[mast creaks]
[Euron yells] You just made yourself a target, right? There's one guy there. It's relatively easy to defend against. Just shoot him. Hi, my name is Evan Wilson. I'm a professor at the
US Naval War College, and I'm an expert in
18th-century naval warfare. Today I'll be looking at
naval warfare scenes in movies and judging how real they are. So, if you're desperate and you're being chased by someone who you know is stronger than you, you would throw things overboard if you're trying to speed up. But the thing that's really
going to lighten the ship is throwing the guns overboard. I mean, that's the
fastest way to lighten it. A 32-pound cannon or something like that weighs 7,000 pounds. What they're throwing overboard is like -- a single cannonball isn't going to make any difference in the speed of your ship. This is a maneuver that's
called club hauling. You drop an anchor off the side in an attempt to rapidly turn the ship in another direction. It did happen, but you
did it in an emergency, when you were trying
to extricate your ship from a very dangerous situation, rather than as a tactic in battle usually. You could surprise the Black Pearl, but it's going to take many minutes for this maneuver to happen. I mean, it is a surprise,
'cause it's really dumb. So, that's chain shot. That's a real thing. It's either an antipersonnel thing, 'cause it's going to spin, or you fire it at the rigging in the hopes of cutting
ropes as it spins through. I'd be surprised if you
had a one-shot thing that brings the mast down like that. A good naval gun crew that's
got a lot of men on it can load and fire a cannon in a minute, but you probably couldn't
sustain that for very long. It looks like there are, like,
eight people on this ship, like I said, so, you know,
they could fire one gun. But not all of them.
You need a lot of men. It's a great way to
make yourself a target. Probably much more likely to
end up in between the ships, which is a great way to
get crushed to death. It's very cinematic, it's very evocative, and it looks like sort of a
Tarzan-esque thing, I get that, but you're asking for trouble. And I think when people are firing at you, doing that is not smart. One of the things you don't see here is that it's actually really hard to keep two ships right
next to each other. We saw these ships moving
in opposite directions. Something would have
needed to have happened to keep them near each other. Right now this is just, very conveniently, I guess they've anchored
next to each other so that they can duke it out. Like, in the "Pirates" universe,
this is a 10 out of 10. It's about as accurate as they ever get. In reality, it's like a, I don't know, 4 out of 10. French officer: This is
your last warning! Stop now! They showed a couple shots there of the crowded deck of what
we know is a British frigate. That's much more accurate. I mean, these ships are going
to be crawling with men. Jack: Fire!
[cannons boom] So, that's a pretty risky strategy, to try to knock down the
mainmast of the enemy ship, because masts are hard to hit. But firing into the
rigging was a real tactic, because the masts are
held up by the rigging. So the reason you'd want to
knock the enemy mast down is to disable his ship. And then he couldn't chase you anymore, and then you could just leave. Often the British practiced
firing hard and low into enemy hulls, into the enemy ship, with the idea of killing men. Not to sink the ship. It's really hard to sink a
wooden ship. Wood floats. Instead, what you're doing is you're trying to kill the crew. The knock-on effect of that is that you can either board them and take them, or they'll be so disabled and so damaged that they will surrender to you and then you can go take possession. Officer: Put out the boarding plank! Those are ropes that they're throwing over to try to get the ships to stay together, to solve that problem of
the ships moving apart. It's really hard to get two ships to actually get close
enough together to board. Ships have something called a tumblehome. The hull is shaped so that the sides aren't straight up and down. The sides actually turn in a little bit. Which means that when two
ships are next to each other, they both have tumblehomes
that are going this way, which means that to cross
from one deck to the other is actually a long way. The challenge of actually
getting two ships next to each other to board them is real. They do a good job in this movie of showing you that
there are different ways that you can go about doing it. I mean, they got almost everything right. This is a 10 out of 10. [Euron yells]
[cables creak] [bowsprit thuds] That's supposed to be
sort of the bowsprit. That's the mast that sticks
out the front of the ship. That's really essential to hold up most of the rigging of a ship. If you were to put elaborate
metal claws on the front of it, you'd, first of all, probably not be able to
sail the ship very well; secondly, it'd be very heavy
on the front of your ship and cause your ship to go like this. You can run your ship into the other ship and then board it from there. But you do that by just
clambering over your own bowsprit. You don't do it by staging an
elaborate entrance in which, once again, just like with
the Tarzan rope thing, you just made yourself a target, right? I mean, they stand there
shocked that it's Euron, but, like, just shoot him. Flaming arrows? I would say no, that's not
something that would work. Mainly because to make
a flaming arrow work, you probably have to
light it on your own ship, and fire is by far the
biggest threat to ships. Wood, canvas, pitch, tar, this
stuff is really flammable. Firing flaming arrows
at someone else's ship is much more likely to
set your own ship on fire than to set the other guy's ship on fire. The fact that they correctly identify that one of the greatest fears
for a fleet would be fire and that would be the thing
that would make Euron scary I think is accurate. The two ships are about to be on fire. That would be very bad. That would be catastrophic. You would be much more
concerned about the fire than about whatever the enemy's doing. Would you keep fighting in a storm? The answer is, it would affect tactics, but it wouldn't necessarily
