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In the Age Of Sail , a gunboat was usually a small undecked vessel carrying a single Smoothbore Cannon in the bow. A gunboat could carry one or two masts or be oar-powered only, but the single-masted version of about 50 ft length was most typical. Some types of gunboats carried two cannons, or else mounted a number of Swivel Gun s on the railings. The advantages of this type of gunboat were that since it only carried a single cannon, that cannon could be quite heavy -- for instance a 32-pounder -- and that the boat could be maneuvered in shallow or restricted waters, where sailing was difficult for larger ships. A single hit from a Frigate would demolish a gunboat, but a frigate facing a half-dozen gunboats in an estuary would likely be seriously damaged before it could manage to sink all of them. Gunboats were also easy and quick to build; the combatants in the 1776 Battle Of Valcour Island on New York 's Lake Champlain were mostly gunboats built on the spot. All navies of the sailing era kept a number of gunboats on hand. Gunboats were a key part of the French plans to invade Britain in 1804, and were heavily used by Denmark-Norway . Between 1803 and 1812 , the US Navy had a policy of basing the naval forces on coastal gunboats, and experimented with a variety of designs, but they were nearly useless in the War Of 1812 , and went back to being special-purpose vessels. , February, 1862.]] The term experienced a revival in the American Civil War , and was commonly used for armed Sidewheel Steamer s, which frequently mounted a dozen guns or more, sometimes of rather large caliber. These were usually armored. In the later 19th Century and early 20th Century , "gunboat" was the common name for smaller armed vessels, often called "patrol gunboats". In the US Navy, these boats had the Hull Classification Symbol "PG"; they usually displaced under 2,000 tons, were about 200 ft long, 10-15 feet draft and sometimes much less, and mounted several guns of caliber up to 5-6 inches. An important characteristic of these was the ability to operate in rivers, enabling them to reach inland targets in a way not otherwise possible before the development of Aircraft . In this period, gunboats were used by the naval powers for police actions in colonies or weaker countries, for example in China . It is this category of gunboat that inspired the term " Gunboat Diplomacy ". With the addition of torpedoes they became '' Torpedo Gunboat s''. During the Second World War the gunboat was for the Royal Navy a vessel identical to Torpedo Boat s, but equipped with machine guns and larger weapons up to 57 mm in calibre for attacking enemy torpedo boats or small craft - the Motor Gun Boat (MGB). Post- World War II , the terms "motor gunboat" came to be used for smaller vessels, with displacements in the 500-ton range. US river gunboats in the Vietnam War became known as the " Brownwater Navy ". REFERENCE
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