There is virtually no documentation on the origins of combat under sail, which occurred during the conflicts of the 16th Century. No doubt many experiments were attempted, and many failed, foundering in obscurity. Most of the admirals of the 16th Century were not men of the sea, but land generals appointed to command "naval armies" -- Medina-Sidonia being the most obvious example - and probably many of them were as bewildered as Napoleon two and a half centuries later.
Such tactics as are known to us come down via the "fighting instructions" left us by the admirals. "Fighting instructions" were issued by the admirals commanding certain fleets, and a copy was given to each captain so that the captain would know what his admiral expected of him. They were a mixture of theory and practice -- the included instructions to individual captains and officers of the ships for the ordering of their ships (including, in Raleigh's book among others, such things as the daily singing of psalms and instructions for the soldiers carried on board not to "meddle with" ship's discipline), but also included signals and instructions for formations and station keeping. They were not only instructions for the ordering of ships, but often served as tactical manuals.
In the early 16th Century tactics still showed a decided Mediterranean influence. Tactics consisted of forming ships in line abreast and descending on the enemy, bow-first -- tactics ideal for galleys that had ramming prows, but not guns on the broadside. Cannon were to be used to clear a path for boarders. The moment of decision came when boarders were called, and armored soldiers attempted to capture the enemy ship from under covering arrow fire.
But by the time of the Armada it was clear that these tactics were obsolescent. The galleon had replaced the carrack as the standard ship of war. Larger and more seaworthy, the galleon had a number of fore-and-aft lateen sails on its aftermost masts, a foremast that tended to lean slightly forward, and a bowsprit jutting from the prow carrying a square spritsail -- all innovations that tended to allow the galleon to sail closer to the wind.
With the larger ship, more cannon were being placed on the broadside, and the result was a ship that was much more capable of fleet maneuver than were King Harry's "great ships" of just a few years before.
But no tactics had yet been worked out to deal with this new situation. Admirals, who were usually landsmen appointed to the command of fleets because of social prominence or victories on land, had to improvise. But there were some things that were probably obvious - if not to the "generals at sea", then to their nautical advisors. if the cannon were placed on the broadside, then the best formation would be one in which as many broadsides could be presented to the enemy as possible. If the ships had difficulty sailing upwind, then the best situation in which to place the fleet would be upwind of the enemy. If the fleet was upwind of the foe -- if it had the weather gage -- it could deny combat to the enemy, and it could choose the moment in which to sail downwind and strike.
Medina-Sidonia, the "Captain-General of the Ocean Sea" who commanded the Armada, did a surprisingly good job of facing these facts. He formed his fleet in a rectangle, with the weakest ships in the middle, protected by the broadsides of the stronger ships on the outside. Any enemy getting inside of the rectangle was to be crushed between the more numerous Spanish ships and taken by boarding (the famous crescent formation claimed for the Armada by contemporary Englishmen was apparently an illusion caused by bad station-keeping on the part of the Spaniards: their more seaworthy ships on the wings just got ahead of the rest).
The box formation did a good job of keeping the English away from the more vulnerable Spanish ships in the center, at least until the Armada lost its formation after a fireship raid. But a number of important facts were working against the Spanish.
The Spanish warships had high fore- and sterncastles from which soldiers could fire down on their enemies. These high sides created a high profile that caught the wind and created an enormous amount of leeway. The Spanish also cut their sails very full, to form a better kite-shape so as to catch the wind. But these big, ballooning sails were very poor aerodynamic shapes, and aerodynamic effect was lessened.
As a result of their full-cut sails and the extraordinary amount of leeway they made, the Spanish could not point into the wind, at least not beyond a fraction of a point. Their very design sacrificed the weather gage to the enemy.
In contrast, the English had flatter-cut sails that made good airfoils, and much lower fore- and sterncastles. They could probably sail about seven points from the wind. This gave them a huge advantage over the Spaniards - they could swoop down on the Armada at a point of their own choosing, fight as long as they wished, and then put down their helms and sail away into a point of the compass that was not accessible to the Spaniards.
