Quote Originally Posted by Berthier View Post
The cotton bales are a throw back in concept to similar earth filled bundles used for protection on land for centuries. I'm not sure what a cotton bale weighed but the cotton fibres would have formed a lattice network spreading in different directions in the bale allowing the capture of splinters and disspitation of force of projecticles hitting them. Very inventive.
It helped that most cannons were still firing ball ammo -- big, blunt, and relatively slow. Conical shells would have ripped apart a cottonclad in moments (assuming the Union contractors weren't f***ing with the ammo -- the crew of CSS _Alabama_ reported after sinking USS _Hatteras_ that the "dud" shell found in the sternpost was a dud because instead of being filled with black powder, it was filled with black-painted *sand*...).