The largest sailing battleship was the French Valmy, a 120-gun 3-decker.įrom the early 1840s onwards, several technological innovations started to revolutionize the conception of warships. Over time, designs for the line of battle became relatively standardized around a 74-gun design originated by the French in the 1830s. Ships generally had two or three decks and fifty to eighty guns. Spain, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom all built large fleets of ships-of-the-line. The French Valmy (1847), the largest sailing battleship ever built These ships dominated the naval landscape from the start of the eighteenth century through until the mid-nineteenth century. The major warships built during this period were known as ships of the line, denoting their ability to play a part in the line of battle and distinguishing them from lighter vessels such as frigates or other cruisers. The line of battle dominated naval combat in the age of sail and retained a strong influence up until World War II. The line formation deployed the powerful broadsides of ships mounting guns along the sides of decks to best effect.

As small-arms fire and hand-to-hand combat became less vital, the castles on the ship became less important and were built smaller, resulting in lighter and more maneuverable warships. With more cannons mounted and improving gunpowder technology, the cannon armament of a ship became battle-winning on its own, without the need for boarding action. Galleons had long sides, and the greatest concentration of cannons could be achieved along the sides of the ship. The line of battle developed in the seventeenth century as firepower replaced boarding actions as the most important factor in sea battles. China, however, never developed them into such advanced fighting ships, and when European interests overtook China, the remnants of these sailing junk fleets were vastly outclassed. Large sailing junks of the Chinese Empire, described by various travelers to the East, such as Marco Polo and Niccolò Da Conti, and used during the travels of Admiral Zheng He in the early fifteenth century, were contemporaries of such European vessels. By the 1710s every major naval power was building galleons. With the growing importance of colonies and exploration and the need to maintain trade routes across stormy oceans, galleys and galleasses (a larger, higher type of galley with side-mounted guns, but lower than a galleon) were used less and less, and by about 1750 had little impact upon naval battles. The opposing British and Spanish fleets of the 1588 Spanish Armada were both largely composed of galleons. Galleys could still overwhelm great ships, especially when there was little wind and they had a numerical advantage, but as great ships increased in size, galleys became less and less useful.įrom the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the Great ship and Carrack evolved into the galleon-a longer, more maneuverable type of ship, with all the advantages of the Great ship.

Their disadvantage was that they were entirely reliant on the wind for mobility. The lack of oars meant that large crews were unnecessary, making long journeys more feasible. Because of their development from Atlantic seagoing vessels, the Great Ships were more weatherly than galleys and better suited to open waters. Because of their higher construction and greater load-bearing ability, this type of vessel was better suited to gunpowder weapons than the galley. These ships were the first used in experiments with carrying large-caliber guns aboard. Over time these castles became higher and larger, and eventually started to be built into the structure of the ship, increasing overall strength. These vessels, developed from the cogs which traded in the North Sea and Baltic, had an advantage over galleys because they had raised platforms called 'castles' at the bow and stern which could be occupied by archers, who fired down on enemy ships. The origin of the battleship can be found in the Great ships built by the British in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the similar large carracks built by other European nations at the same time.

Battle nations dreadnought