"The age of cannons and sails and pirates" is pretty broad, but I think we can fairly say that between a period of say 1650 or so and 1805 or so, naval battles were often quite lethal to the people involved. The caveat here of course is that the tactics used and the motivation of the people involved ebbed and flowed over time, and so there's not really a straight line we can draw among different encounters.
Just to set our parameters: I'm picking 1650ish to bound this on the early end because the first Anglo-Dutch war started in 1652, and the three conflicts (1652-54, 1665-67 and 1672-74) saw the development and codification of what we generally refer to as line-of-battle tactics for fleet engagements.
I'm picking 1805 as the bound on the other end because, of course, the battle of Trafalgar saw a complete abandonment of those tactics and a decisive victory for Britain.
The Anglo-Dutch wars saw the first widespread use of the line-of-battle tactic that would dominate naval tactics for the next 150 years or so. The exact origin of the idea that you would line up ships front to rear and engage the enemy's line arranged in the same way is pretty well disputed -- some people trace this back to 1500, others say that Maarten Tromp used the tactic in 1639 -- but for our purposes that's kind of a moot point, because the line-of-battle tactics used in the Anglo-Dutch wars often produced long-running engagements, many of which resulted in simple mutual exhaustion on both sides. If both sides kept to a strict line, engagements usually ran a fairly regular course of the ships passing one another and firing away until one fleet edged away, enough ships were damaged that the rest tried to flee, or darkness fell and one side broke off the battle.
If that didn't happen, though, and a line became disordered due to damage, lack of leadership, flaws in weather, etc., the battle could turn quite quickly in favor of one side or the other. The Four Days' Battle is probably a good and also bad example of this -- it's quite unusual in being the largest battle of the Age of Sail, though it's not well known, and resulted in a decisive English defeat in the second Anglo-Dutch war.
It was fought from 11-14 June 1666 (New Style) with 54 ships on the English side against 84 on the Dutch side. The English, commanded by George Monck (the duke of Albemarle) decided to attack the numerically superior Dutch fleet commanded by Michiel de Ruyter in hopes of defeating them in detail before the Dutch could combine. In the event, on the first day Albermarle did not double up or fall on a portion of the Dutch fleet but fought a conventional battle at range, to his disadvantage.
On the second day, the ships again formed lines but seem to have quite often cut through one line or the other to attempt to engage with some numerical superiority; the English fleet suffered heavily in this encounter. Admiral de Ruyter's ship was badly damaged and he withdrew from the fighting, but at the end of the day the English fleet was reduced to only 29 ships that were battle-worthy. Albermarle decided to withdraw to the west, and on the third day the Dutch fleet gave chase but stayed out of range, fearing the large English stern-chasers. Albermale's course took the fleet over the Galloper shoal, and several ships grounded, including Admiral George Ayscue's Prince Royal; his men, panicking, forced him to surrender the ship. He was, and remains, the highest-ranking English naval officer to have been captured by an enemy.
On the fourth day, the English fleet received some reinforcements, including fireships, and decided to attack the Dutch fleet. Both sides realized that this might be the decisive battle of the war. The English attacked from leeward, in an unfortunate position for a sea-fight, and the Dutch fleet was able to encircle and overwhelm them. Sir Christopher Myngs, taking over as admiral of the van from Ayscue, was shot with a musket-ball and fatally wounded; with the van falling into disarray, de Ruyter attacked Albermale's squadron directly and forced him to retreat into a fog bank.
Both fleets took fairly heavy damage, but the English had the worse, with about 1,500 men killed, 1,500 or so wounded, and 1,800 captured (many of whom served in the Dutch fleet later). The Dutch lost about 1,500 killed and 1,300 wounded, but had the tactical and strategic victory.
What happened between the Anglo-Dutch wars and the Napoleonic period is a time where there was a bit of tactical indecisiveness, not to say outright cowardice, on the part of the British. The battle of Minorca is a good example -- evenly matched British and French fleets fought an indecisive battle, with 38 killed and 150 or so wounded on the British side and 45/160 on the French, after which the British held a council of war and decided to withdraw. This led to John Byng being convicted of cowardice and shot; after which British captains and admirals had a much stronger motivation to seek decisive battle.
I wrote about the battle of Quiberon Bay here before, which I'll c-p below:
This is exactly what British admiral Sir Edward Hawke did in 1759: the bulk of his fleet lay off the northwest of Ushant, with two small ships of the line under Augustus Hervey anchored off the Black Rocks at the Iroise watching the Goulet. His ships were often blown off station, but a westerly wind usually meant that the French were bottled up in port even as the British ships were blown off blockade.
