a treatise on naval gunnery 1855

“A treatise on naval gunnery 1855” is the only comprehensive English-language work on the armament of warships during the final period of the cast-iron smooth-bore gun, the main weapon of Western fighting ships for nearly 450 years. The first edition of Douglas’s treatise was written in 1817 and concerned itself with the state of gunnery during the Napoleonic Wars, but in the succeeding decades the war was constantly expanded and up-dated to cover every major development in naval ordnance. However, in later edition he retained much of the original information, such as the section on the tactics of single-ship actions, which draws its examples from the War of 1812 between Britain and United States. Therefore, the fourth edition chosen for this reprint offers a unique over-view of progress in gunnery during the hal-century preceding its publication in 1855. It is not just breadth of coverage that makes Douglas so valuable: the depth of detail about the guns themselves and their performance is virtually unobtainable elsewhere. Besides chapters on training, theory and tactics, he describes all the latest types of weapon, including shell guns, rockets and the earliest rifled breech-loaders. For anyone interested in the history of artillery this book is an incomparable work of reference.

Edizione: 1982