Gunpowder and Ammunition, Their Origin and Progress

Darts.

The iron darts feathered with brass—"garros ferrés et empanés en deux cassez"—which are mentioned in the earliest document relating to Artillery that has been found in France,506 dated 1338, belonged unmistakably to the same family as those used for cross-bows. The brazen feathers were nailed to the shaft, and the missile, which weighed about 7 oz.,507 was wrapped in a leather covering, so as to fit the bore tightly. Experience quickly proved these darts to be quite unsuited for firearms; yet they dragged on a lingering and precarious existence for quite 250 years. In the anonymous Livre de Canonnerie et Artifice de feu, Paris, 1561, the title of the seventy-fourth chapter is: “Pour tirer lances ferrées d’une bombarde, canon ou autre baston à feu de cannonerie.”508 To a return of the powder on board his squadron, dated March 30, 1588, addressed to Government, Sir Francis Drake added a P.S.: “Forgett not the 500 musketts, and at least 1000 arrows”;509 and on the 8th April following the Privy Council ordered him to be supplied with “muskittes, 200; arrowes for the said muskittes with tamkines for eche, 1000.”510

Round Shot.

On the failure of the darts, informal trials were begun everywhere with balls of stone, iron, bronze, and lead, to discover which material was best suited for ordnance.

Stone shot, which had been used in machines for countless centuries, were on trial for cannon in France in 1346;511 and, unless a ballad written about this time refers to machines and not to guns, we employed them at the siege of Calais the same year:—

Stone shot were in use in Italy in 1364,513 and in 1378 Richard II. ordered 600 stones to be bought for the cannon in the castle of Brest.514 They were employed more or less in England and elsewhere until the Great Rebellion, and possibly even later.

The earliest mention of iron shot, perhaps, is that in the Arderne MSS., say 1350;515 although we should not be justified in inferring from it that they were then in actual use. There were 928 iron shot in the arsenal of Bologna in 1381,516 but iron seems to have been sparingly employed until the time of Charles VIII. of France, 1483-98.517 The only iron projectiles mentioned by (or, we may infer, known to) the authors of the Berlin Firebook, 1400-50,518 and of the Tractatus de Pugnaculis of the same period preserved in the Hof-Bibliothek at Vienna,519 are iron bullets for handguns. When used against troops in wooden buildings, &c., they both recommend that the balls should be heated red-hot Hot (cannon) balls were introduced much later, in 1579, by Stephen Bathory, King of Poland.520 It was a simple matter to discharge hot projectiles from a machine, but a delicate operation to load a gun with them without exploding the charge. In fact, it was impracticable until the thick wet wad had been devised.

It appears from Petrarch’s De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ,521 which must have been written in or before 1344, that bronze shot—glandes æneas—were then in use among the Italians; and Valturio mentions bronze shells—pilæ æneæ—in his work, which, although not published until 1472, was already written in 1463.522

A document, dated 29th April 1345, proves that the French were employing lead shot at this time;523 and the accounts of Robert de Mildenhale, Keeper of Edward III.’s Wardrobe, show that we sent to Calais on the 1st and 2nd September 1346, 73 large leaden shot, 31 small shot, and 6 pieces of lead.524 Finally, the accounts of John de Sleaford, Clerk of the King’s Privy Wardrobe, prove that in 1372-74 workmen were employed in the Tower in making leaden “pelottes” for guns.525

In a battle at Taro, 1491, the Venetians are said to have fired upon the French with shot of all three metals—iron, bronze, and lead.526

These trials naturally resulted in the general, but by no means exclusive, adoption of stone as the best material for round shot; because it was found that not only the use of metal balls was considerably more costly than that of stone, but that the heavier charges of powder necessitated by metal shot exerted a destructive effect upon the feeble cannon.

The respective prices per lb. of iron,527 gun-metal,528 and lead529 in the second half of the fourteenth century were .856, 2.44, and .627 pennies, fourteenth century money. Multiplying by 10, to get their approximate prices in our money, we obtain:—

TABLE IX.

Comparative Prices of Metals, 1375 and 1865.

