10. Getting Carried Away With a Good Idea
Sometimes there can be too much of a good thing, as England’s naval authorities discovered with the Mary Rose. Commissioned in 1511, the Mary Rose was among the earliest ships that revolutionized naval warfare by using cannons in a new way. Instead of placing her guns on the top deck and firing them from there, as had been the norm for generations, the Mary Rose and her ilk placed their guns in the lower decks, and fired them through portholes cut into the hull. As such, she was among the pioneering ships that transformed naval warfare and helped usher in the shift from the era of fighting at sea via grappling and boarding or ramming, to the classic Age of Sail, in which fighting ships relied on massed gun broadsides.
The Mary Rose was a success and gave the Royal Navy decades of solid service. Then in 1536, she underwent an unfortunate redesign and upgrade. The logic and thinking behind the upgrade seem to have boiled down to “since cannons are good, it follows that more cannons must be better“. In of itself, that was not a bad line of reasoning. However, the English were about to discover that adding more cannons to a ship could prove problematic if that ship had not been specifically designed to accommodate more cannons and bear their additional weight. The Mary Rose was a ship that had not been specifically designed to accommodate more cannons and bear their additional weight.
