Gunboat - History

History

In the age of sail, a gunboat was usually a small undecked vessel carrying a single smoothbore cannon in the bow, or just two or three such cannons. A gunboat could carry one or two masts or be oar-powered only, but the single-masted version of about 15 m (49 ft) length was most typical. Some types of gunboat carried two cannons, or else mounted a number of swivel guns on the railings.

The advantages of this type of gunboat were that since it only carried a single cannon, that cannon could be quite heavy—for instance, a 32-pounder—and that the boat could be maneuvered in shallow or restricted waters, where sailing was difficult for larger ships. A single hit from a frigate would demolish a gunboat, but a frigate facing six gunboats in an estuary would likely be seriously damaged before it could manage to sink all of them. Gunboats were also easy and quick to build; the combatants in the 1776 Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain in New York were mostly gunboats built on the spot.

All navies of the sailing era kept a number of gunboats on hand. Gunboats saw extensive use in the Baltic Sea during the late 18th century as they were well-suited for the extensive coastal skerries and archipelagoes of Sweden, Finland and Russia. The rivalry between Sweden and Russia in particular lead to an intense expansion of gunboat fleets and development of new gunboat types. The two clashed during the Russo-Swedish war of 1788-90 a conflict that culminated in the massive Battle of Svensksund in 1790, where over 30,000 men and hundreds of gunboats, galleys and other oared craft participated. The majority of these were vessels developed from the 1770s and onwards by the naval architect Fredrik Henrik af Chapman for the Swedish Archipelago Fleet. The designs were copied and refined by the rival Danish and Russian navies and spread to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Two variants were the most common, a larger 20 m (66 ft) "gun sloop" (from the Swedish kanonslup) with two 24-pounders, one in the stern and one in the bow, and a smaller 15 m (49 ft) "gun yawl" (kanonjolle) with a single 24-pounder. Many of the Baltic navies kept gunboats in service well into the second half of the 19th century. British ships engaged larger 22 m (72 ft) Russian gunboats off Turku in southeast Finland in 1854 during the Crimean War. The Russian vessels had the distinction of being the last oared vessels of war in history to fire their guns in anger.

Gunboats were a key part of Napoleon's plan for the invasion of England in 1804. Denmark-Norway used them heavily in the Gunboat War. Between 1803 and 1812, the United States Navy had a policy of basing its navy on coastal gunboats. It experimented with a variety of designs, but they were nearly useless in the War of 1812, and went back to being special-purpose vessels.