As for the system of recoil, while the recoiling of the carriage with the gun had an advantage in reducing the stresses brought on the hull structure, yet this arrangement had the correlative disadvantage that the carriage as well as the gun had to be hauled out again. And, as regards safety, it is a matter for surprise that the system of chocking recoil by means of large ropes--of absorbing the momentum of a heavy gun and its carriage in a distance corresponding to the stretch of the breechings under their suddenly applied load--was not far more injurious than experience proved to be the case. Even so, the results obtained from it were far from satisfactory. “It is a lamentable truth”--we quote Sir William Congreve, writing in 1811--“that numbers of men are constantly maimed, one way or another, by the recoiling of the heavy ordnance used on board ships of war. Most of the damage is done by the random recoil of the carriage which, moving with the gun along no certain path, is much affected by the motion of the vessel and the inequalities of the deck. It is difficult to know, within a few feet, to where the carriage will come, and the greatest watchfulness is necessary on all hands to prevent accidents.” This refers, observe, to the truck gun under control. How terrible an uncontrolled gun could be, may be read in the pages of Victor Hugo’s _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, of which romance the breaking loose of a piece on the gun-deck of a frigate forms a central incident. It was conjectured that the old _Victory_, Admiral Balchen’s flagship which went down off the Casquets in 1744, “mouse and man,” was lost through the breaking loose of her great guns in a gale.[95] [Illustration: A TRUCK GUN] The accessories of the truck carriage were a source of frequent accident. The attachment of breechings and tackles to the ship’s side often involved disablement in action, the numerous bolts being driven in as missiles among the crew, who were also in danger of having their limbs caught up in the maze of ropes and trappings with which the deck round the gun was encumbered. Considered as a mechanism the whole gun-equipment was a rude and primitive affair; the clumsy carriage run out to battery by laborious tackles, the cast-iron gun laid by a simple wedge, the whole equipment traversed by prising round with handspikes--by exactly the same process, it has been remarked, as that by which the savage moved a log in the beginning of the world. _Why, then, did the truck carriage maintain its long supremacy?_