While the use of grenades, bombs, carcasses and other explosive and incendiary missiles had been recognized on land for centuries, an event occurred in the year 1788 which, coming to the ears of Europe, should have had considerable effect in turning the thoughts of artillerists to the possibilities of their use at sea. In that year, some sixty-five years before the action off Sinope, a Deptford shipwright who had risen to high service under the Russian government fitted out for his employers a flotilla of long-boats for an attack upon a Turkish squadron. These long-boats Sir Samuel Bentham--he was the ex-shipwright--armed with brass ordnance mounted on his favourite non-recoil system, and for them he requisitioned a large supply of shells, carcasses and solid shot. At the mouth of the Liman river in the Sea of Azov the Russians, with these insignificant war vessels, attacked a very superior force of Turkish ships, and gained a complete victory. The effect of the shells, fired at close range into the Turkish ships, was startling and impressive. Great holes were torn in the sides of the vessels, and fires were started which, in a favouring medium of dry timber and paint and pitch, rapidly spread and caused the squadron’s destruction. No evidence can be quoted, it must be admitted, to show that contemporary opinion realized how portentous was this sea action; no stress is laid on the event in histories relating to that time. Nor does another event which occurred at this period appear to have caused the notice it deserved: the firing, at the suggestion of a Captain Mercier, 35th Regiment, of mortar shells from the British long 24-pounders, from Gibraltar into the Spanish lines.[100] Nor was Lieutenant Shrapnel’s contemporaneous invention,[101] of a shell containing case shot explodable by a small bursting charge, developed or the possible adaptation of its use for sea warfare fully appreciated. Or, if authority did discern the eventual effect of these innovations, a wholesome dread of their extension and development in naval warfare appears to have dictated a policy of calculated conservatism in respect of them, a suppression of all ideas and experiments which had in view any intensifying or improvement of our artillery methods. “So long as foreign powers did not innovate by improving their guns, by extending the use of carronades and, above all, by projecting shells horizontally from shipping; so long it was our interest not to set the example of any improvement in naval ordnance--the value of our immense material might otherwise be depreciated. Many of the defects which were known to exist, so long as they were common to all navies, operated to the advantage of Great Britain.”[102]