga

[OpanaPointer]

The early cannons were, to put it mildly, scary as all Hell. I didn't blink when I read that prisoners sentenced to death had the choice of being gunners on the early cannons. If they survived their sentence was commuted. (From memory, my books are in storage.)

The image of the Spanish hanging onto the outside of ship to reload a cannon that was withdrawn as far as possible stuck with. Perfect target for grapeshot or anydamnthingshot for that matter.

[marcelo_malara]

What would have been the beam of a man of war of the Armada age?