The reason for keeping the French fleet in port was that the French, growing desperate at their losses in the Americas, had decided in 1758 upon an invasion of Britain. The invasion fleet was assembling in Vannes, in the west of France, while the battle fleet was at Brest (at the time, there were only sketchy land communications with Brest -- it relied on coastal shipping for nearly everything, and an army couldn't assemble there). The fleet would have to break out of Brest, sail to Vannes to pick up the transports, and then evade the British fleet to land troops somewhere in Britain, which was a tall order.
The French were increasingly desperate to break out of port as 1759 drew to a close, and when a westerly gale blew Hawke off station in November, the French acted. The same day that the storm died down and Hawke left Torbay, the French left Brest. They were blown far to the west before they could come about and head for Vannes, and had trouble with the fleet because many of its men were inexperienced at sea after being bottled up in port. They sailed for Quiberon Bay, where the transports waited, with the British fleet on their heels, and made it almost there before sighting the British fleet. The French gambled that the British would not follow them into Quiberon Bay, because the British lacked charts of the area, but Hawke attacked at once and the French fleet fled. The British caught up with the tail end of the French fleet just as the van was entering the bay, and at that point the wind backed and headed the French, as well as kicking up an extremely rough sea.
The battle was a disaster for the French; the Thesee sank attempting to open its lower gunports (the ship flooded) and the Superbe sank after two broadsides from Hawke's flagship. One French ship was captured; three were trapped in the Vilaine river with their guns thrown overboard to lighten ship; and six were wrecked or sunk. Two British ships were also driven ashore and wrecked, but their crews were rescued.
British casualties were about 400 men killed, against French of 2,500 lost in battle and/or drowned.
The best-known battles of the age of sail, of course, were Nelson's three victories at the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. I've written about the Nile here and Trafalgar here -- casualties in both battles were quite high.
Of course, that doesn't also mean there were engagements with fewer! The famous action between HMS Speedy and the Spanish ship Gamo ended with the British losing three killed and nine wounded, in capturing a much larger ship with 14 killed and 41 wounded (more men than were on board Speedy).
I'm going to need to stop here for now, but I will come back later and expand!
Not so much about pirates but one of the innovations of Admiral Nelson was the introduction of deliberate chaos into naval warfare with an aim at being spectacularly lethal. The battle of Trafalgar, and similar actions, saw the British outkill their enemies by a ratio of 10 to 1 or more. I can't speak as much to pirates except by a bit of extrapolation but clashes between naval armed forces could be highly lethal.
This "innovation" came about for a variety of reasons, some practical and some cultural, but prior to Nelson and commanders like him the accepted method had been for two fleets to approach each other in an orderly fashion, maneuver to get a wind advantage, and then, at the direction of the admiral, engage with an aim toward capturing enemy ships. Crews, captains, and admirals all got a share of the value of captured ships so destroying the enemy wasn't exactly the highest priority if you could avoid doing so. Furthermore, "not losing" was more important than "winning", per se.
All this began to change in the early to mid 1700s but the tipping point is really probably in 1757 when the British shoot an admiral for cowardice. Admiral Byng came from a long line of British seamen and was the equivalent of the royalty of the British Navy. However, he made a fatal miscalculation off Minorca by not closing with a French fleet that outnumbered and outgunned him, despite the fact that he had the wind advantage. There'd been a fierce debate about changing sea tactics for a while but the Admiralty ended up court-martialing him, convicting him, and then denying some very high-level pleas for mercy before having him executed by firing squad. If you could shoot an admiral with close connections to royalty, a family history of naval service, and a lifetime of service of his own then NO ONE was getting a pass. Nelson was born a year later and came up through the ranks of a Royal Navy with a very different ethos.
Nelson really came into his own at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, where he took his 74 gun ship, disobeyed direct orders, and attacked three Spanish ships with a total of 322 guns. Ultimately he fought until all four ships were badly damaged, then stormed one of the Spanish ships with a boarding party. This was *not how things were done* and it threw the Spanish for a complete loop. The battle was a huge British victory but the Royal Navy didn't want to reward Nelson for disobeying orders so he didn't get shot but he didn't get promoted either. Privately, his superiors realized he had a visionary approach to cataclysmic killing.