keep you from fighting. There's a famous example
of two British frigates chasing a much larger French ship in 1797. And normally, if the
weather had been calm, the two frigates probably
would have run away from the bigger French ship. But because of the storm was so bad, the French ship couldn't
open its lower gunports, because the water would've
come in too low, right? So the French ship was basically half as powerful as it would've been. I don't feel like I need to explain that, but I can, if you want. What's the name of the carnival ride? That's what -- they clearly
saw that at a carnival and they were like,
"Let's make that happen." The guy swings like Tarzan, comes around, fires a gun, and then
gets shot in the face. Because of course he would. 'Cause you see a guy
swinging, and you're like, "I'm gonna shoot you now." Boarding is risky, right? When you board another ship, you need to be pretty confident that you are superior to the
enemy that you're boarding. Because if you board an enemy
ship and it goes poorly, then you might lose your own ship. Whereas if you hadn't bothered to board them in the first place, you probably wouldn't get captured. And you'd be much more likely to just obliterate them at a distance, and then once they surrender,
take over the ship and say, "Well, that was better." A lot of movies have boarding in them because it's very cinematic and it's a lot more interesting
than watching two ships just fire at each other for a long time. That's a 1. War at sea is not a carnival ride. That's just ... Look at the way that the wind is blowing the sails of the
British ship from behind and the sails of the other
ship from that direction. I mean, that's a really
good illustration of, the wind doesn't work like that. The wind has been
disengaged from this scene so that these ships can
turn however they like. A lot of the times in
the age of sail clips that we've been seeing, they're turning the
ship's wheel kind of like you're just sort of spinning it, like, "Ah, just gonna throw
it this way and spin it." Usually it took two guys. It would take two people there
to really work the wheel. 'Cause you're turning a really
large piece of wood in water. So you turn the wheel,
and that that moves ropes that are connected to the tiller that are connected to the rudder, and the rudder does steer the ship. So you do need to spin the wheel, but often these ships
are turning on a dime with nothing happening in the sails, and you're expected to believe
that that's how it worked. So, you would turn the wheel to do that, but you'd also do 1,000 other things, and the wind would have to be just right, in the right place, and
it would take a while. These ships are passing
each other very quickly. I mean, the combined speed
there is, like, I don't know, 15 miles an hour. The number of seconds you'd probably have in which the enemy ship was in just the right
position to fire on it would be very few. And so you'd end up with them just, you know, you'd do a little bit of damage, and then the ship would just sail on. You could double up on
an enemy ship like that, and there are famous examples of it. At the Battle of the Nile in 1798, the British do this to the French. It's a great way to do a lot of damage, 'cause it forces the enemy
to fire on both sides, to figure out which way to concentrate. They do a good job actually
here of showing the splinters. And the one realistic thing
about this clip is that the air gets filled with splinters, and splinters were the real danger. That was what hurt you. You're very unlikely to be
hit by an actual cannonball. It happened, of course, but the splinters are the thing here. Like, these things are
coming at bullet speeds. There are famous examples
of ships exploding. They're rare, but
certainly they did happen. The magazine is where
you store the powder. If the magazine catches fire, then you'd see a major explosion. An iron cannon ball doesn't bring with it any explosive power. There's nothing that goes boom there, it's just a solid iron ball. So it's unlikely that an enemy shot is going to cause a magazine to explode. It's not something you
could really aim for. It's much more likely that
some fire got started on board that then spread to the magazine. Because, remember, all the
guns on that ship need sparks in order to ignite the
powder to get them to fire, so there's a lot of flames in and around powder on board a ship. And if something goes wrong,
you could have that happen. Wood floats. Right? Wood doesn't take a nosedive and be like, "Well, I'm done floating now. See ya." There'd be wreckage everywhere, and all that wreckage would float. You'd end up with water
coming in the hull, and it would sink slowly over time. Certainly not after a single pass from two ships sailing
in the opposite direction on a magical wind. So this clip is a 2, mainly because of the splinters,
and ships did explode. But all the sailing stuff is ludicrous. Yeah, I don't know what to
say about that. [laughs] What happens when a ship goes downhill? I don't know. I'd be much more concerned about the wave and the curvature of the earth
there than the enemy ships, but that's a fantasy
element we can leave aside. Rowing a ship using human power is pretty inefficient. The way to get your ship going fast enough to do any damage with the ram means that the rest of the
ship needs to be pretty light, and you need a lot of rowers. They've done some testing on this. The answer is, an untrained crew could get a trireme going maybe 9 knots, which is like a jog. It's like 8 miles an hour, right? So, yeah, it's not that fast. The way that they're
moving relatively slowly as they approach the ship is, meh, sure. And then it's sort of
accelerated at the end, and then the ship bent. You could probably poke
a hole in the guy's ship if you really were going
to try to ram the guy. And you would aim for the
middle of the other guy's ship, 'cause that probably
would be the weakest part, but you're unlikely to sink him. 'Cause, again, wood floats. It's really hard to sink ships. What you're more likely to
