To most of us, the age of sail brings up images of majestic ships under full sail and bristling with guns; each blasting broadsides at enemy ships with the scene full of shattering masts and clouds of smoke. This would be true of the 17th, 18th and early 19th century, but these sorts of ships had to be developed from something else. All of that harkens back to the late 15th and early 16th century in general, and the reign of the Tudor kings of England in particular.

Before the reign of Henry VII and Henry VIII the Navy Royal had very few ships. No more than a handful at any one time and most of the quite small. It was the fear of invasion by the French that spurred Henry VII and later his son to produce larger and larger ships. While still not numbering more than a handful or two, these ships displayed a large number of weapons on both forecastle and sterncastle, though most were small and designed as anti-personnel weapons to rake the decks of the opposing ship.

Henry decided to start arming the larger ships with a few larger cannon. These weapons were not light and in order to prevent the ships from being too top heavy, started placing them on lower decks, requiring gun ports to be cut into the sides of the ships. These weapons were very much one shot wonders if they were muzzle-loaders, as there was no room to pull back the guns to reload them. This glitch in the design of ships was later fixed, but by the end of the reign of Henry VIII, it was still a problem.

We can thank Henry VIII for his fascination with ship's guns for developing fighting ships with large weapons. Initially these were only to be used to assist landing troops as sort of a floating artillery, but later it was found that these guns would do great damage to enemy ships and if it could be done from a greater range than right next to each other, then so much the better.

Angus Konstam tells the story of these interesting ships, taking you through the design and development of all the ships of the Navy Royal during this time period. Much of what has been learned about these ships is fairly recent, helped by the discovery and examination of one of Henry's largest ships, the Mary Rose (as shown on the book cover). This unfortunate ship was sunk, not in war, but when a strong wind caused the ship to lean too far over, causing water to enter the lower gun ports. This eventually led to the rapid sinking of the ship with the loss of most hands.

All of this is backed by superb images of period illustrations and the artwork of Tony Bryan, providing one with an outstanding book on a truly unique subject. Get this one, you'll be pleased you did.

April 2008

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