When and where was the first naval gunnery school/college established?
score:3
Military knowledge like this was considered highly secret and valuable and was not originally taught in schools, but Phillip II (1556-1598) saw the strategic value of cannon and greatly expanded artillery education. Originally most ships were privately owned and kings would put together fleets only temporarily for specific purposes. For example, when Columbus sailed, the ships and crew were all private and the king hired them specifically for that just that one mission. The arming of a ship was typically arranged by the shipmaster.
The first galleons with cannons were Portuguese and Spanish and were known in the 1530s or even earlier. In some cases these were ships of the crown, being permanently owned by the king and operated by his officers. To make a fleet a king might have a small core of royal ships and then private ships would be hired to round out the fleet in the case of war.
Training in artillery was the same for both ships and the field, so in the beginning, the artillery men would just load onto the ship, not being sailors at all and have to learn how to be a seaman quickly. The Spanish are known to have had artillery schools early on at Burgos, Barcelona and Gibraltar established by Phillip II. In 1575, Phillip II instructed the Council of the Indies to create an artillery school at the Casa de la Contratacion in Seville. This school became very important and led developments. The school at Barcelona was also very important also because there was a large cannon foundry in Baracelona.
The foundation of the school in Seville is well known. For example, you can refer to:
"Ordenanzas Reales, para La Casa De La Contratacion de Sevilla, Y Para Otras cosas de las Indias, y de la navegacion y contractacion de ellas." (1647)
Upvote:5
I cant answer for every country but for Britain, the move to formal education of naval gunnery officers came fairly late. The Royal Artillery College at Woolwich had been established in 1741 to train army officers in the necessary sciences. By comparison, the Royal Navy first established their gunnery school (known as HMS Excellent) as late as 1830.
Brian Lavery in "Nelson's Navy" (Conway Press, 1989) says, of officers during the French Revolutionary & Napoleonic Wars,
"Army artillery officers were highly trained in ballistics at Woolwich, but naval officers, though not entirely unschooled in mathematics, had little idea of scientific gunnery. Ballistics formed no part of the lieutenant's examination, and a ship's gunners were not expected to have any mathematical or scientific knowledge"
Prior to the establishment of HMS Excellent, gunnery was something that was learned on the ship, and thanks to almost constant wars in the 18th century, it was something that they had plenty of practice at. There was no service-wide system of gunnery training or drills. The amount of training that was performed was dictated by the individual ship's captains. As a result the standard of gunnery could vary greatly from ship to ship.
The War of 1812, in particular, highlighted the shortcomings of this approach, and it was thanks to the experiences and criticisms of officers such as Philip Broke (of HMS Shannon) that the naval gunnery school was finally established.
More post
- 📝 Were the problems Fibonacci solved in his work "Flos" posed specifically for him?
- 📝 What caused the shift from annexation of territory, to colonization of territory?
- 📝 Why did Meiji government consider switching from Japanese to English?
- 📝 What gift did Saladin send to Richard when he was ill?
- 📝 What does Spivak mean by "epistemic violence" in her paper "can the subaltern speak"?
- 📝 Couldn't an army of archers easily defeat Macedonian style phalanxes?
- 📝 Is this wrench from 1881, or is it just a serial number?
- 📝 What were the dimensions of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem?
- 📝 How did Hitler get off so lightly after the Beer Hall Putsch?
- 📝 How did the Allies locate, identify and process Nazi War criminals?
- 📝 Was Swedish king Charles X Gustav's horse killed during Siege of Kraków (1655)?
- 📝 Why was the World Trade Center selected as a target by Al Qaeda?
- 📝 Who are the people walking with Hitler?
- 📝 When was the first national anthem?
- 📝 Sources for archer vs other unit comparisons?
- 📝 Was the London Blitz accidentally started by lost pilots?
- 📝 How did Japan get so many Nobel Prizes?
- 📝 Could any Habsburg kings of Hungary speak Hungarian?
- 📝 What happened to the stuff stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans?
- 📝 What is the ancestry of the Robertians, progenitors of the Bourbon dynasty?
- 📝 How could the 4/5 devaluation of Franc Poincaré in 1928 end the financial crisis France was going through?
- 📝 Did any age of sail ship have a "back-bone cannon"?
- 📝 Why does German money from the 1940s not bear Nazi symbols?
- 📝 Had there been a significant physiological difference between the Vikings and the Europeans (around the 11th century)?
- 📝 Demonym for someone from the kingdom of D'mt
- 📝 What is the difference between the Ancient Greek religion and the Ancient Roman religion?
- 📝 What kind of fence is used at this British airfield?
- 📝 Who taught Russian in Eastern-bloc satellite countries?
- 📝 Why does the Balfour declaration refer to Palestine, as opposed to the Land of Israel or the Holy Land?
- 📝 Pre-WW2 location of Skalat
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 When and where was the first naval gunnery school/college established?
- 📝 When and where was the first time moveable bridge?
- 📝 When and where were the first coins made showing the currency or a face value?
- 📝 When was the concept of the "border wall" between the United States and Mexico first proposed?
- 📝 When was King John of England given the name 'Dollheart', and who first used it?
- 📝 When was the first intentional ricochet fired from a naval artillery?
- 📝 When and where was rape first criminalised independently from adultery?
- 📝 Where and when was the shortest calendar day in history, due to DST and calendar changes, etc?
- 📝 When and where did it first became usual that the ID Card holder signed his card?
- 📝 Who conducted the first "straw poll" in U.S. election politics, and when was it conducted?
- 📝 When and why was the 55th parallel established as an administrative boundary in Quebec?
- 📝 Why is Musselburgh considered the first golf course, when St. Andrews was where golf was first played?
- 📝 When and where arose the first civilization?
- 📝 When and where was the term "nigra" used and what was its relation to "nigger"?
- 📝 When was the term "Dravida" first used and what is the context with which it was presented?
- 📝 When and where was William the Conqueror baptized or christened?
- 📝 When was the term for WW2 first used and was it more popular in, say, US before Europe?
- 📝 Where did Hitler get the funds to invest in economic development programs such as the autobahn when the German economy was in a depression?
- 📝 How and when was the modern company ownership structure invented?
- 📝 When and why was the samurai class abolished?
- 📝 What / When was the first use of concentration camps in history?
- 📝 How and why was the boundary between West and East Berlin decided to be where it was?
- 📝 When and where was salt as valuable as gold?
- 📝 When was the American War of Independence first called a 'Revolution'?
- 📝 When was the concept of "weekly day off" first introduced in Indian Subcontinent?
- 📝 When was the change from kalends, ides and nones to numbers
- 📝 Where was Carl Sagan working on a plan to detonate a nuke on the Moon? Where was he applying when he leaked it?
- 📝 When was the first electrical intra-battlefield communication?
- 📝 When was the first time Rome was mentioned in outside records (and specifically, in Greek ones)?
- 📝 When was the tactic of chaining ships together last used in a major naval battle?