The lines along which improvement lay were those which were taken. First, an elimination of the smallest guns. Second, a return to muzzle loading. Third, a strengthening of the powder by corning. Fourth, a further fortifying and a general augmenting of the weight of the cast pieces, which had the double effect of giving the necessary strength to meet the stronger powders coming into use,[51] and of giving the extra mass required to minimize the violence of their recoil. Cast iron could not yet compete with well-found brass for the guns required. Demi-cannon proved too unwieldy, and as Elizabeth’s reign progressed, gave place more and more to the long-ranging culverins, demi-culverins, and sakers, “which strained a ship less, were served more quickly and by fewer men, and permitted a heavier broadside in the same deck space.”[52] As powder grew stronger the conditions improved; smaller charges were necessary, windage had less effect, and, owing to the quicker combustion, it was possible to shorten the pieces without detracting seriously from their ranging power; and this was done in the Queen’s Navy, the guns being thereby made lighter and more easily manipulated, while at the same time their projecting muzzles were less liable to entangle and interfere with the tackles of the sails.[53]
The substitution of the powerful, safe, and easily manipulated demi-cannon and the long-ranging culverin and demi-culverin in place of the old chambered ordnance of the first half of the century made possible a new form of naval warfare. The cannon at last became, in the hands of the Elizabethan seaman, the chief instrument of battle. Off-fighting was now feasible: a mode of action which largely neutralized the effects of an enemy’s superiority in size of ship or number of men, and which gave full scope and advantage to superior seamanship. Though no high standard of gunnery efficiency was then possible, yet it was the great superiority of the English gunfire, principally from the demi-culverins, the sakers, and the minions, over that of Spain, which conduced more than any other factor to the dispersal and subsequent flight of the Invincible Armada. The gun was the weapon on which the English seaman had learnt to rely. It was the gun, plied with rapidity just out of pistol-shot of his lofty ships, which in the year 1588 harassed and put to confusion the Spaniard, the haughty fighter who still maintained a quixotic contempt for the use of cannon and esteemed artillery “an ignoble arm.”[54] What a volume of fire was poured against him may be seen from a letter written by the admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham: “All the world,” he writes, “never saw such a force as theirs was; and some Spaniards that we have taken, that were in the fight at Lepanto, do say that the worst of our four fights that we have had with them did exceed far the fight they had there; and they say that at some of our fights we had twenty times as much great shot plied as they had there.”