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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 50 ft length was most typical. Some types of gunboats 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 a half-dozen 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 New York's Lake Champlain were mostly gunboats built on the spot. All navies of the sailing era kept a number of gunboats on hand. Gunboats were a key part of the planned Napoleon's invasion of England in 1804, and were heavily used by Denmark-Norway. Between 1803 and 1812, the US Navy had a policy of basing the naval forces on coastal gunboats, and experimented with a variety of designs, but they were nearly useless in the War of 1812, and went back to being special-purpose vessels. Continue article |
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