Nelson would refine this over the course of his career and as he became more and more of a hero to the British public he began to draw people to his way of thinking. His crews were close-knit and fiercely personally loyal (partially due to the fact that the British navy was a pretty strict meritocracy in which everyone started at the bottom, albeit sometimes with advantages, and worked their way up). He encouraged constant training on firing so that his crews could fire much more quickly than their counterparts, even if it meant dry firing due to the Admiralty not giving them powder allocations for training, and often bought supplemental powder to train his gun crews. His captains, as he rose through the ranks, were disciples of this approach. This was coupled with the rise of the Romantic movement in Europe, particularly in Britain, which saw a societal fascination with purifying nature cataclysmic violence and a hearkening back to Britain's Romantic past.
At Trafalgar, Nelson's famous signal was "England expects that every man will do his duty"; it is worth noting that he first ordered "confides" instead of "expects" but that would have had to have been spelled out and there was a single flag for "expects", which saved considerable time as battle approached. This encapsulates his philosophy almost perfectly. He chose England, the realm of Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur, over "Britain", "every man" from the captains to the powder monkeys, and "confides" instead of "demands" or "orders". The effect is something akin to "your countrymen back home, your families and towns, your King and Parliament, are confident that each and every one of you will carry the fate of the nation in your hands today". Instead of approaching in an orderly line alongside the Spanish and French fleets, he hit them perpendicularly in the center of their line and the rest, effectively, is history.
To return to the extrapolation a bit, pirates would have lacked a lot of these motivations- they weren't in a national service and they were fighting primarily for plunder so they'd like their opponents to surrender with as little damage to the valuable ships as possible. They likely didn't have the same standards of discipline and didn't train as often (although this isn't a universal by any means).
You might check out "Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar" by Adam Nicolson for a quick, easy, but thorough overview of how, why, and when all these things changed.
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Great question. Generally speaking, regular naval combat during the Golden Age of Piracy was a mixture of complicated and time-consuming logistics mixed with incredible lethality. Looking at properly organized navies, it's actually somewhat helpful to imagine these fighting at sea the way regular armies fought on land. Major naval engagements fought among the superpowers (England, Spain, France, Netherlands) usually employed what were called ships of the line. These were the aircraft carriers of their day: huge, exceptionally powerful technical marvels that were not very maneuverable. As their name suggests, these ships would arrange themselves in a column, with all of their guns (between 50 and a hundred --usually around 70--sometimes more) arranged on one side to bring all of their firepower to bear. This maneuver, however, was tricky as the slow-moving, square-rigged ships struggled to catch the appropriate point of sail with an uncooperative wind, and it often took days and sometimes even weeks for both sides to get into formation.
Once the opposing fleets were finally organized into two columns, they would then slowly pass one another exchanging broadsides (imagine army regiments marching toward each other, stopping to fire volleys of musketfire). It was a tremendous amount of violent explosive force, and because the vessels were sailing within feet of one another, it was hard to miss. (This is the exception to the rule, though, which is that it's hard to fire accurately at sea. Guns were powerful but inaccurate in their own right. Add in the fact that you have one vessel tossing and rolling with the waves, shooting at another vessel rolling on different waves, and you have a tall order for gunners. An alternative was to use special shot for different purposes, like grapeshot--basically a cannon-turned-shotgun--to clear decks or chain- or barshot--two halves of a cannonball attached by a chain or bar--to destroy rigging and immobilize a sip.)
But keep in mind that these were essentially floating fortresses that sacrificed speed and maneuverability to focus on firepower and strength, so even though there was often high amounts of damage to the vessels and their crews, it wasn't uncommon for the ships involved to survive the encounters. Sometimes you would have snipers in the rigging hoping to take out ship's officers or toss crude grenades onto the decks, but with hundreds of guns firing over the course of hours, such precision attacks were basically pointless after a point. In these cases, high-seas encounters were less about decisive routs and more about attrition: it wasn't who could dish out the most amount of firepower who won the day but who could field the most ships and men to eat it.
As a result, navy sailors were seen as essentially dispensable. This lead the rise of press gangs, especially in England, to keep a steady stream of bodies to man the ships. These gangs would roam the streets looking for able-bodied men to coerce into service. In some cases, "recruiters" would visit pubs, identify sailors just in from port, get them roaring drunk and convince them to sign on the dotted line. In other cases, they would literally break into homes and inns, beat a recruit with cudgels and drag him kicking and screaming onto a boat. (Anyway, I mention this because it's important to keep in mind that "violence" in warfare includes more than just the causalities inflicted in battle. Because of naval warfare, people at home lived in constant fear of violence against them and their sons, husbands, fathers...)
