It is time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
Me with the big guns on that first day
Last Sunday marked the 10th anniversary of my first visit to Iowa, and I figured it was worth noting here, given that Naval Gazing definitely wouldn't have happened if not for that.
I also have the official dates for the 2026 Naval Gazing Meetup. We'll be in Dayton Ohio from May 14th to the 17th. Look for a signup sometime in the next couple months.
Overhauls are Air Attack on Ships Part 3, Understanding Hull Symbols, Nimrod, Battlecruisers Part 3, Secondary Armament Part 2, Spanish-American War Part 7, Riverine Warfare - China Part 1, Standard Part 2 and for 2024 Carrier Design and Organizational Structure, The Flavor of the Military, A Visit to the ADA TSF and Suez Part 1.
Comments
I have become consumed by a desire to figure out what 32-pdrs the HMS Caledonia (the 1808 first-rate) started with (and, more generally, what the whole deal with her lower-gundeck 32-pdrs is).
I have created a more in-depth explanation on the Talk page of the Wikipedia article (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:HMSCaledonia(1808)), but in short: Winfield's British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1817-1863 contains a single mention of "64cwt 32pdrs" being replaced by 55-cwt models in 1831...
...but there were no 64-cwt 32-pdrs, right? At least, not till much later (there's a rifled variety that maybe fits the bill half a century down the line, IIRC?); and even the 63-cwt Millar 32-pdr only came onto the scene in 1829, so it's hard to imagine that these could be the guns being replaced in Caledonia's first (1831) re-armament.
It's tempting to imagine that Winfield meant that 63-cwt 32-pdrs replaced the LD 56 cwt 32-pdrs, instead of that "64cwt 32pdrs were replaced by 55cwt 32pdrs"... but I don't know—that'd require two different errors...
...or maybe I am in error, and her original LD cannon WERE 64-cwt? Help me, O Great Bean! Help with your crowd-wisdom, O Naval-Gazers–generaliter!–
[Whoops—either I fucked up the link there, or the Markdown did. Well, y'all probably know how to get to the Wiki page, anyway!
One other erratum: by "single mention", I mean that for the Caledonia this was mentioned, and that nowhere else in the volume (nor in his 1793–1817 volume) is a 64-cwt 32-pdr mentioned.]
This is, unfortunately, a problem I can't really help you solve, because my usual solution in this is to look up what Rif Winfield has to say and then relay that.
Curses—that's my secret strategy for appearing to know stuff about ships-of-the-line, too, heh. But lemme ask: what's your intuition say, here?
I.e., unlike some of us here, I'm really just a dilettante: I can count the number of times I have cracked open Winfield on one hand (ironically, for being about sailing warships, they are somewhat dry reads... uh, so to speak); and it was not too long ago that I was unaware of the existence of different (British) 32-pound cannon, heh ("but it's a 32-pounder—that's the designation; what do you mean, different types?–")...
...so I figure that perhaps you (or maybe another reader here, if you inexplicably fail to love the tall ships as much as more modern exemplars) might have an intuitive feel for whether or not it would be so unusual, at the time, for a single RN warship to have a complement of totally unique cannon shared by no other vessel... or if it is as suspicious as I thought it was? 🤔
It does strike me as rather weird, particularly given the lack of mention of any gun of that size in some rather formidable sources, and the fact that even though there were slightly larger guns we don't seem to have weights for, they wouldn't have been that heavy on simple scaling. Best guess is a mixup somewhere along the way, most likely getting "to" and "from" swapped and that never getting sanity checked, but there are plenty of other options. The obvious other explanation is that the cannons weren't originally British, but Caledonia wasn't captured, and I would expect that if they had to press French guns into service on a new-build ship, it would not be a first-rate.