do is just damage him enough that you can board him. But what doesn't work in this clip is that the vessels that you
would expect to see here are fair-weather ships, right? So galleys, triremes, that sort of thing. These are not all-weather vessels that are going to handle a big sea. These ships would be mainly
struggling to survive, rather than able to fight much. Maybe it's a 5. Yeah, they had triremes, they
fought like this, sort of. Their boat is turning into more boats! The division of the pirate
ship into small ships to send them out to attack the small ship doesn't make a ton of sense to me. You'd use the small boats on your big ship to tow you places in a flat calm, sometimes, if it were an emergency, but otherwise the little
boats that you've got are not going to help do much. A smaller, maneuverable ship could theoretically
run away from big ships in the right conditions. The speed of a ship depends on about 1,000 different factors. You're going to deal
with the wind direction, the wind speed, which direction the ship is trying to go relative to the wind. Moana and Maui are going
to be more maneuverable. They're going to be able to
change direction very quickly. I think for realism, you know, it's a 6. I mean, there are coconut pirates, so let's not get too carried away. So, now's probably a good
time to talk about range. The guns that they're
firing in this period are not usually rifled, right, so they have smooth bore barrels, which means that the cannonball is slightly smaller than the barrel. Which means that as it
fires down the barrel, it's got windage, so it can bounce around
the barrel as it goes, and then it goes off there. So they're not particularly accurate. Think of a musket as opposed to a rifle. That said, they can
throw a ball really far. So, the muzzle velocity
of a 32-pound cannon here is, like, 1,500 feet per second, or I think Mach 1.3. It's going faster than the speed of sound. And so you could hit something at maybe a mile. Whether you could hit what
you were aiming at at a mile, less clear, but at a
mile you could probably, if you got the pitch just right
and you hit it on the roll, you could get a ball to go that far. Unlike most movies that immediately shrink the battlefield down
to right next to each other, it does a good job of
sort of showing that, yeah, you could actually open
up at a pretty good range and expect maybe to hit something. Ideally you'd want to be
within a quarter of a mile. You'd only do that in very short ranges. Ships are constantly moving, right? And they're moving
faster than you can swim. So the idea that you would be able to risk swimming across to an enemy ship and then when you board it
there'd be enough of you to actually do something
with it is very unlikely. In a fleet battle like
this it's very rare. What they did at Trafalgar, this lieutenant swam
across to a French ship and then managed to
get ropes tossed to him so that they could grapple
the ships together, again, to board it. But it's within range of someone to be able to throw a rope, not, like, a mile or whatever
the distance is here. Would you do it at that range? No. Would you open up guns at that range? It looks pretty far to me, but it's hard to judge distances here. So I'll say 7. That weird funnel of ships was strange. There are a lot of collisions
that are about to happen in that fleet right there. So you wouldn't get that
close to each other. But they're basically trying
to form a line of battle. Forming a line of battle was a technique developed in the middle
of the 17th century, in the 1650s, roughly. And it was a defensive technique. So you form ships in a line of battle one after the other, lined up like this. Remember that ships' guns, the most powerful ones fire sideways, but ships sail forward. You line up all the ships in your fleet, one after the other, like this in a line, so that the weakest part of every ship, the bow and the stern, is facing a friend. The most dangerous part
is facing the bad guy. You form a really
effective defensive barrier that means that it's very difficult for the enemy to do anything to you, because you can keep them at bay with your massive powerful
guns all lined up. And that's called the line of battle, and it basically is the major fleet tactic for the next 150 years. If you had a solid line of
battle that wouldn't get broken, then chances are you're weren't
going to lose the battle. That gun sort of gently
rolled back when it fired. Like, that's not nearly violent enough. 7,000 pounds moving
backwards 10 to 11 feet, you wouldn't really even
see it, it would be so fast. 'Cause the thing that's
going out the front is going out at Mach 1.3. Now, that put out a huge amount of stress on the ship's side, 'cause it meant that the bolts that held
it to the ship's side had 16 tons of force pulling them that way every time you fired the gun. So one of the things that
they learned over time is, don't fire every single gun
on the ship at the same time. Do a rolling broadside so that you don't exert 16 tons of power on every single bracket on every single side of your ship. So bang, bang, bang,
bang, bang, bang, bang, not kaboom, right? It wouldn't necessarily
tear the ship to pieces, but it would certainly put
more stress on it than it would if you sort of staggered
the firing a little bit. To fire these cannon, put the
slow match on the touch hole. Well, all that's doing is igniting a stream of powder fuse that's going to go down the touch hole into the actual charge. And then sometime in the
next two or three seconds, the cannon's going to fire. But I can't exactly predict it. Which, again, makes aiming really hard, 'cause the ship is moving
in all sorts of directions. It's going forward, it's pitching and rolling and yawing, and all these other dimensions. They do a good job of actually showing slow match in this clip, but the guns don't recoil fast enough and there's not enough
uncertainty about it. This is probably an 8. You don't normally see
lines of battle in movies, and so credit where credit's due. If you take nothing else away
from this show, wood floats. If you enjoyed this video, click above to watch another one.
