Carronade

Origins

In the 1770s the Carron Company, an ironworks near Falkirk in Scotland, was in trouble: its cannon had a poor reputation and had been removed from the Royal Navy's approved list. Its managers, including Charles Gascoigne, and the general Robert Melville developed a new kind of gun, short and light with a thin barrel and a large bore, meant to fire a heavy ball with a small charge. The first examples were cast in 1778, and the Admiralty began mounting them on warships the following year. The new gun was named after the company, and it was an immediate success.

Design & Construction

A carronade is about a third the weight of a long gun firing the same weight of ball. A 32-pounder carronade weighed around 17 hundredweight (about 1,900 pounds), against about 55 hundredweight for the 32-Pounder Naval Long Gun. The bore was cast with a chamber for the smaller charge, and the ball fitted closely, so less power was wasted. Instead of trunnions on the sides, most carronades had a loop underneath that fixed them to a slide carriage, which recoiled along a bed pivoted at the front and could be turned easily. The low velocity was an advantage at close range: a slow, heavy ball broke through a ship's side rather than punching a neat hole, and the flying splinters of oak killed and wounded more men than the ball itself. Carronades were made in sizes from 12 to 68 pounds; the 68-pounder was nicknamed the "smasher."

Combat Use

The Royal Navy mounted carronades on the upper decks of ships of every size, and small ships such as sloops and brigs could carry batteries of them in place of long guns. They helped win the Battle of the Saintes in 1782 against the French, and the British became famous for close-range fighting in which carronades were devastating. At Trafalgar in 1805, HMS Victory's two 68-pounder carronades fired into the stern of the French flagship Bucentaure, killing and wounding a large part of the crew. The weakness appeared when a carronade-armed ship could not close: in 1814 the frigate USS Essex, armed mostly with carronades, was battered from long range by HMS Phoebe off Valparaíso and forced to surrender. The United States and French navies also used carronades widely.

Legacy

Carronades remained in service until the 1850s, when shell guns and rifled artillery replaced smoothbore guns at sea. They were cheap to make and easy to handle, and were also used ashore in forts and on merchant ships and privateers. Many survive at museums, historic ships and fortifications around the world, and the carronade's lesson — a weapon designed for one range and one tactic — was studied by naval theorists for a century. The Swivel Gun and the Boarding Cutlass belong to the same close-range world of the sailing warship.