It will be noticed that the price of bronze, which had been brought to perfection by the ancients, and whose manufacture was independent of modern appliances, only fell to half its old price in five centuries; that the price of lead, which had some dependence on these appliances, fell to a little over one-third; while the price of iron, whose progress depended essentially upon the use of coal, scientific furnaces, &c., fell to between one-fifth to one-ninth.

The weights of (wrought) iron,530 bronze,531 and lead balls of 4” diameter are respectively 9.3, 10.18, and 13.8 lbs., and Master Gunner Nye informs us that the weight of a stone ball of this diameter was 3.375 lbs.532 Therefore the respective prices of the iron, bronze, and lead balls were 7.96, 26.468, and 8.65 pence, exclusive of the cost of manufacture; while the price of the material of the stone ball was much less than a farthing.533 Again, for powder at 13.664d. per lb.,534 and charges one-ninth the weight of the shot, the prices of the charges for the stone, iron, bronze, and lead balls are respectively 5.12, 14.07, 15.44, and 20.496 pence. We can therefore form an estimate of the relative cost of one round with balls of the four materials.

TABLE X.

Comparative Cost of One Round, 4.25″ gun; stone, iron, bronze, and lead balls.

These figures do not profess to give the absolute price of one round, but they represent pretty accurately the relative cost of a round with the different projectiles.

The pressures per square inch exerted upon the bore of a gun are directly proportional to the weight of the charges used, and these charges were directly proportional to the weights of the projectiles used. We have therefore the following comparative pressures:—

TABLE XI

Numbers proportional to the pressures per square inch on the bore of a 4.25″ gun when fired with shot of different materials.

Table X. shows that the cost per round with stone was much less than with metal shot, while Table XI. shows how great was the disparity between the pressures on the bore in the two cases, which, as the calibre (and therefore the absolute pressure) increased, became a serious matter. With the very small, early guns, the greater cost and heavier strain may not have been sensibly felt. The extra cost in their case was not very considerable, and the increased pressure may not have been even suspected until guns began to burst.535 But that these disadvantages made themselves unmistakably felt when the guns grew larger is proved beyond a doubt by the fact that “great stone shot and great cannon were introduced together.”536 Leaden bullets were retained for hand-guns, because it was comparatively easy to strengthen them, and the metal, although dearer per bullet than iron, was much easier to manipulate. Iron shot were doubtless used as a general rule for breaching purposes, for which stone shot were ill adapted, owing to their lightness and liability to break up. We even hear from time to time of the use of bronze and lead cannon balls.

Case.

There were two ways, in early times, of firing a volley of small shot at troops. The first consisted in mounting a number of small bombards on one carriage and firing them all, or a certain number of them, together. Gattaro speaks of 144 bombards mounted on the same bed, and so arranged as to fire thirty-six at a time.537 The whole apparatus was called a ribaudequin, barricade, orgue, orgelgeschütz, &c.; the two latter names being given to it because it resembled “organ-pipes placed upon a broad carriage.”538 By the second method the bullets required for the volley were put for convenience in a cartridge case or canister, and fired from a large bombard. The bullets, according to General Köhler, were simply pebbles of flint.539 During the Indian Mutiny, I forget where, a volley of “Pyramid” or “Pool” balls was fired by the mutineers from a clubhouse upon our storming party with deadly effect.

Essenwein gives plates of an orgue, dated 1390-1400, and of a gun firing case dated 1410.540 Case was used at the siege of Belgrade, 1439,541 and at the siege of Scutari, 1478.542 Orgues were used as late as the Great Rebellion. At the battle of Copredy Bridge, 1644, the Cavaliers took “two baricadoes of wood, which were drawn upon wheels, and in each seven small brass and leather cannon, charged with case.”543

Shrapnel.

Isolated attempts to fire shell from guns (as distinguished from howitzers and mortars) had been made from time to time in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but they proved, one and all of them, abortive. The first methodical and successful shell-fire from guns was carried on during the siege of Gibraltar, 1779-83, at the suggestion of an English Infantry officer.

