The conclusion seemed incredible, but it was supported by the results of the naval battles.  The Americans showed superiority amounting in some cases to twice the efficiency of their enemies in the use of weapons.  The best French critic of the naval war, Jurien de la Graviere, said:—­“An enormous superiority in the rapidity and precision of their fire can alone explain the difference in the losses sustained by the combatants.”  So far from denying this conclusion, the British press constantly alleged it, and the British officers complained of it.  The discovery caused great surprise, and in both British services much attention was at once directed to improvement in artillery and musketry.  Nothing could exceed the frankness with which Englishmen avowed their inferiority.  According to Sir Francis Head, “gunnery was in naval warfare in the extraordinary state of ignorance we have just described, when our lean children, the American people, taught us, rod in hand, our first lesson in the art.”  The English text-book on Naval Gunnery, written by Major-General Sir Howard Douglas immediately after the peace, devoted more attention to the short American war than to all the battles of Napoleon, and began by admitting that Great Britain had “entered with too great confidence on war with a marine much more expert than that of any of our European enemies.”  The admission appeared “objectionable” even to the author; but he did not add, what was equally true, that it applied as well to the land as to the sea service.

No one questioned the bravery of the British forces, or the ease with which they often routed larger bodies of militia; but the losses they inflicted were rarely as great as those they suffered.  Even at Bladensburg, where they met little resistance, their loss was several times greater than that of the Americans.  At Plattsburg, where the intelligence and quickness of Macdonough and his men alone won the victory, his ships were in effect stationary batteries, and enjoyed the same superiority in gunnery.  “The Saratoga,” said his official report, “had fifty-five round-shot in her hull; the Confiance, one hundred and five.  The enemy’s shot passed principally just over our heads, as there were not twenty whole hammocks in the nettings at the close of the action.”

The greater skill of the Americans was not due to special training; for the British service was better trained in gunnery, as in everything else, than the motley armies and fleets that fought at New Orleans and on the Lakes.  Critics constantly said that every American had learned from his childhood the use of the rifle; but he certainly had not learned to use cannon in shooting birds or hunting deer, and he knew less than the Englishman about the handling of artillery and muskets.  The same intelligence that selected the rifle and the long pivot-gun for favorite weapons was shown in handling the carronade, and every other instrument however clumsy.