TRATEGIC RATIONALE FOR 17TH CENTURY SHIPS OF THE LINE
Written By Jim Bloom
P.01
The British Sovereign of the Seas and the French Soleil Royale are renowned as the most formidable warships of the 17th century. They are favorite subjects for model kit makers and builders. Much of this popularity has to do with their striking beauty, with an abundance of ornate gilded and festooned heraldic carvings, and a complex layout of the open and closed galleys surrounding the transom, not to mention their sheer imposing bulk. The hype from the kit manufactures regards the ships as the first true “battleships”. However, equating these propagandistic showpieces with the first-raters of Nelson’s time is erroneous. I thought it might be interesting to examine exactly what was the intended function of the major combatants of the leading navies of the mid to late 1600s: English, French and Dutch, with a brief look at a Portuguese ship of the period for contrast.
In the 17th Century fleets could consist of almost a hundred ships of various sizes, but by the mid 18th Century, ship of the line design had settled on a few standard types: older two-deckers (ie. with two complete decks of guns firing through side ports) of 50 guns, which were too weak for the battle-line but could be used to escort convoys, two-deckers of between 64 and 90 guns which formed the main part of the fleet, and larger three- or even four-deckers with 98-144 guns which were used as admirals' command ships. Fleets consisting of perhaps 10-25 of these ships kept control of the sea-lanes for Britain and its allies while restricting sea-borne trade of Britain's enemies.
However, the sea lanes along the routes of commerce were not so strongly monitored before around 1750, and the firepower-intensive behemoths were reserved for employment in home waters. It was problematic at any rate to send these monsters, with the huge manning and munitions requirements, on long journeys; not to mention that the high-sided battleships were subject to being top-heavy, not a quality conducive to transoceanic expeditions. These showpiece ships were far too expensive to risk on far-flung adventures, which in any case would necessitate their being accompanied by a whole squadron of supply ships.
The writings of “the prophet of seapower”, Alfred Thayer Mahan, illustrate the tendency to attribute the characteristics of later technology to 16th and 17th-century naval history. In his study of naval warfare under sail, Mahan doggedly credited the ships and fleets of the mid-1600s with the structural characteristics, firepower, seakeeping capabilities, and cruising endurance of those of the Napoleonic era. This led Mahan and his disciples to concentrate on the actions of the great battle fleets, maintaining that commerce destruction, or the guerre de course was at best an inherently wasteful strategy of doubtful value and that victory at sea could be reliably won only by a decisive major fleet engagement. As noted naval experts of this period, John Guilmartin and Geoffrey Symcox have pointed out, this belief is based on the assumption that the fleets in question were capable of operating for extended periods and in all seasons at great distances from their home ports. That notion is clearly mistaken for the 17th century, when the enormously powerful first and second-rate ships-of-the-line on which the main battle fleets depended were sadly lacking in both endurance and seaworthiness
The campaigns of the battle fleets of the 17th century had a cyclic, seasonal character more reminiscent of 16th-century galley warfare than of the great naval campaigns of Nelson and his French and Spanish opponents. Mahan's pervasive influence on the historiography of warfare at sea can be seen clearly, if indirectly, in the almost total lack of attention paid by naval historians to the extended 17th-century struggle over Brazil between Portugal and the Dutch, arguably the only truly decisive maritime war ever waged in the Western Hemisphere. The Portuguese-Dutch conflict was not a war of great battle fleets; rather, it was a sustained war of economic attrition, fought well beyond the radii of action of the mighty ships-of-the-line that dominated the English Channel and contiguous waters. These characteristics are demonstrated by the design of the Santíssimo Sacramento, a Portuguese warship sunk off Brazil in 1668 and recovered by divers of the Brazilian Navy between 1976 and 1978. The principles underlying the shaping of Sacramento were not in accord with Mahan's theories; she was built for a sustained war of convoy escort, raid, and counter-raid fought far from home, if not for the guerre de course itself. John Guilmartin has done some extensive research on the gun armament of Santissima Sacramento based on the archaeological examination of the wreck site. His general conclusions, apart from the details of the cannon design and founding, are quite illuminating.