[Robert A Cook PE]

Oh granted those problems. (Worse was the short time for the guy to make that model of the ship he had only seen once from a distance. ....

Never heard of anybody ever pulling wheels off of the cannons either, but it "could" work, and was a way to aim at the mast. But why not improvise chain shot or bar shot?

But reading M&C now shows me how better the movie script really was! Apparently, it (the movie) merged one of the early books (he was captain on a sloop in the Med) with a later book (when he was chasing the bigger Frenchman off Chile.)

[John H K]

The later book he's essentially chasing the U.S.S. Essex (under a different name) off South America, actually.

Having talked with some friends who literally know more about warfare in the period than anyone on earth, I think, they couldn't come up with an example of taking the wheels off the guns.

But, in the grand scheme of historical unreality in war films, it did OK. Didn't do the egregious violence to history that something like, say, The Patriot did. (Oops, I just spoke ill of something associated The Mel, I'm doomed on FR, I guess.)

And some of the stuff that people have complained about actually WAS unrealistic. Yes, 14 year old boys were actually midshipmen ordering 40 year old sailors around :-)

[John H K]

Also the boarding combat was all wrong. You fought to keep the other guys off your ship. Once they were on, you were finished. You didn't hide to ambush them.

But boarding ships has been done all wrong forever in movies, particularly pirate movies and all the swinging from ropes nonsense:-). Boarding combat was much rarer overall than people think, too.