Piracy was obviously a completely completely different animal than regualr naval engagements. On the one hand, the motivations were completely different. Pirates generally didn't want to destroy their victim's ships, or prizes, because then they would lose whatever valuables were on board/risk losing what could be an upgraded vessel. And they didn't necessarily even want to harm the crews on board, because these were often a rich source of recruits. With the exception of skilled crew members like carpenters, cooks, and surgeons, who were always in high demand and therefore almost always pressed into service by pirates, many ordinary sailors actually volunteered to join the crews of pirate vessels that captured them. Life aboard merchant and navy vessels was extremely hierarchical, and officers were authorized to mete out harsh punishments--anything short of death, really--for even minor infractions. (The organization that brought the press gang also introduced the "cat-o-nines," a nine-tailed whip that was sometimes tipped with knots or steel spikes...) Crews of merchant ships were also shorthanded as a cost-saving measure, which meant more backbreaking work. And all of it was for little--and in the case of the royal navies, sometimes literally no--pay. Joining a pirate crew meant more freedom and the chance at a life-changing payday.
Likewise, the technology available to pirates was severely limited. They didn't have the resources of the state to outfit heavily-armed ships of the line. Although some of the more famous pirates eventually worked their way up to commanding impressive, multi-masted brigantine- and frigate-rigged vessels (Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge, Sam Bellamy's Whydah), more often than not pirates sailed single-masted sloops with a battery of maybe a dozen or so guns or even smaller sailing canoes called periaguas.
Taken together, this meant pirates employed an entirely different set of tactics than the regular navies. Maybe the most popularly known one is fear: the appearance of a black flag (which signified no quarter) waving above a deck studded with cannon and swarming with dozens or even hundreds of pirates would be enough to make the captain of an understaffed, overworked merchantman surrender. (Many of these ships were insured anyway, though collecting was--as always--never easy.) As time wore on and stories (usually embellished but sometimes not) of pirates' violence circulated, this got easier, to the point where a captain like Blackbeard could blockade the entire port of Charleston and hold the twon hostage.
There were obviously many actual engagements, though, and in these cases the pirate's small ships were actually an asset. Even the humble periagua could be used to devastating advantage. Because they were rowed, they could sail into the wind directly at a victim. Pirates were actually usually good with muskets, so as they approached, sharpshooters would pick off gunners and officers. If their victims could manage to get some shots off, the smaller pirate ships were hard to hit. Once the pirates came alongside, the pirates would use ladders and grappling hooks to get on deck. If the victim crew resisted, it would get violent quick, with pirates firing one or two pistols before cutting the resistance down with cutlasses, knives, boarding axes, pikes, etc. Once the vessel was under control, the pirates could have hours to ransack the holds, interrogate and torture prisoners, and recruit new crewmembers and slip away before any passing coast guard or navy patrols could respond. Even the larger sloops, whose rigging allowed them to sail closer to the wind than square-rigged vessels, had an easy path to escape. So in cases where they did use violence, it was primarily based on leveraging speed and the element of surprise.
Sources:
- The Republic of Pirates, Woodard
- The Sea and Civilization, Paine
I’m not a historian of the era, but a fan. Also British, so sorry for the bias in my knowledge.
The era you are talking about really fits between the late 16th century, and the early to mid 19th century. Prior to this era, the battles concerned themselves with trying to board the other vessels, hence the Spanish Galleons that typified the time had very high fore- and aft-castles, to gain the high ground, so to speak. This era ended with the introduction of steel armoured ships (The French Gloire being the first in 1859), and gun turrets (USS Monitor - 1862) rather than broadsides.
In the late 15th century, Britain developed a compact gun carriage, It invention is sometimes attributed to Henry VIII. This is the type of gun carriage you see in historic vessels, and on shows like Hornblower. Prior to this Field guns, with large wheel carriages were install on ships. The smaller carriages meant that the guns could recoil further, allowing for larger calibres and much faster reload speeds.
The efficacy of this invention was demonstrated during the Spanish Armada, with the Spanish still using the old field gun carriages, and the English using the new compact carriages. One pitch battles, where the English lost no ships to combat (8 fire ships to burn the Spanish out of port to actually fight them).
The Spanish lost over 600 dead in the battle of Gravelines plus 800 wounded (out of 7000 sailors and 17000 soldiers). 5 ships were sunk, but most of the Spanish fleet was severely damaged. If they had been modern warships with that much damage they’d have sunk, but fundamentally wood floats. Overall the Spanish lost c.20,000 of 24,000 on that campaign, mostly lost to the high seas taking the long way back over the top of Scotland and Ireland. The English lost only a maximum of 100 to combat (6-8000 to disease chasing the Spanish over the top.) From the dead in the battle at least it shows that the new carriage was 6x more lethal.
This was a bit of a theme from pitch battles at the time, the tail of the butchers bill was usually higher then the bill during combat, as badly damaged ships succumbed to high seas, or crew fell ill in foetid conditions.