The distance from our nearest batteries to the Spanish lines when the siege began was 1700 to 2000 yards,544 and at this range our fire was ineffective. Many of the mortar shell burst at the muzzle from the heavy charges required for these long ranges, a gunner losing his life on one occasion from this cause.545 The shell that withstood the shock flew wildly; the fuzes were “in general faulty”;546 many good shell were smothered in the sand of which the Spanish works were constructed; those that burst produced but little effect;547 and round shot were of no avail against sandbanks twenty-two feet high. As fire against the Spanish works was useless, it only remained to direct it on the working parties. Against them our mortar fire was as ineffective as against the works, and what was to be looked for from guns provided only with round shot and case? Case would not carry one-sixth of the range, and round shot against handfuls of men, scattered here and there, were as worthless as shell. The difficulty was still unsolved when Captain Mercier, 39th Regiment, suggested firing the 5.5-inch shell of the royal mortars, with short fuzes, from the 24-pounder guns which had the same calibre as the mortars, 5.8-inch. A trial was made on the 25th September 1779 with (I believe) the “Rock gun,” which was a 24-pounder; the “calculated fuzes,”548 it was found, “often burst (the shell) over the heads of the working parties,”549 and Merciers brilliant proposal was officially adopted.

When the siege was over, and men had time to think, it became clear enough that excellent as was Captain Mercier’s plan as a makeshift during the stress and strain of a siege, it had its weak points. The strong charge necessary to burst the common shell tended to scatter the fragments here and there in all directions, and the fragments were few in number. Experiments were carried on in Prussia in 1761 to determine the bursting charges which broke (mortar and howitzer) shell into the greatest number of pieces. It was found that royal mortar shell (maximum bursting charge, 1 lb. 2 oz.) broke into eight pieces, with a bursting charge of 1 lb., and into nineteen pieces with a bursting charge of 14 oz., these figures being the means of six trials.550

In any case, the siege of Gibraltar proved beyond denial that we possessed no recognised and effective projectile against troops in open order beyond the range of case. To fill the void thus disclosed in our ammunition, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel, R.A., conceived the idea in 1784551 of a gun-projectile, which he called “spherical case.” As he was quartered in Newfoundland during the siege, it is improbable that he was aware at this time of Capt. Mercier’s plan. At all events he did not follow it, the principle of his invention being radically different from that of common shell. The bursting charge of the latter was a maximum, the bursting charge of the former was a minimum; the fuze of the latter was bored long, the fuze of the former was bored short; the fragments of common shell were projected by the bursting charge of the shell, the fragments of the shrapnel by the charge of the gun from which it was fired.

This absolutely new and original invention at first met the fate of many other new inventions—it was long disregarded.552 Not until 1803, when England was in grave danger, did the authorities bestir themselves about it: a trial of Shrapnel’s shell was then ordered, and the Ordnance Committee reported in their favour.553 How great an invention these shell were may be measured by their inextinguishable vitality: they outlived official apathy; they overcame endless objections; they survived countless modifications; they adapted themselves to rifled guns; and at the present moment they are the best projectiles available against troops in open order beyond the range of case.

The originality of the Shrapnel shell did not, of course, remain unchallenged. Certain officers in France, Germany, and Belgium discovered that the invention was an old one, and that Master Gunner Samuel Zimmermann had employed Shrapnel no later than 1573. His MS., it may be observed, had been removed from Heidelberg to Rome during the Thirty Years’ War; was sent back to Heidelberg in 1816; and was not discovered by Hauptmann Toll until 1852, just ten years after Shrapnel’s death.554

Zimmermann’s projectile was not constructed on Shrapnel’s principles.

It consisted of a leaden cylinder, with a time fuze fixed in the end placed next to the charge of the gun. The back half of the cylinder was filled with strong (röschem) powder; the front half with bullets; and the missile was intended to act a few hundred paces (etlich hundert schrytt) beyond the ordinary range of case, say, at 500-600 yards. A very small bursting charge would have sufficed to burst open a leaden case: why, then, did the Master Gunner use the maximum charge which was possible without unduly diminishing the number of bullets—a charge, too, of specially strong powder? Because he intended the bursting charge not only to open the case, but to accelerate the velocity of the bullets—he could have had no other conceivable reason.

