Russian Naval Artillery Exercise in the 18th Century: Functioning, Borrowings, and Innovations

The article is devoted to the issue of the development of Russian naval artillery exercise in the 18th century. The author discovered previously unknown lists of command sequences with their descriptions related to the Russian naval artillery exercise. The earliest of them (conventionally referred to as the Old Exercise) was in use from 1718 to the end of the 1740s, and was later replaced by the exercise of Lehman. A new version of this exercise, compiled by N. Kurganov, was published in 1774. All these exercises have minor differences, which can be explained by different approaches of their authors to recording information rather than the development of the gun maintenance process. Gaps in the texts of one or another exercise should be mostly interpreted as omissions of the information that was obvious to the authors rather than an indication of the absence of the corresponding phenomenon. The analysis of the Russian naval artillery exercise makes it necessary to raise the question about the process of formalizing scientific and technical knowledge, when at the first stage it was transferred orally from a teacher (a commander) to a student (a subordinate). The second stage was connected with various kinds of handwritten collections and manuals, examples of which are the exercises of the mid-18th century. The third stage saw the appearance of printed textbooks, such as the “Marine Science” by Kurganov. Finally, at the fourth stage, a normative act in the form of an instruction or a manual was prepared (however, this stage of development of the Russian naval artillery exercise went beyond the 18th century).

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