Thus during this era, naval battle was global, and a lot of the skills centered around navigation and being able to bring your guns to bear. Hear generally the English, then British, excelled as the song would have it “Britannia rules the waves”. They employed frigates as the were faster, and more manouverable, and more that a match for a merchant ship. Generally if they were unlucky enough to be cornered by a ship of the line, they’d be annihilated.
Naval Warfare at the time would then more usually be between a ship of the line and two or three frigates. They could last several days, mostly with the frigates chasing down the ship of the line or merchantman. The conquering ships generally did not want to destroy the conquered ship, as it would be very valuable in price money, as the royal navy would essentially buy the captured ship of the crew that captured it. For an able seaman or petty officer, this could be enough to retire, if a frigate managed to capture a merchantman. Thus the battles were deadly but generally not lethal, as the target was to get them to surrender. Navy’s would have been spread quite thin, trying to cover global interests.
The other notable pitch battle then is right at the end of this era. The battle of Trafalgar. This was a decisive moment in the Napoleonic war. It prevented a French invasion of Britain, and effectively removed the French navy as any kind of force for decades. As an aside to the prize money aspect. The French were exceeding good at building ships, but rubbish at sailing them. And over half of the British Navy at the battle were French made ships, previously captured and pressed into service for the Royal Navy.
The total compliment (Sailing crew, gun crews, officers and marines) for the would have been of the order of 13,000-20,000 (I can’t find the exact number, but Nelson’s flagship Victory had a compliment of 850 for scale, there were 2-3 ships which were larger than the Victory).
Casualties were relatively high due to Nelson’s tactics of sailing his ships straight at the French/Spanish line. A particularly vulnerable thing to do, as they’d be sailing directly into the enemy broadside for over an hour before they would retaliate. The ships in the vanguard of the two columns bore the brunt of this, particularly in the leeward (down-wind) column which was the engaged the French sooner (thus forcing them to disengage from the windward column allowing them final approach relatively unmolested.)
None the less the leading ships took c. 20% casualties. (there is a great chart on Wikipedia of casualty rates on each ship). Most of the windward column suffered less than 10% casualties. The French and Spanish navies suffered much higher casualties. With Redoutable suffering 90% casualties.
In the end there were 458 British dead (<5%) and c3,300 French and Spanish dead (c. 15%), and double that again wounded on each side. Only 5 of the combined navy ships returned to sea, out of 41. 21 further ships were captured by the British. Only one ship was actually destroyed (the Redoutable was scuttled, due to extensive damage sustained). Another 3000 men were lost in a storm after the battle.
This is one of the most decisive and bloody battles in naval history prior to WW2 in the Pacific. Nelson’s sole intent was to remove the French navy as an effective force, and he was willing to throw as many men as necessary at that goal. Nelson and Gravina (the Spanish C-in-C) were both killed in action. Compare this with the total annihilation of Hannibal by the Romans to achieve the same goal.
On casualty rates, these would include crew injured and wounded. The primary cause of injury, fatal or otherwise, were splinters, as cannon balls smashed through the hulls, they’d shower the lower decks with splinters, some as big as your forearm. These left horrific injuries, often requiring amputation of limbs in order to have a clean wound to cauterise and sew shut. A lot of the fatalities would have been men who bleed out before they saw the surgeon, and few would have died instantly. The caricature of eye patch and peg leg was not too far removed from reality, though generally in sovereign navies only officers could afford to not have all limbs, some crew men could serve effectively whilst dismembered, but most would be discharged.
Still, set piece battles like this were still extremely rare. The only other battle of the same scale as the battle of Trafalgar during Nelson’s era was the Battle of the Nile, whereas Wellington, in the same wars fought dozens of battles. Most of naval life was taken up with the business of sailing, and skirmishes between 2-4 ships would have been much more common. In these example, the ships with the upper hand would have been fairly obvious at any point, and when the position finally became untenable the weaker ship would usually capitulate if the fight was between two countries. More sailors were lost to disease and the high seas.
Against outright pirates, they usually fought to the death, because it was less horrific to die to a sword then 1000 lashes, or keel hauling, the usual punishments for pirates. Some pirates crew men might be pressed into service within the sovereign navies.
There is a further category of ships. Privateers. These were pirates who had been given Letters of Marque by a country. Essentially commissions in those countries navies’ to capture and harass trade shipping of foreign powers, on their own dime. They would do this for the prize money, which as mentioned, could be substantial. They were theoretically offered the same protections as crew and officers from those sovereign navies, but often were not worth the paper they were written on if captured