Whatever may have been the merits of this missile, it was certainly not a Shrapnel, as will be seen clearly by placing the details of construction of the two projectiles side by side.

The annals of Artillery will be ransacked in vain for Shrapnel shell before the nineteenth century, because the successful application of Shrapnel’s principle was impossible until an extremely accurate time fuze had been constructed, and no nation possessed a really good fuze before that epoch558—nor in truth until long afterwards. The results of the Shrapnel practice in 1819,559 after Shrapnel and many others had devoted their best energies to the improvement of time fuzes for sixteen years, show how defective they still were. But although the want of a sufficiently accurate fuze made the Shrapnel system a practical impossibility before the nineteenth century, a man above his fellows might have dreamt dreams of distant case fire ages before.

That Zimmermann was groping about blindly in search of the projectile Shrapnel found in 1784, is proved beyond a doubt by the question which the Feuerwerker puts to the Büchsenmeister: “Cannot a case shot be made which will leave the bore whole and burst at a few hundred paces’ distance?”560 But Zimmermann failed in his search: what he sought did not lie on the road that he took. Like Fronsperger,561 he placed his fuze next the charge, in consequence of which (as the old man frankly confesses) most of his cylinders burst in the bore: “Gemainlich im Stückh angegangen und zersprungen.” Boillot, a quarter of a century later, had a better knowledge of gunnery: “adviserez que le trou d’icelle (the fuze-hole) soit du costé de la bouche dudit mortier.”562 Zimmermann filled the front half of his cylinder with bullets and the rear half with strong powder, obviously assuming the stability of the missile in its flight. Now Prof. Greenhill has given us a table showing the minimum twist at the muzzle requisite to give stability of rotation to elongated projectiles. If a common shell’s length be 3 calibres, it requires a twist of 1 turn in 38.45 calibres; if its length be 4 calibres it requires a twist of 1 turn in 27.6 calibres; and so on.563 How far, then, would Zimmermann’s ill-balanced, smooth-bore cylinder have travelled before it toppled over, with the certain result that, when it did, the large bursting charge would blow the bullets any way but the right way?

Zimmermann’s projectile failed, and his sole merit consists in vaguely foreshadowing the Shrapnel, just as Roger Bacon dimly foresaw balloons and ships driven by machinery—“Marine engines can be constructed and worked by one man which will propel the largest vessels quicker than a ship’s crew of oarsmen.... Flying machines can also be made.”564 His cylinder no more establishes Zimmermann’s claim to be the inventor, or even the suggester, of Shrapnel shell, than Bourne’s method of shooting “three times in a peece at one lading of her”565 entitles him to be regarded as the inventor of quick-firing guns.

We should have been spared much unprofitable controversy had foreign critics thought fit to make themselves acquainted with the nature and properties of Shrapnel’s Spherical Case before discussing its history. Its history is simple. It was made in England, the invention of an English Artillery officer who owed nothing to earlier gunners in Germany or anywhere else.

CHAPTER XIV

IGNEOUS PROJECTILES

Hot Shot.

The Britons set fire to the Roman Camp during Cæsar’s second invasion, 54 B.C., by discharging hot balls of clay among the tents.566 At the attack on Placentia, A.D. 69, igneous missiles were employed (glandes et missilem ignem), and probably destroyed the amphitheatre.567 As before mentioned, hot shot (for cannon) were invented by the Polish king, Stephen Bathory, in 1579.568 Their greatest triumph was the destruction of d’Arçon’s floating batteries and a great part of the Spanish fleet at Gibraltar, 13th September 1782.

Incendiary Fireballs.

