32-Pounder Naval Long Gun

Origins

Naval guns were rated by the weight of the iron ball they fired, and the Royal Navy spent the eighteenth century standardizing its establishment around a handful of calibers. The 32-pounder settled in as the lower-deck gun of the three-decker first-rates and the 74-gun third-rates that formed the backbone of the battle fleet, because the lower deck, closest to the waterline, could carry the heaviest metal without making the ship top-heavy. The guns of the Napoleonic Wars were mostly of the pattern associated with Thomas Blomefield, Inspector of Artillery from 1780, whose design — with a distinctive ring on the cascabel for the breeching rope and a thicker breech — and rigorous proof-testing at Woolwich greatly reduced the burst guns that had plagued earlier castings.

Design & Construction

The standard long 32 was cast in iron, about nine feet six inches long, and weighed roughly 55 to 56 hundredweight — close to three tons — before its carriage. It sat on a four-wheeled wooden truck carriage, restrained by a heavy breeching rope and run in and out with side tackles, and it was elevated with a wooden quoin under the breech. Loading followed the muzzle-loader's routine: a flannel cartridge of powder, a wad, the ball and a second wad, rammed home; the gun captain pricked the cartridge through the vent, primed it, and fired by slow match or, increasingly after 1790, a flintlock gunlock. A full crew of around thirteen or fourteen men worked each gun, supplied by a powder boy, but in practice one crew served guns on both sides of the ship as the action required. Point-blank range was about 400 yards and maximum range at high elevation well over a mile, though fleets deliberately fought far closer. The gun fired solid round shot to smash hulls, double-shot for close range, chain and bar shot against rigging, and grape against men on deck.

Combat Use

The Royal Navy's tactical advantage in the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France was less its guns than its gunnery: relentless drill let British crews fire more quickly than their opponents — a well-worked 32-pounder might fire a round every minute and a half or better — and they aimed at hulls, killing gun crews and dismounting guns rather than disabling masts. At Trafalgar in 1805, the lower-deck 32-pounders of ships like HMS Victory fired double- and treble-shotted broadsides at point-blank range into the sterns of the French and Spanish ships as the British columns broke the line, and the carnage on the receiving gun decks decided the battle. The carronade, a short gun first cast at Carron in 1778, supplemented the long guns on upper decks, but only the long gun could fight at range. Seamen carried the Boarding Cutlass and Sea Service Pistol for the moment the guns fell silent and the ships closed.

Legacy

In the 1830s the Admiralty adopted the 32-pounder as the single standard caliber for the whole fleet, in a range of lengths and weights, so that every ship could share one type of shot. Explosive shell guns after Paixhans, and then rifled and breech-loading guns in the 1860s, ended its career. Many survive — on HMS Victory at Portsmouth, as bollards on quaysides, and in coastal forts — and the long 32, with its heavy Swivel Gun ancestors, is the image of Age of Sail ordnance.