By Rob Morgan
The middle years of the long Napoleonic Wars were a prosperous time for William Congreve. His rockets were much fancied by several active naval men, including Nelson and Cochrane, though Admiral Keith, who commanded the Channel Fleet blockading Napoleon’s “empire,” was less enthusiastic.
It seems, from information I have found in an old (1952) Naval Records Society Miscellany, that much was hoped for from the Congreve rockets. They came in several sizes, notably 24-pound and 32-pound (there was a 42-pound version, as well), and had a range of around 3,000 yards, being fired from very basic frames. There are numerous illustrations of single rockets being frame-fired from small ship’s boats, and of course scratch-building a model in, say, 1/450th using the Peter Pig pirate range is easy enough.
Attacks were planned on two of Bonaparte’s main naval bases, Cadiz, where the “allied” fleet lay, and Boulogne. The Cadiz attack was cancelled after Trafalgar, not surprisingly, but Boulogne was raided. On 8 October 1806, more than 400 rockets were fired at the vessels in the harbour – though with limited success.
Rockets and frames were sent to the Dardanelles in 1807, during the attempt to force the Narrows, and were used at Copenhagen in the same year. Cochrane, that brilliant “maverick,” as the Americans might term it, used them in the Battle of Aix Roads in 1809, and the Royal Navy used Congreve’s missiles against shore targets, convoys, batteries and ports in the Peninsular War, and regularly so. The Congreve remained in the British arsenal until around 1860, but was generally used by the army, rather than the fleet, after 1815. There were instances of ships using rockets in colonial action. By the 1860s, the Congreve had been superseded by a much improved design.
Congreve rockets were part of the equipment of more than 30 Royal Navy vessels in 1806-7, and for some years after, it seems. Aboard a number of 38-gun frigates, such as HMS Clyde and HMS Naiad, which each carried four frames and 12 boxes of six 24-pound rockets, with all necessary spares and tools. Nine sloops (there’s a fine, suitable example in the Peter Pig range), each carried two frames and eight boxes of six 24-pound rockets – these included HMS Kangaroo, HMSs Kite and Mosquito and HMS Calypso. Finally, some 17-gun brigs (and, yes, there’s a Peter Pig model suitable for that too), each carried three frames and eight boxes of six 32-pound rockets. A fair addition to the normal gun armament in each case.
I have encountered a comment on the subject of Congreve rockets being used in the early stages of the American Civil War. It was in the Vermont-based journal The Artilleryman, but I have no idea if any rockets were used for shore bombardment or defence, or indeed if any ACW warships had rockets as part of the armament carried. Of course, some member may know more about the subject.
The presence of a host of rocket-armed small boats offshore, firing nasty projectiles at your fleet in harbour, might make for a good counter-attack game with a few chasse-marees or cutters, and a raid like that planned on Cadiz with rocket-boats, gunboats and a mass of well-manned raiding craft would provide a combined ops game of some potential vigour.