You just made yourself a target, right?

There's one guy there.

It's relatively easy to defend against.

Just shoot him.

Hi, my name is Evan Wilson.

I'm a professor at the US Naval War College,

and I'm an expert in 18th-century naval warfare.

Today I'll be looking at naval warfare scenes in movies

and judging how real they are.

So, if you're desperate

and you're being chased by someone

who you know is stronger than you,

you would throw things overboard

if you're trying to speed up.

But the thing that's really going to lighten the ship

is throwing the guns overboard.

I mean, that's the fastest way to lighten it.

A 32-pound cannon or something like that

weighs 7,000 pounds.

What they're throwing overboard is like --

a single cannonball isn't going to make

any difference in the speed of your ship.

This is a maneuver that's called club hauling.

You drop an anchor off the side

in an attempt to rapidly turn the ship

in another direction.

It did happen, but you did it in an emergency,

when you were trying to extricate your ship

from a very dangerous situation,

rather than as a tactic in battle usually.

You could surprise the Black Pearl,

but it's going to take many minutes

for this maneuver to happen.

I mean, it is a surprise, 'cause it's really dumb.

So, that's chain shot.

That's a real thing.

It's either an antipersonnel thing,

'cause it's going to spin,

or you fire it at the rigging

in the hopes of cutting ropes as it spins through.

I'd be surprised if you had a one-shot thing

that brings the mast down like that.

A good naval gun crew that's got a lot of men on it

can load and fire a cannon in a minute,

but you probably couldn't sustain that for very long.

It looks like there are, like, eight people on this ship,

like I said, so, you know, they could fire one gun.

But not all of them. You need a lot of men.

It's a great way to make yourself a target.

Probably much more likely to end up in between the ships,

which is a great way to get crushed to death.

It's very cinematic, it's very evocative,

and it looks like sort of a Tarzan-esque thing, I get that,

but you're asking for trouble.

And I think when people are firing at you,

doing that is not smart.

One of the things you don't see here

is that it's actually really hard

to keep two ships right next to each other.

We saw these ships moving in opposite directions.

Something would have needed to have happened

to keep them near each other.

Right now this is just, very conveniently,

I guess they've anchored next to each other

so that they can duke it out.

Like, in the "Pirates" universe, this is a 10 out of 10.

It's about as accurate as they ever get.

In reality, it's like a,

I don't know, 4 out of 10.

French officer: This is your last warning! Stop now!

They showed a couple shots there

of the crowded deck of what we know is a British frigate.

That's much more accurate.

I mean, these ships are going to be crawling with men.

Jack: Fire! [cannons boom]

So, that's a pretty risky strategy,

to try to knock down the mainmast of the enemy ship,

because masts are hard to hit.

But firing into the rigging was a real tactic,

because the masts are held up by the rigging.

So the reason you'd want to knock the enemy mast down

is to disable his ship.

And then he couldn't chase you anymore,

and then you could just leave.

Often the British practiced firing hard and low

into enemy hulls, into the enemy ship,

with the idea of killing men.

Not to sink the ship.

It's really hard to sink a wooden ship. Wood floats.

Instead, what you're doing is

you're trying to kill the crew.

The knock-on effect of that is that

you can either board them and take them,

or they'll be so disabled and so damaged

that they will surrender to you

and then you can go take possession.

Officer: Put out the boarding plank!

Those are ropes that they're throwing over

to try to get the ships to stay together,

to solve that problem of the ships moving apart.

It's really hard to get two ships

to actually get close enough together to board.

Ships have something called a tumblehome.

The hull is shaped so that

the sides aren't straight up and down.

The sides actually turn in a little bit.

Which means that when two ships are next to each other,

they both have tumblehomes that are going this way,

which means that to cross from one deck to the other

is actually a long way.

The challenge of actually getting two ships

next to each other to board them is real.

They do a good job in this movie

of showing you that there are different ways

that you can go about doing it.

I mean, they got almost everything right.

This is a 10 out of 10.

[Euron yells] [cables creak]

[bowsprit thuds]

That's supposed to be sort of the bowsprit.

That's the mast that sticks out the front of the ship.

That's really essential

to hold up most of the rigging of a ship.

