That little was done for years to improve the truck gun equipment, is evident from a letter, written in 1825 by Captain S. J. Pechell and addressed to the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean squadron, deploring the defective equipment of ships’ guns. Even at this date, it appears, few of the guns were properly disparted, few had sights or scales fitted to them. No arrangements had yet been generally adapted for permitting horizontal, or what Captain Broke had called “blindfold” firing; or for laying all the guns together by word of command. The truck carriages still gave insufficient depression, preventing a ship from firing her weather guns at point-blank when listed more than four degrees. The quantity of powder and shot allowed for exercise only amounted to one shot for each captain of a gun in seven months. No instruction was given in sighting or fixing sights, no system of instruction in principles was followed. And once again, as in the seventeenth century, the disadvantage under which naval gunnery laboured by reason of the dual control in all matters pertaining to the ordnance was strongly felt. “It is singular,” wrote Captain Pechell, “that the arming of a ship is the only part of her equipment which has not the superintendence of a Naval Officer. We have no sea Officer at the Ordnance to arrange and decide upon the proper equipment of Ships of War; or to carry into effect any improvement which experience might suggest. It is in this way that everything relating to the Ordnance on board a Man of War has remained nearly in the same state for the last thirty years; and is the only department (I mean the naval part of it) that has not profited by experience or encouraged Officers to communicate information. Much might be done now that the Marine Artillery are stationed at Portsmouth. At present it is not even generally known that a manual exercise exists.... If some such system were adopted, we should no longer consider the length of an action at its principal merit; the _Chesapeake_ was beat in eleven minutes!” Captain Pechell was a firm believer in the desirability of developing to its utmost British material. He had an enthusiastic belief, moreover, in the possibilities of his personnel; and stated his conviction that officers were only too anxious to be given the chance of instruction, prophesying an emulation among them and as great a desire to be distinguished “in gunnery as in Seamanship.” His advocacy of a system of gunnery training bore fruit later in the establishment of the _Excellent_ at Portsmouth. The scheme for the development of a corps of scientific naval officers, which had been foreshadowed by Sir Howard Douglas in his classic treatise on Naval Gunnery and which was formulated later in detail by Captain Pechell, was one of the reforms brought to maturity by Sir James Graham in the year 1832.