I was studying about the Spanish Armada and the fighting the Dutch and English. I know they were trying to destroy each others ships. What I dont get is , if these ships were made of wood, would they not be easy to set afire?
Why didnt England just send some spies to where the ships were based and set them on fire?
or vice versa?
in battle were they not easy to set ablaze?
2007-02-20 00:39:25 · 6 answers · asked by ? 1 in Arts & Humanities ➔ History
The rigging was often made of hemp fibers, the sails were hemp, wool or cotton. The ships themselves were entirely wood, caulked with highly flammable pitch and/or tar. War ships, like the ones you are asking about, also carried supplies of gunpowder on board. These vessels were floating fire hazards.
The British did use fire ships to destroy vessels in the Sanish Armada, but mainly these burning hulks merely split the Armada apart and disrupted their formations by panicking crews and captains. A spy could be difficult to use, and if you can simply ligth a buch of old ships ablaze and sail them into the enemy, why not just do that?
2007-02-20 00:45:51 · answer #1 · answered by 29 characters to work with...... 5 · 1⤊ 0⤋
There are a few possiblities as to why that was not done:
Firstly - the then rules of engagement tended to be for "Frontal Conflict" as opposed to sabotage.
Why didn't they use fire during the battle? Well, the English ships were as flammable as the Spanish ships - so really if you had catapults with fire balls the likelihood that a wave would unbalance the fireball would be high - if that happened the ship would burn.
I will assume you got the idea from the Trireme Fireships of the Ancient Mediterranian? They had different environmental concerns - being a closed in sea the waves are not as high and the boats tended to stay close to shore (further reducing wave displacement).
The weapon of choice - deck cannon - did two things:
1 - punched LARGE holes through ships to sink them
&
2 - they would hopefully dislodge enemy cannon and possibly set a fire just above the Gun powder room of enemy ships.
The risk of throwing LIVE fireballs was too large a risk to the attacking ship let alone the ship being attacked....
hope that explains it...
2007-02-20 08:54:48 · answer #2 · answered by max power 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
you're right; as other posters have mentioned, ships were made entirely of flammable materials......tarred rigging and decks, canvas sails.....so sailors of the day were especially paranoid about fire....
it would have been hard to sneak a spy aboard; remember these ships were crowded and someone playing with matches would have been found out in a heartbeat........
it was a standard tactic to try and burn enemy ships....if you've driven the crew off then a pile of canvas, some kindling, a match and whooosh.......Francis Drake raided Cadiz two years before the Armada and burned a number of ships in harbor, as well as a bunch of barrel starves........as a result, the Armada sailed with fresh new wood barrels that leaked and they were low on food and water........
the danger of fire aboard in battle came not from deliberately shooting flaming tar or whatever.....as another poster mentioned, its really hard to aim a catapult on heaving ship, and the the danger from having a furnace to heat cannon balls aboard was deemed too much.......
but by accident. Cannon balls were rammed home in the barrels with a cotton wad around them; this would frequently burn when the gun went off, fly over to the other ship....which might only be 50 feet away.....and start fires......at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 (?)....or, 200 hundred years after the Armada....one of Nelson's ships accidentally set fire to the French flagship Orient......
EVERYONE pulled well away.when she blew up it stopped the battle dead from the shock and awe....
2007-02-23 08:21:21 · answer #3 · answered by yankee_sailor 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Very easy indeed, the whole ship was full of tar,oakum (tar and rope) was forced between the planking to make it waterproof,all of the rigging and all ropes used aboard were soaked in tar as a preservative, the whole ship was agreat fire hazzard
2007-02-21 07:37:34 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
you just used a flamethrower with some petrol ... easy...
thing is, there were moral and ethical problems of using such advanced 'weapons of mass destruction' as they were know in those days ...
that's why we didn't do it !
Hope that helps
Philip
2007-02-20 10:02:59 · answer #5 · answered by Our Man In Bananas 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋
There were no suicide volunteers those days. Christian ethics were and still are against suicide killing and you went to hell.
2007-02-20 08:46:56 · answer #6 · answered by Tamart 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