At a later date these advantages would prove decisive, but in the mid 16th Century there were reasons why they weren't. First, the English themselves had yet to evolve a system of naval tactics. They had no formations as such - their ships were simply bunched around their admirals, not formed into a line-of-battle as it was later understood. There was no real system of signals with which the Admiral could make any complex tactical intention understood - he had to lead by personal example, and hope his subordinates would understand what he wanted. Either that, or he had to send written messages from one ship to another by small boat, by which time his fluid tactical advantage might have evaporated.
And thirdly, naval gunnery had not yet evolved to a point at which it was decisive. Naval guns were run up to the ports and lashed in place, without the complex system of tackles that would later allow them to recoil when fired, or to be trained when aiming. Naval guns stayed at the ports the whole time, which meant that they had to be loaded by men working outboard, hanging onto the side of the ship. This, combined with the fact that the ships carried smaller crews than would later be standard, meant that reloading guns took a long time.
Also, it was not yet understood that naval guns had to be used at short range to be effective. The fact that ships are always rolling and pitching on the waves, plus the fact that both gun platform and target were moving and that gunsmoke was obscuring the battle, tended to make gunnery inaccurate unless the ships were so close the guns couldn't miss. in addition, it was not yet understood how valuable gun drill was--the men simply hadn't practiced at their guns long enough to know how to aim them properly.
Most of the fighting during the Armada battles was done at medium range, where certain of the English guns were perceived (by the English) to be superior. Very little damage was done, and it was only in the last days of the battle when the ships closed to a range at which structural damage began to be done -- but by that point the fireships had scattered the Spanish formation, and the Spaniards had already lost. Also the English had already used up most of their ammunition, as had the Spanish for the most part, in the down-Channel skirmishes.
So why had the Spanish lost? Because they couldn't sail upwind, back up-Channel to the English coast where they hoped to land an army. Even though the English had run out of cannonballs, the Spanish could not take advantage of the fact, and were doomed by the facts of aero- and hydronamics to their dreary and desperate sail around the whole of the British Isles, searching for a wind that would push them back to Spain. No wonder so many ended on the lee shore of Ireland.
RALEIGH'S INSTRUCTIONS - THE FIRST LINE
No tactical manuals for warfare at sea survive from the period of the Armada, so the precise tactics used remain conjecture. The first set of Fighting Instructions in English that propose a system for fighting with sailing ships and broadside guns was issued by Walter Raleigh preparatory to his ill-fated attack on Guiana in 1617. He first urges the fleet to weather the enemy (apparently the English still counted on their superior ship and sail design getting them upwind of the enemy sooner or later), after which he advises each ship to attack in succession, firing first one broadside, then tacking, firing the other broadside, and sailing upwind to reload (apparently the English hadn't worked out reloading yet).
The entire fleet is to concentrate their fire on the "windermost ship or ships of the enemy", hoping to overwhelm a few of the enemy fleet with a series of devastating broadsides (Fig. 3). The gunners are told not to "shoot any great ordnance at other distance than point blank" - apparently that lesson from the Armada fights was learned well.
The fighting instructions are interesting because they show the influence of contemporary land combat on naval tactics. The system of ships firing their broadsides, then retiring out of the combat to reload resembles nothing so much as the caracole practiced by contemporary cavalry. And the concentration of the fire of the English fleet on the "windermost" few of the enemy shows an attempt at concentration of force, bringing the whole of the English power on a small part of the enemy -- another lesson well learned on land, but much more difficult to do at sea. There is no provision for what might happen if the windermost enemy simply refused to wait for the assault of the English fleet and retired to the protection of the main body of the enemy fleet.
Perhaps the most interesting facet of Raleigh's instructions is that the system implies the use of something like a line-of-battle. In order for the caracole to work without the English getting in each other's way, the ships would have to have been lined up head-to-tail, in a formation subsequently known as line ahead in the Royal Navy, and column in the U.S. Navy. The ships would have required a long gap between each ship to allow for the change of course and tacking. However primitive Raleigh's line may have been, it shows that the English, very early in the game, had developed the basics of a tactical system that was to dominate naval warfare for the next 200 years.