The gunners of old encountered great difficulties in their endeavours to introduce igneous projectiles. Their use in the early guns was not absolutely impossible, but it would have been fruitless; for to prove effective an igneous projectile, whether incendiary or explosive, must contain a considerable mass of combustible matter, and this condition could not be fulfilled with guns of very small calibre. When the calibre had greatly increased, during the last quarter of the fourteenth century, any attempt to employ such igneous projectiles as were in use with the machines must have ended in failure. The action of the machines was similar to that of a sling, and the shells (or envelopes) of their incendiary missiles were made just strong enough to resist the pressure to which they were subjected on discharge, although not strong enough to bear the shock of impact with the object they struck. This broke them up and scattered their blazing contents about. Such projectiles were evidently unfit for use in cannon; for the explosion of the charge would inevitably break them up in the bore, and their viscous contents would travel but a very short way. Owing to these difficulties the machines held their ground to the middle of the fifteenth century, if not longer, and the igneous projectiles ultimately constructed for cannon were developments of the hand-grenade.

In Fig. 31 of the plate from the MS. of Kyeser’s “Bellifortis,” 1405, given by Herr von Romocki (i. 169), we are shown a projectile which unquestionably belongs to the same family as the tonneau which terrified Joinville and his companions;569 but this barrel could have only been discharged from a machine. Whether Figs. 26 and 28 of the same plate were thrown by hand or machine depended on their size, which we do not know. From their construction, with a mere covering of cloth or cordage, we may safely conclude that they were not gun-projectiles.

We are given a detailed account of fireballs in the German Firebook, 1400-50, belonging to the Royal Library, Berlin, MS. Germ. qu. 1018. Missiles are there described which consisted of an interior ball of gunpowder kneaded with spirits of wine, smeared over with thick incendiary matter, rolled tightly in a cover of cotton steeped in the same mixture, and secured by two metal bands at right angles to each other. They could be either thrown by hand or fired from a bombard. In the latter case a hole was bored through the ball and the plug which was used in bombards to close the end of the powder-chamber next the projectile, in order to admit the flame into the interior of the ball. The success of the missile, it was thought, depended on the hole through the ball being exactly opposite the hole through the plug, a condition which could be only fulfilled in a breechloading bombard. The inventor believed that the ball would explode, for he warns the gunner to throw it before the flame reaches the composition, lest it “blow his head off.”570 It is obvious, however, that the gunner’s head was quite safe, although he might burn his fingers, when using these incendiary toys which are unknown to military history. The incendiary projectiles actually used in the fifteenth century were comparatively simple and of a different nature. Take, for instance, the incendiary cannon-projectile used at the siege of Weissenburg in 1469, just six years after Valturio had presented his book to the Sultan Mahomed II.571 It consisted of a stone ball, considerably smaller than the bore of the gun, which was smeared over with thick incendiary matter and wrapped in a cloth soaked in the same mixture. This process was continued until the ball was the proper size for the bore.572 Other incendiary missiles were tried,573 but none of them, so far as I am aware, had anything in common with the unpractical projectile proposed in the Berlin Firebook.

Incendiary Shell.

A further step is taken in a later edition of the Firebook just quoted, but of the same period,574 1400-50. A quill full of incendiary matter is directed to be inserted in the hole through the ball above described, and the whole was enclosed in an envelope or shell of earthenware or iron. An earthenware ball could of course only be thrown by hand: an iron ball would be fired in general from a bombard. The metal shell was formed of two hemispheres of iron fastened together by bands, with a small hole to admit the flame to the quill. A similar envelope, of bronze, is suggested by

Valturio in his De Re Militari, 1463, p. 267;575 but in this case the shell is filled with powder, which in all probability was driven in and compressed as tightly as possible with a mallet and drift.576 The German writer undoubtedly believed that his shell would burst, for he uses such phrases as “chugel dye da springt” and “zerspringt und zerslecht alls umb.” Neither his shell or Valturio’s would have exploded except under the most exceptional circumstances.

