Joe Bemier wrote:
On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 10:38:15 -0400, "J. Clarke"
wrote:

Jay Pique wrote:

....
I read in a book about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars that the
British did some research in this area and decided to built their warships
in Britain out of oak and pine rather than teak, even though structurally
the teak was superior, because they found that splinter wounds from teak
("splinter" in this case is the aftermath of a cannonball going through the
side of the ship and we might think of it today as "wooden shrapnel")
almost invariably turned septic but oak and pine usually did not.

Of course they never were sophisticated enough to realize that a
cannonball would -most often- bounce off of a teak hull.
....

As someone else already noted, the process of bouncing off can (and
often did) create "splinters" on the other side--essentially the
equivalent of spalling in concrete. Whatever they were, the British
Navy was not unsophisticated in relation to the state of the art at the
time...