Afloating battery is a kind of armed watercraft, often improvised or experimental, which carries heavy armament but has few other qualities as awarship.
During thecapture of Mahdia in 1550, Spanish captainGarcia de Toledo Osorio built a floating battery to bombard the city. The fortified, nine-gun battery was built over two galleys and became decisive to take the position.[1] It was designed bySicilian engineer Andronico de Espinosa and built over galleys owned by Toledo and admiralAndrea Doria.[2]
Use oftimber rafts loaded with cannon by Danish defenders of Copenhagen against bomb ketches of a combined British-Dutch-Swedish fleet is attested by Nathaniel Uring in 1700.[3]
In 1727, Spanish engineer Juan de Ochoa proposed KingPhilip V his project of thebarcaza-espín ("barge-porcupine"), heavily armored floating batteries moved by rows and fitted with multiplerams. The end of theAnglo-Spanish War, however, buried the project before it could be implemented.[4]
An early appearance was in 1782 at theGreat Siege of Gibraltar, and its invention and usage is attributed to French engineerJean Le Michaud d'Arçon.
A purpose-built floating battery wasFlådebatteri No. 1,[5] designed by Chief EngineerHenrik Gerner in 1787; it was 47 m (154 ft) long, 13 m (43 ft) wide and armed with 24 guns, and was used during the 1801Battle of Copenhagen under the command ofPeter Willemoes. The British made limited use of floating batteries during theFrench Revolutionary andNapoleonic Wars, with the two-vesselMusquito andFirm-class floating batteries, and some individual vessels such asHMS Redoubt.
The most notable floating batteries were built or designed in the 19th century, and are related to the development of the first steam warship and theironclad warship.
Demologos, the first steam-propelled warship, was a floating battery designed for the protection ofNew York Harbor in theWar of 1812.
In the 1850s, the British and French navies deployed iron-armoured floating batteries as a supplement to the wooden steam battlefleet in theCrimean War. The role of the battery was to assist unarmoured mortar and gunboats bombarding shore fortifications. The French used their batteries in 1855 against the defenses atKinburn on theBlack Sea, where they were effective against Russian shore defences. The British planned to use theirs in theBaltic Sea againstKronstadt, and may have been influential in causing the Russians to sue for peace.[6] However, Kronstadt was widely regarded as the most heavily fortified naval arsenal in the world throughout most of the 19th-century, continually upgrading its combined defences to meet new changes in technology. Even as the British armoured-batteries were readied against Kronstadt in early 1856, the Russians had already constructed newer networks of outlying forts, mortar batteries of their own, and submarine mines against which the British had no system for removing under fire.
Traditional floating battery calledkotta mara was used by theBanjar andDayak against the Dutch during theBanjar war (1859–1906). The battery is made by adding walls (sloped and unsloped) to a raft made by large logs. Some of them shaped like a castle and hadbastions with 4 cannons on each bastion. The kotta mara could resist the Dutch 30-pounder cannons until 24.5 m range, the range which the cannon could effectively penetrate it.[7]
Floating batteries were popularly implemented by both theUnion and theConfederacy during theAmerican Civil War. The first was the ConfederateFloating Battery of Charleston Harbor, which took an active part in thebombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861. Experimental ironclad vessels that proved too cumbersome or were underpowered were often converted into floating batteries and posted for river and coastal waterway control. Here too, Civil War batteries and even ironclads such as the famedmonitors, were acutely vulnerable to mines protected in turn by forts. As a result, the combined defences of Charleston, South Carolina, for example, were never overwhelmed by the Union Navy.
