1636- the China Venture Read online

  This accomplished, they lowered a small boat, clambered into it, and rowed to Zheng Zhilong’s flagship.

  “You’re not going to tow the target?” asked von Siegroth, standing with Admiral Zheng Zhilong on the quarterdeck of the Rode Draak. “That would make for a better test.”

  “Alas,” said the admiral, “we aren’t carrying a long enough tow line for any of my captains to feel comfortable towing a target in front of a crew whose gunnery skills are unknown to them. Or for me to be inclined to order them to do so. Perhaps another time. For now, a target moving slowly under reduced sail and a sea anchor suffices.”

  Colonel von Siegroth studied the Eagle’s Claw. It had three masts, each bearing a single junk sail. The hull, however, had a more European appearance. This, then, was what the colonel had been told was called a lorcha; they had been developed by the Macanese and were quite fast. It had eight gunports visible, but von Siegroth assumed that the guns had already been removed.

  The principal source of information in Grantville concerning nineteenth-century and older artillery were the books and magazines owned by the town’s American Civil War reenactors, and by Eddie Cantrell and his wargaming buddies.

  The Grantville literature gave the exact dimensions of the 32-pounder carronades carried by the Constitution’s sister ship, the United States, and provided scale drawings of the classic carronade slide mount. Neither the carronade nor its mount had required any technology that the seventeenth century didn’t have already, just the commitment of resources that would otherwise have gone into casting more iron long guns and building more of the standard truck carriages.

  Colonel von Siegroth cleared his throat. “So, Admiral Zheng, I understand that you have been aboard European warships. Their principal armament are the long guns; the very heaviest fire a forty-two-pound shot and have a barrel length of ten feet. Here in Asian waters, the heaviest long gun probably fires a twenty-four-pound shot, and has a barrel length of nine to ten feet.

  “This is a carronade. We have eight on the quarter deck, as you can see, and there are another eight below. It fires a heavier shot, thirty-two pounds, although the barrel is only a little over four feet. It weighs about two thousand pounds, whereas the long twenty-four weighs more than five thousand. It can be handled by a crew of four—fewer in a pinch—whereas the long twenty-four needs a dozen. And it can be fired more quickly, too.”

  “So what’s the drawback?” asked Zhilong. “There has to be one.”

  “It’s designed to use a smaller powder charge relative to the weight of the shot, and hence there is less force generated. The maximum range is less than that of a long gun firing the same shot.”

  Von Siegroth did not volunteer any details as to the carronade’s interior design, but of course if Zhilong were to buy one, his foundrymen would be able to study it and discern that the powder chamber was narrower than the bore, and that the windage, the clearance of the shot within the bore, was less than the norm for a long gun.

  Zhilong glanced at the sea, as if gauging distances. “What sort of range are we talking about?”

  “Well, it’s complicated. Point blank, you can reach a bit over three hundred yards, comparable to or better than a long eighteen or twenty-four. Which is overkill, since most battles are fought at one to two hundred yards. At five degrees elevation, it can reach something like twelve hundred yards. With a long eighteen, perhaps eighteen hundred yards. But you’d need a small miracle to hit a ship-sized target with either gun at those distances, I think. And a long eighteen weighs twice as much and fires only half as frequently.”

  “Man the starboard guns!” yelled Captain Lyell.

  Lyell continued to give orders. The four starboard quarterdeck carronades were sponged out, cartridges loaded and rammed home, shot loaded, and the guns run out.

  “We will begin by demonstrating the effect of a single gun, so there is less uncertainty as to what is happening,” explained von Siegroth. He raised his hat.

  Seeing this, Captain Lyell commanded, “Gun number one, fire on Colonel von Siegroth’s command.” It was a deviation from protocol to yield control to a passenger, but von Siegroth was an artillery expert. Its present gun captain was an artilleryman brought on board by von Siegroth to train the gun crews with the carronades.

