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A gunboat is a naval watercraft designed for the express purpose of carrying one or more guns to bombard coastal targets, as opposed to those military craft designed for naval warfare, or for ferrying troops or supplies. ==History== In the age of sail, a gunboat was usually a small undecked vessel carrying a single smoothbore cannon in the bow, or just two or three such cannons. A gunboat could carry one or two masts or be oar-powered only, but the single-masted version of about length was most typical. Some types of gunboat carried two cannons, or else mounted a number of swivel guns on the railings. The advantages of this type of gunboat were that since it only carried a single cannon, the boat could be manoeuvred in shallow or restricted areas, where sailing was difficult for larger ships, such as rivers or lakes. The gun that such boats carried could also be quite heavy; a 32-pounder for instance. As such boats were cheap and quick to build, swarm tactics were favoured; while a single hit from a frigate's broadside would destroy a gunboat, a frigate facing a large squadron of gunboats could be seriously damaged before it could manage to sink them all. Gunboats used in the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain during the American Revolutionary War were mostly built on the spot, attesting to the speed of their construction. All navies of the sailing era kept a number of gunboats on hand. Gunboats saw extensive use in the Baltic Sea during the late 18th century as they were well-suited for the extensive coastal skerries and archipelagoes of Sweden, Finland and Russia. The rivalry between Sweden and Russia in particular lead to an intense expansion of gunboat fleets and development of new gunboat types. The two clashed during the Russo-Swedish war of 1788–90 a conflict that culminated in the massive Battle of Svensksund in 1790, where over 30,000 men and hundreds of gunboats, galleys and other oared craft participated. The majority of these were vessels developed from the 1770s and onwards by the naval architect Fredrik Henrik af Chapman for the Swedish archipelago fleet. The designs were copied and refined by the rival Danish and Russian navies and spread to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.〔See Glete (1993), pp. 710–11 for lists of European navies that employed rowed gunboats〕 Two variants were the most common, a larger "gun sloop" (from the Swedish ''kanonslup'') with two 24-pounders, one in the stern and one in the bow, and a smaller "gun yawl" (''kanonjolle'') with a single 24-pounder. Many of the Baltic navies kept gunboats in service well into the second half of the 19th century.〔Anderson (1962), pp. 97–99〕 British ships engaged larger Russian gunboats off Turku in southeast Finland in 1854 during the Crimean War. The Russian vessels had the distinction of being the last oared vessels of war in history to fire their guns in anger.〔Anderson (1962), p.98.〕 Gunboats were a key part of Napoleon's plan for the invasion of England in 1804. Denmark-Norway used them heavily in the Gunboat War. Between 1803 and 1812, the United States Navy had a policy of basing its navy on coastal gunboats, experimenting with a variety of designs. President Thomas Jefferson and his Republican party opposed a strong navy, arguing that gunboats were adequate to defend America's major harbors. They proved useless against the British blockade during the War of 1812. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「gunboat」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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