small vessels on some degree of
equality with the line-of-battle ships and large frigates of the
Turks: namely, that of using projectiles more destructive than the
shot of the enemy. These projectiles were hot shot and shells, instead
of the cold round-shot of the Turks. We have already mentioned that
the Karteria was armed with sixty-eight pounders. Of these she mounted
eight; four were carronades of the government pattern, and four were
guns of a new form, cast after a model prepared by Hastings himself.
These guns were seven feet four inches long in the bore, and weighed
fifty-eight hundred-weight. They had the form of carronades in every
thing but the addition of trunnions to mount them like long guns;
these trunnions, however, were, contrary to the usual practice, placed
so that their centre intersected a line through the centre of the bore
of the gun. They were mounted on ten-inch howitzer carriages, which
answered the purpose admirably. The shells used were generally
strapped to wooden bottoms; but they were more than once employed
without any precaution, except that of putting them in the gun with
the fusees towards the muzzle. The hot shot were heated in the engine
fires, and were brought on deck by two men in a machine resembling a
double coal-box, which was easily tilted up at the muzzle of the gun
to be loaded.

Hastings fired about eighteen thousand shells from the Karteria in the
years 1826 and 1827, with a miscellaneous crew composed of Englishmen,
Swedes, and Greeks, and never had a single accident from explosion. As
a very small number of hot shot can be heated at once, and as an iron
ball of eight inches diameter loses its spherical form if kept for any
length of time red hot, this projectile could only be used in
particular circumstances. It happened more than once on board the
Karteria, that shot which had remained for some time in the engine
fires, had so lost their form as not to enter the muzzle of the guns.
With regard to the great danger which is supposed to attend the use of
hot shot on board ships, Hastings thus states his opinion in a "Memoir
on the use of Shells, Hot Shot, and Carcass Shells, from ship
artillery:"[11] "I have continually used hot shot with perfect safety;
my people having become so familiar with them, that they employ them
with as little apprehension as if using cold shot."

We shall now give a regular account of the career of active service in
which Hastings was engaged,