  “As you can see, Admiral, the carronade has an unusual mount.” The carronade had a mounting block cast on the bottom of the gun. The gun crew had slid the mounting block back on its bed to bring the muzzle inboard for loading, and then slid it back out to the firing position. A long gun would be mounted on a four-wheeled sea carriage, and rolled back and forth. More men were needed to control its movement.

  “When it is fired, the gun will recoil back along the slide, bringing it back to the loading position.”

  The bed had a pivot underneath one end and complementary rollers under the other. The pivot engaged a socket that in turn was attached to the bulwark.

  “Captain Lyell advises me that usually the guns are fired directly broadside, but in a chase we would point forward and if fleeing we’d point aft. To traverse a long twenty-four to point ahead or astern, two tackle men and two handspike men would be needed to ease up the barrel and turn the carriage. However, traversing is easy with a carronade mount, as it can just be rolled around the pivot point. One or two men could do the job with the aid of the side tackles.”

  Zhilong grumbled, “Until I started building a new line of war junks, our ship guns didn’t even have carriages; they could only fire directly broadside. I can see the advantage of the new mount from a gun-handling perspective, but it leads to less flexibility. You can’t as readily transfer a gun from one deck to another, let alone one ship to another.”

  “The up-timers also had gunnades,” said von Siegroth, “which had barrels like a carronade but were mounted on a normal sea carriage. They could be pointed upward more sharply, and merchant ships used them to destroy enemy rigging. And small gunnades were also used as warship launch guns.”

  Now the gun captain was having the crew adjust the elevation. Although the Rode Draak forecastle deck was considerably higher than the main deck of the junk, the range or the roll were great enough, apparently, to warrant a slight elevation.

  “You’ll note that to elevate the guns, we use a screw instead of quoins.” Quoins were wooden wedges inserted under one end of the barrel. “It is more economical of manpower, and smoother.” The elevating screw had been drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, but in the old time line, it was not used in artillery until 1650, and then on land. “The screw engages a screw hole in the cascabel. But I must admit that quoins are faster if you need to make a big change quickly,” von Siegroth added.

  “Gun One, fire when you bear!” he yelled to the gun captain. The Rode Draak was now even with the target junk, and it reduced sail to keep it that way.

  “Clear the gun!” the gun captain called out in turn, and his men got out of the way. The recoil on the carronade was ferocious. It was Newton’s laws at work; momentum had to be conserved, and while the muzzle velocity of a thirty-two-pounder carronade was relatively low, the mass of the shot was so high that it had almost twice the momentum of that fired from a nine-pounder long gun. Yet the latter had sixty percent more mass, and thus inertia, to resist the recoil. While there was some friction from the slide mount, the breech rope was necessary to keep the fired gun from dismounting.

  Von Siegroth pointed to the pendulum hanging from the foremast. “The ship’s officers can use that to judge the roll, and instruct the gun captains accordingly. We’ve also equipped each gun carriage with spirit levels; a bubble moves inside a graduated tube partially filled with alcohol. One tube shows roll and the other shows pitch.”

  The gun captain was checking that the gun was trained and elevated properly.

  “You’ll observe,” said von Siegroth, “that the breech end of the carronade is substantially wider than the muzzle end. Consequently, we equipped the muzzle end with a dispart sight.” By this
he meant that the gunner would peer through the rear sight across the top of the dispart sight; they formed a line parallel to the bore. Whereas if he sighted along the barrel metal, as was the norm with a long gun, the carronade would be aimed too high and the shot would most likely overshoot the target.

  “Are these measures really necessary?” asked Zhilong. “Aren’t most engagements at just a few hundred yards?”

  “Quite true,” von Siegroth admitted, “and short-range smashing fire is the forte of the carronades. But just in case they ever have to duel with long guns at a somewhat longer range, we have tried to take advantage of their greater precision.”

  Von Siegroth did not confide that he thought that the spirit levels were more a sales gimmick than anything else. After all, Zhilong was a potential customer.

  The gun captain of Gun One jerked the lanyard of the friction primer. There was, of course, a delay from when the lanyard was pulled to when the primer was ignited, and then another delay before the ball emerged from the muzzle, so the gun captain had to anticipate where that delay would put the gun on the roll.