If you were to put elaborate metal claws on the front of it,

you'd, first of all,

probably not be able to sail the ship very well;

secondly, it'd be very heavy on the front of your ship

and cause your ship to go like this.

You can run your ship into the other ship

and then board it from there.

But you do that by just clambering over your own bowsprit.

You don't do it by staging an elaborate entrance in which,

once again, just like with the Tarzan rope thing,

you just made yourself a target, right?

I mean, they stand there shocked that it's Euron,

but, like, just shoot him.

Flaming arrows?

I would say no, that's not something that would work.

Mainly because to make a flaming arrow work,

you probably have to light it on your own ship,

and fire is by far the biggest threat to ships.

Wood, canvas, pitch, tar, this stuff is really flammable.

Firing flaming arrows at someone else's ship

is much more likely to set your own ship on fire

than to set the other guy's ship on fire.

The fact that they correctly identify

that one of the greatest fears for a fleet would be fire

and that would be the thing that would make Euron scary

I think is accurate.

The two ships are about to be on fire.

That would be very bad.

That would be catastrophic.

You would be much more concerned about the fire

than about whatever the enemy's doing.

Would you keep fighting in a storm?

The answer is, it would affect tactics,

but it wouldn't necessarily keep you from fighting.

There's a famous example of two British frigates

chasing a much larger French ship in 1797.

And normally, if the weather had been calm,

the two frigates probably would have run away

from the bigger French ship.

But because of the storm was so bad,

the French ship couldn't open its lower gunports,

because the water would've come in too low, right?

So the French ship was basically

half as powerful as it would've been.

I don't feel like I need to explain that,

but I can, if you want.

What's the name of the carnival ride?

That's what -- they clearly saw that at a carnival

and they were like, "Let's make that happen."

The guy swings like Tarzan, comes around,

fires a gun, and then gets shot in the face.

Because of course he would.

'Cause you see a guy swinging, and you're like,

"I'm gonna shoot you now."

Boarding is risky, right?

When you board another ship,

you need to be pretty confident

that you are superior to the enemy that you're boarding.

Because if you board an enemy ship and it goes poorly,

then you might lose your own ship.

Whereas if you hadn't bothered

to board them in the first place,

you probably wouldn't get captured.

And you'd be much more likely

to just obliterate them at a distance,

and then once they surrender, take over the ship and say,

"Well, that was better."

A lot of movies have boarding in them

because it's very cinematic

and it's a lot more interesting than watching two ships

just fire at each other for a long time.

That's a 1.

War at sea is not a carnival ride.

That's just ...

Look at the way that the wind

is blowing the sails of the British ship from behind

and the sails of the other ship from that direction.

I mean, that's a really good illustration of,

the wind doesn't work like that.

The wind has been disengaged from this scene

so that these ships can turn however they like.

A lot of the times in the age of sail clips

that we've been seeing,

they're turning the ship's wheel kind of like

you're just sort of spinning it,

like, "Ah, just gonna throw it this way and spin it."

Usually it took two guys.

It would take two people there to really work the wheel.

'Cause you're turning a really large piece of wood in water.

So you turn the wheel, and that that moves ropes

that are connected to the tiller

that are connected to the rudder,

and the rudder does steer the ship.

So you do need to spin the wheel,

but often these ships are turning on a dime

with nothing happening in the sails,

and you're expected to believe that that's how it worked.

So, you would turn the wheel to do that,

but you'd also do 1,000 other things,

and the wind would have to be just right,

in the right place, and it would take a while.

These ships are passing each other very quickly.

I mean, the combined speed there is, like, I don't know,

15 miles an hour.

The number of seconds you'd probably have

in which the enemy ship

was in just the right position to fire on it

would be very few.

And so you'd end up with them just,

you know, you'd do a little bit of damage,

and then the ship would just sail on.

You could double up on an enemy ship like that,

and there are famous examples of it.

At the Battle of the Nile in 1798,

the British do this to the French.

It's a great way to do a lot of damage,

'cause it forces the enemy to fire on both sides,

to figure out which way to concentrate.

They do a good job actually here of showing the splinters.

And the one realistic thing about this clip is that

the air gets filled with splinters,