In Fiction
The Commodore (published 1945), a Horatio Hornblower novel written by C. S. Forester, features several actions by British bomb vessels. The text includes a highly detailed account of the procedures used to load the mortars and aim, which involved anchoring fore-and-aft, receiving feedback from shot monitors, and precisely adjusting the aim using a spring-line attached to a windlass to adjust the direction of the shot, and by using sometimes tiny adjustments in the amount of charge to adjust the range. It is worth noting that Hornblower's vessels are named "Harvey" and "Moth", suggesting that Forester might have been unaware of the historical naming conventions. A later book Hornblower in the West Indies, features a small portable "ship's mortar" mounted in a boat, used to bombard a target during a riverine operation.
Read more about this topic: Bomb Vessels
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)