  The gun barked. Some seconds later, there was a splash on the far side of the target.

  “A miss,” von Siegroth admitted. “We prefer to fire just after the bottom of the roll, at the beginning of the rise, so if we miss the hull we have a chance of hitting the rigging, but that was a plain miss, dammit.”

  “I think it would have hit the upper part of the sail if it hadn’t been reduced,” Admiral Zheng offered.

  “Fire again,” commanded von Siegroth.

  They could see the gun captain reduce the elevation a notch or two. A couple of rolls later, he fired again.

  The ball whistled out, and this time struck home, perhaps a foot below the main deck, but above the waterline. It made a large, irregular hole.

  “Nice,” said Admiral Zheng. “Hard to patch, and it would create lots of splinters. May we see what a full broadside would do?”

  Von Siegroth signaled the captain, who gave the necessary orders. One after another, each of the four starboard quarterdeck carronades fired, then the lower guns: four carronades, the lone “short thirty-two,” and the five “long twelves.” Ship gun captains had told von Siegroth that the rippling fire was necessary to minimize the shock to the hull, but he wasn’t convinced of this. The ship was much more massive than the broadside, and the elasticity of the breeching ropes would spread out the momentum transfer to the hull. His guess was that any long-term damage from firing simultaneous broadsides would be fairly superficial to the bulwark and the deck planking in the immediate vicinity of the guns. However, he could think of other reasons to use staggered fire—reducing smoke that would make it difficult to see the enemy, reducing heel produced by gunfire, easier observation by the officers of how the gun crews served their guns, the psychological effect on the enemy of maintaining continuous fire.

  A huge amount of white smoke was generated, and when this cleared, it could be seen that the damage done was considerable. Without actually sending someone aboard the Eagle’s Claw to count the holes and the balls embedded in the hull, it would be difficult to say precisely what fraction had actually hit, but it was clear that the broadside had done serious damage to the hull and probably would have been devastating to the crew, had the Eagle’s Claw been manned.

  Even von Siegroth was impressed. It was one thing to set up a single carronade to shoot at a wooden butt at a proving ground, quite another to see the effect of a full broadside on a real hull.

  “How thick is the hull of the target?” he asked the admiral.

  Zheng Zhilong held up his palm, with the thumb parallel to the forefinger.

  Okay, thought von Siegroth, about four inches. No wonder the Eagle’s Claw looks like Swiss cheese; the Vasa’s hull was sixteen inches thick, and even a Dunkirker would probably feature eight inches of oak.

  “And now,” said von Siegroth, “as the climax of our little presentation, we will show you the effects of an explosive shell. We would normally recommend use of shells at a somewhat closer range, as they are more expensive.” That was a half-truth—the real problem was that the supply of shells was limited, and the crew was nervous about handling them. “May we proceed?”

  Zheng expressed assent and von Siegroth walked aft to speak to the captain. In due course, the Rode Draak swung around the target, bringing its port guns to bear at a range of perhaps one hundred yards.

  “Number Two Gun, fire practice shells when ready,” von Siegroth ordered. Turning to Zheng Zhilong, he explained, “The practice shell is filled with sand in place of a bursting charge.”

  The practice shell fell slightly short, splashing the sides of the Eagle’s Claw.

  “The shell is much lighter than thirty-two-pound solid shot, although of the same diameter, a bit more than six inches. Hence, it flies differently.”

  The next practice shell struck the target directly.

  “There we go!” he told the admiral. Then, more loudly, he ordered the gun crew, “Fire a single live shell when ready.” A hatch in the forecastle deck allowed the shell to be hoisted up from the shell magazine.

  The shell, which was round like the solid shot since the cannon was a smoothbore and thus couldn’t impart a stabilizing spin, was rammed down the bore. “This live shell will explode on contact,” von Siegroth added. The percussion fuse was of the Pettman type that had been manufactured by the USE Navy and used in the Baltic War.

