From the back cover:
The great guns were the man-of-war's chief armament, of course; but they were not the only weapon aboard, by any means. She also carried mustkets, for the use of the Marines and the small-arms men in the fighting-tops, pistols, axes and cutlasses for boarding, stinkballs (made of pitch, resin, brimstone, gunpowder and asafoetida in an earthenware pot: it was set on fire and thrown so as to burst among the enemy and overwhelm him with the stench), and grenades for tossing on to the enemy's deck, and boarding-pikes to repel him if he tried to come over the side. We might even add soot to the list, since Lord Cochrane, setting about the 32-gun frigate EL GAMO with his 14-gun SPEEDY in 1803, made his men black their faces in the galley before boarding, to the unspeakable dismay of the Spaniards, who yielded less to the SPEEDY'S little 4-pounders than to the truly hideous appearance of her crew.
The great guns were the man-of-war's chief armament, of course; but they were not the only weapon aboard, by any means. She also carried mustkets, for the use of the Marines and the small-arms men in the fighting-tops, pistols, axes and cutlasses for boarding, stinkballs (made of pitch, resin, brimstone, gunpowder and asafoetida in an earthenware pot: it was set on fire and thrown so as to burst among the enemy and overwhelm him with the stench), and grenades for tossing on to the enemy's deck, and boarding-pikes to repel him if he tried to come over the side. We might even add soot to the list, since Lord Cochrane, setting about the 32-gun frigate EL GAMO with his 14-gun SPEEDY in 1803, made his men black their faces in the galley before boarding, to the unspeakable dismay of the Spaniards, who yielded less to the SPEEDY'S little 4-pounders than to the truly hideous appearance of her crew.
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