It was not till the war of 1812 that the fatal weakness of the carronade, as primary armament, was fully revealed. The Americans had not developed the carronade policy to the same extent as ourselves, for transatlantic opinion was never at this period enamoured of the short-range gun. Their well-built merchant ships, unhampered by tonnage rules or by the convoy system which had taken so much of the stamina from British shipping, were accustomed to trust to their speed and good seamanship to keep an enemy at a distance. Their frigates, built under less pedantic restrictions as to size and weight, were generally swifter, stouter and more heavily armed than ours. And, though they included carronades among their armament, these were not generally in so large a proportion as in our ships, and in part were represented by a superior type--the colombiad, a hybrid weapon of proportions intermediate between the carronade and the long gun. Our ships often depended heavily upon the carronade element of their armament. Experience was soon to confirm what foresight might, surely, have deduced: namely, that when pitted against an enemy who could choose his range and shoot with tolerable accuracy the carronade would find itself in certain circumstances reduced to absolute impotence. This was to be the fate and predicament of our ships on Lakes Erie and Ontario, in face of the Americans. “I found it impossible to bring them to close action,” the English commodore reported. “We remained in this mortifying situation five hours, having only six guns in all the squadron that would reach the enemy, not a carronade being fired.” The same lesson was to be enforced shortly afterwards on the Americans. One of their frigates, the _Essex_, armed almost exclusively with carronades, was fought by an English ship, the _Phœbe_, armed with long guns. The _Essex_, it should be noted, possessed the quality essential for a carronade armament, namely, superior speed. But the _Phœbe_ fell in with her in circumstances when, owing to damage, her superior speed could not be utilized. The captain of the _Phœbe_ was able to choose the range at which the action should be fought. He kept at a “respectful distance”: within range of his own long guns and out of range of his opponent’s carronades. Both sides fought well, but the result was a foregone conclusion. The _Essex_, disabled and on fire, had to surrender. From that time the carronade was discredited. For some years after the peace it found a place in the armament of all classes of British ships, but it was a fallen favourite. The French commission which visited this country in 1835 reported that, although still accounted part of the regular armament of older ships, the carronade was being replaced to a great extent by light long guns in newer construction. Opinion certainly hardened more and more against the type, and, gradually falling into disuse, it was at last altogether abandoned.