  “But we also have shells that will explode after a set time. Those are mainly intended for bombardment of land targets. They are also less expensive to manufacture.” The time-fused shells would be loaded into the barrel with the fuse end facing the muzzle opening. It had been discovered during the gun trials that the flash from the charge would travel around the ball and ignite the fuse, despite the smaller windage of the carronade. The time fuse itself was a hollow hardwood fuse body filled with the fuse composition. That was admittedly problematic for naval use. If the fuse were too short, the shell would explode short of the target, and if it were too long, and fell on the enemy deck, an alert opponent conceivably could toss the shell back in the water or even snuff out the fuse.

  Von Siegroth looked skyward, and uttered a brief nonverbal prayer. Percussion fuses were still cutting-edge technology.

  The prayer was either heeded or unnecessary. The shell was fired without mishap and struck the target, holing it. An instant later, the shell exploded.

  The ship was set afire and after a little while all that was left of it were some blackened planks that were bobbing in the water.

  Admiral Zheng said to von Siegroth, “Let us talk more about your wares.”

  * * *

  Somewhat to von Siegroth’s surprise, Zheng Zhilong was insistent on acquiring the particular carronade that had fired the shell that destroyed the target, rather than one of the “sales units” stowed below. Insistent enough to pay triple price, and to throw in gifts for both von Siegroth and Captain Lyell.

  At last they agreed. The carronade proper, that is, the barrel and its mounting block, were detached from the slide bed and hoisted over to Zheng Zhilong’s flagship. A box containing the parts for a slide carriage was taken up from the hold and likewise transferred over. The Rode Draak’s carpenter went onto Zheng Zhilong’s to make sure the mounting was done properly.

  “Some assembly required,” Jim Saluzzo muttered to von Siegroth.

  “Come again?” the artillerist asked, looking confused.

  “Up-time joke. Not important.”

  “Ah.”

  Chapter 22

  Island of Jinmen (Quemoy)

  Liaoluo Bay

  Near Xiamen (Amoy)

  “Set it down over here, please,” Jim Saluzzo ordered.

  The sailors carried the crate over to the designated place. “Here, sir?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Jim.

  There were three crates in all, holding all the parts of their hot air balloon. One held the envelo
pe itself. When inflated, it would be fifty feet in diameter, seventy feet high, and hold almost seventy thousand cubic feet of hot air. The envelope was carefully pulled out of its crate and laid on a wheeled pallet.

  For the purpose of the balloon inflation and launch, Zheng Zhilong had secured an old building, somewhat rundown, but with a large unadorned courtyard. On one wall there was a large double gate.

  The balloon envelope was carefully laid out on the courtyard and the sailmaker from the Rode Draak and his assistant carefully checked it, gore by gore and inch by inch, for tears and mildew. It was late morning and the light was good for this purpose. The envelope was patched as needed, then just as carefully folded up, laid on a padded rolling pallet, and rolled into the protective cover of the inwardly extended roof of the northern building.

  They also checked the rigging. Cables would be used to attach the basket to the load frame and the load frame to the mouth of the balloon envelope, and three ropes, anchored in an equilateral configuration, would be used to tether the balloon so it wouldn’t wander around the countryside. Thanks to Zheng Zhilong, they had been able to replace their hemp rope with silk rope, which had a higher tensile strength per unit length.

  Another team of sailors reassembled the basket, under the direction of the ship’s carpenter. It had a pinewood base and sides made of rattan and willow woven together.

  In the meantime, Jim and Mike were looking at the burners. There were four burners, all told. Two would be mounted on the load frame; two were spares. They were light enough to be lifted with one hand, although it was far more comfortable to use two.

  In Joseph Montgolfier’s late-eighteenth-century hot air balloon, the passengers had stood in an annular gallery surrounding the gaping mouth of the envelope, and had tossed flammable materials through a port onto a grating that covered that mouth. These materials caught fire and heated the air, which rose into the interior of the envelope. It was not, however, an efficient way of heating the air.