THE LINE WINS OUT
But Raleigh never encounted an enemy fleet on the open sea during his expedition, so his tactics remained untested. During the next English expedition for which Fighting Instructions have survived, Wimbledon's attempt against Cadiz in 1625, the English ships were ordered to sail in little squares of nine ships each, three ranks of three files, like formations of contemporary pikemen. Wimbledon was a landsman and had never commanded at sea before, and in fact had little experience even in land combat. All his advisors and captains (but one) were in the same position. The expedition came to grief without an engagement at sea, so Wimbledon's remarkable experiment at turning back the clock was never tested.
Wimbledon's system serves to illustrate a problem that plagued many "naval generals" during the early period of fighting sail. No formal system of tactics had ever been tried for sailing warships, and many of the admirals were in fact land generals appointed to command at sea. The temptation -- irresistible, in Wimbledon's case -- was to apply tried-and-proven systems for land combat to combat on the waves.
As the naval historian John Creswell points out, the basis for success in land combat was to break the enemy by concentrating a major portion of your forces on a small portion of the enemy, while simultaneously preventing your opponent from doing the same thing to you. Raleigh's instructions for attacking only the "windermost enemy", rather than the entire fleet, illustrate this kind of thinking.
Creswell also points out that certain elements of land combat aid in an attempt to concentrate force against the enemy. One is that the nature of terrain gives a certain advantage to the defensive, particularly if aided by fortifications. A second is that terrain can be used to conceal the movement of troops. A third is that a land army is vulnerable on its flanks, and that a successful flank attack can roll up the whole line.
It took time -- a century or so -- for the "naval generals" to realize that none of these situations applied at sea. The sea gave no particular advantage to offense or defense. There was no terrain behind which to conceal one's troops: instead the fleets maneuvered within full view of one another. Many sophisticated tactics that gave advantages on land -refusing a flank, for example - would work to the contrary advantage at sea. Refusing a flank in a naval combat would result in giving an advantage to the enemy, since the basis of naval combat is to get every ship in combat with the enemy, and furthermore at decisive range-to keep ships out of combat is a deadly mistake.
And furthermore, flanks cannot be rolled up by a well-delivered attack - if the attack is delivered from behind the enemy line, the enemy can simply sail away from it; if delivered from the front, the enemy can alter course either to parallel the attack or to turn away. Raleigh's attempt to concentrate his attack on a few vulnerable enemy could be foiled simply by having the enemy pack on more sail until they were no longer in a vulnerable position.
The English apparently realized these facts earlier than any of their opponents, though precisely when is in doubt, because there was no fleet combat between the time of the Armada, in 1588, to the opening of the Dutch wars in 1652, a gap of over sixty years. During that time there were numerous skirmishes at sea, but no large battles in which fleet tactics could be matched against one another.
But by 1652, the English had clearly adopted the line ahead formation as the basis of their tactical system. Furthermore, the line formation had achieved such a clear superiority in the minds of the English that "naval generals" such as Blake, Prince Rupert, and Monck -- landsmen appointed to command at sea with no previous experience -- accepted the line-of-battle without question.
Even in the skirmishes leading up to the war, such as Blake's brush with Tromp on 9 May, 1652, Blake's ships are described in one account as having "placed themselves in a line ahead of the general, who after tacking... fitted his ship to fight".
Precisely why the English adopted their system while the rest of the world did not has not survived in the documentation. Whatever debates went on were not recorded. Though the English naturally dealt with nautical matters on a day-to-day basis as the inhabitants of an island, and though they naturally looked to the navy as their first line of defense, they were no more dependent on the sea and their navy than, say, the Dutch, their enemies -- who adopted a completely different mode of nautical warfare. The Spanish and French, one of which had a huge overseas empire and the other of which was building one, were also vitally concerned with naval matters; but they made no more progress in evolving fleet tactics than the Dutch.
In the end, one can only say that the English were lucky enough to evolve a successful tactical system, and that their opponents weren't.
But what were the tactics of the line-of-battle?
A History of Sailing Tactics in the Age of Fighting Sail Part I
A History of Sailing Tactics in the Age of Fighting Sail Part II
- Battle of Toulon and Minorca
Additional Instructions, Anson, and Hawke
Morogues, Villehuet, and Ushant
Signal Reform
DeGrasse and Suffern
A History of Sailing Tactics in the Age of Fighting Sail Part III
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