Sea Power Under Sail and Steam: Warships from the Galleon to the Carrier

The galleon joined cargo capacity for long ocean voyages to enough armament to serve as a warship, and it became the characteristic vessel of European overseas empire. Its high castles favored boarding fights, a feature that gave way to lower hulls built for broadside gunnery, as in the English ships that helped repel the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Here the broadside becomes doctrine. Fleets formed single-file lines to bring the most guns to bear, and ships carrying sixty to over a hundred guns on two or three decks, such as HMS Victory, reached their peak at Trafalgar in 1805.

The Carron Company of Falkirk produced this short, light naval cannon, which entered Royal Navy service in 1778. It gave up range and accuracy for a heavy close-range blow, earning the nickname the smasher, and it served through the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812.

Smaller and faster than a ship of the line, the frigate carried its main battery on a single deck and spent its time scouting, escorting convoys and raiding commerce while the great ships waited for a fleet action. American frigates such as USS Constitution won fame against Royal Navy frigates in the War of 1812.

HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, paired an all-big-gun armament with steam turbine propulsion and made existing battleships obsolete. The race to build her kind between Britain and Germany fed the tensions before the First World War and led to the clash of fleets at Jutland in 1916.

The submarine had its first major impact in the First World War, when German U-boats sank the liner Lusitania in 1915. In the Second World War the U-boat campaign tried to sink Allied merchant ships faster than Britain could replace them, a contest that bore directly on whether Britain could stay in the war.

The Japanese Yamato class was the heaviest battleship ever built, with nine 460mm guns. Yamato was sunk in April 1945 by 386 American carrier aircraft and Musashi fell to air attack at Leyte Gulf, a plain demonstration that the dreadnought had been overtaken by air power.

The carrier works as a mobile air base. After HMS Argus entered service in 1918 as the first ship able to launch and recover aircraft from a full-length flight deck, carriers displaced the battleship as the capital ship, and in the Pacific theater carrier air power decided the largest naval engagements.

The French Exocet is a sea-skimming anti-ship missile that entered service in 1975 in its ship-launched form. In the 1982 Falklands War, air-launched Exocets sank HMS Sheffield and the Atlantic Conveyor, showing that a small missile could threaten the largest ships afloat.