Stowage of ready-use ammunition

Lavery in Arming and Fitting of the English Man of War page 150 refers to 'a drawing dated 1690', showing shot kept in piles, and covered with canvas. This may appear in an article by Carr Laughton in Volume 10 of Mariner's Mirror, but I don't have access to this, so cannot confirm. Photographs in H Winter's book Die holländishce Zweidecker von 1660/1670 show shot contained in short racks or boxes secured to the bulwarks betweenthe waist guns. Herman Ketting's book Prins Willem: een zeventiende-eeuwse Ostindieëvarder indicates that shot were on deck, by surrounding them with a coil or rope. If you think about it, substantial coils of rope were found everywhere on the upper deck of a sailing man-of-war, and the temporary placing of loose shot in an available coil would be inevitable. From this, it is a short jump to a grommet of heavier rope made up for the specific purpose. 'Garland' was used in several technical senses, but two listed by Smyth's The Sailor's Word-Book are of interest:

A large rope grommet to place shot in on deck. Also in shore batteries, a band whether of iron or stone to retain shot together in their appointed place.

Plate XXXIX in the second volume of Jean Boudriot's Le Vaisseau de 74 Canons shows an arrangement found in French ships. A triangular 'Parc' is placed between the guns, containing ten balls...the resisting 'laths' or 'tringles' are about three feet long, made of wood, and hollowed out so water will not collect and cause the shot to rust. The triangles have the base towards the bulwarks and the point inboard. Boudriot shows these on all decks of his 74. An excellent illustration is seen in a drawing showing a cannon being aimed, with the gunlayer adjusting the quoin under the breech. [Fig 412 p. 131 Le Vaisseau de 74 Canons, Bande 4] However another Frenchman, Rear Admiral Missiessy, in his Installations des Vaisseaux (1798) shows the triangular frames on the upper deck, but linear shot-racks secured to the greater calibre of the guns on the gun-deck, or the relative inconvenience of using side-racks on the upper deck, where they would interfere with the placement of cleats, kevels and belaying-pin racks, and so on. [The Missiessy engravings can be found in the NRJ, Volume 11, Number 4, together with an article by Dexter Dennis translating most of the technical terms. Unfortunately, Missiessy's Plate II has been chopped off, so that we cannot be sure what he called these triangular frames. There is absolutely no evidence that the frames used in French ships were made of anything else than wood, or that they were called the French equivalent of 'monkeys', brass or otherwise.

Ten balls can be placed in one three-cornered tier having four on each side and one in the middle, [as illustrated by Boudriot], but if one can secure cannon balls in a triangular frame, like the frame used to set up the snooker balls, why not stack the balls into a compact pyramid? This was certainly done on land [note Smyth's reference to shore-batteries]. We could have a lower tier of six balls arranged three a side; a second tier of three; and one ball topping the thing off. On land, a low pyramid of this sort would be stable of its own weight, and a retaining frame probably not be necessary. At first thought, this does not seem practical in a ship at sea, which could pitch and roll. However, one author who illustrates such a pyramid was the redoubtable Portia Takakjian in her 'Anatomy' of the frigate Essex, page 79. Her sketch shows a twelve-pounder, with 20 shot [if I have got the arithmetic right] piled in a four tier pyramid. Portia was a careful researcher and may have had a solid basis for showing this method, and she may have had evidence that things were done that way in the Federal Navy. On the List, we have folk who are very knowledgeable about American sources, and perhaps someone can confirm Portia's idea. FWIW, I have seen no evidence that triangular frames of this sort were used in ships of the Royal Navy.

I hesitate to raise this again, since it is all too likely to lead to endless and profitless further discussion, and almost certainly this will again fail to produce any contemporary citation supporting the existence of the type of the item under discussion...but it is relevant to the question, so reluctantly we will touch on it. The modern notion that iron shot were stored on a sort of cake-stand arrangement called a 'brass monkey' was perpetuated by, and indeed possibly originated with, Bill Beavis and Richard G. McClosky, the authors of Salty Dog Talk-:Granada Publishing, Adlard Coles Limited (1983) which offers:

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. It is said that the expression dates back to the 17th century when 'ready use' cannon balls were stacked on metal trays called "monkeys". These had dished recesses so that each cannon ball was kept in position just touching its neighbor and in calm weather more balls sold be stacked on top to form a pyramid. The monkey's were generally made of iron but in some ships brass monkeys were used for ceremonial reasons. Normally, the arrangement was satisfactory, except in very cold weather when the different coefficient of expansion meant that the brass trays would contract more speedily than the iron causing the pyramid to collapse and the balls to fall off the monkey

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