The weakness of the shell leads Herr von Romocki to suppose that Valturio’s plate is wrong or grievously exaggerated. I see no grounds for this suspicion: the shell was purposely made weak, so that it might break into two pieces on impact and leave the incendiary charge free to do its work. The missile belonged to the same family as the incendiary projectiles thrown into Roveredo by the Swiss in 1487.577 There the shell was filled with pitch and rosin: Valturio’s shell was charged with powder, but it was probably compressed tightly into the interior of the shell, and powder, especially serpentine powder, will not explode under such circumstances. When experimenting with gunpowder at New York, Doremus and Budd subjected good modern powder to such hydraulic pressure as to compress it into a solid block without interstices, and on ignition the mass burned quietly away.578 Valturio’s charge was probably reduced to a state approximating more or less closely to that of the New York powder, and it would have exploded but rarely and occasionally. But the mere fact that the shell was made of bronze is a sufficient proof that it was an incendiary missile. Even had the charge been explosive, a bronze envelope would have been only ripped open by it, not broken into many pieces as iron would have been; a fact which Valturio must have known. Finally, the gunners of the fifteenth century were not in possession of a fuze that would have enabled them to carry on fire with explosive shell. The construction of such a fuze (as will be seen in the section on “Time Fuzes”) was the work of the following century.

The Berlin Firebook does not profess to give us an account of ammunition actually used in the field; it merely describes certain ammunition proposed for use by a fireworker, or inventor, and it adds his honest convictions of the way in which it would act if manufactured. The excerpts given by Herr von Romocki from the Firebook, in so far as they concern the projectile in question, are simply the specification and opinions of an inventor, and there are no grounds for supposing that his missile was ever made or ever tried. If these projectiles had been used with effect in the field, their inventor would surely have been the first to tell us of their success. There is nothing remarkable in the above conclusion: the inventor followed the custom of his age. The value of experiment generally, the absolute necessity for experiment in gunnery, was unknown or altogether underrated in the Middle Ages, and those fireworkers who may have suspected its importance had neither the money nor the opportunity to put their theory into practice. Would Sextus Julius Africanus and Marcus Græcus have bequeathed to us certain preposterous recipes, had they been at the pains and expense of making them and trying them? It was Roger Bacon who wrote: “Experimental science ignores abstract arguments; because, strong though they may be, their conclusions are not perfectly certain until verified by experiment.... In these studies experiment alone, not abstract reasoning, leads to certain conclusions.”579 Yet even he, with his “everlasting lamps,” has not quite escaped the infection of the prevailing fashion: he never tried these lamps. Bourne has left us a whole book of “Inventions and Devices,” and at least one half of Boillot’s book is occupied by similar inventions; but neither of them makes the slightest suggestion that any one of his contrivances was ever made or ever tried. We may, then, discard the wholly unpractical proposal of the Berlin Firebook, and accept Valturio’s as the earliest incendiary cannon-shell of which we have any detailed account.

Carcasses.

Carcasses were invented in 1672 by a gunner in the service of Christopher van Galen, the fighting Prince Bishop of Munster.580 They are mentioned in the London Gazette, 1980/1, 1684. They were originally oblong, in order to contain a large quantity of incendiary matter; but their flight was so erratic that it became necessary to make them spherical. Their thickness was at the same time so much reduced, in order to increase their internal capacity, that a large proportion broke up in the bore. To remedy this defect during the siege of Quebec, 1759, “the interval between the powder and the carcass was filled with turf,” an arrangement which “produced every desired effect.”581

Explosive Fireballs.

Explosive fireballs were simply hand-grenades, which, according to the classification of ammunition adopted here, have been already noticed, p. 169.

Explosive Shell.

The step from Valturio’s shell to common shell may seem to us now to have been a short and an easy one, yet it took nearly a century to make it; the obstacle that barred the way being neither the envelope nor the bursting charge, but the fuze.

It is impossible to say exactly when, where, or by whom explosive shell were first employed. The want of them had been long felt everywhere, and numberless attempts to manufacture them were made. They may, therefore, have come into being independently in several countries about the same period; a supposition which receives considerable support from the conflicting claims which have been set up, quite honestly no doubt, to their first employment.

We have sound evidence of the manufacture of large mortars and shell in England as early as 1543. In this year Bawd and Collet constructed mortars of 11″ to 19″ in calibre, with cast-iron shell “to be stuffed with fireworks or wildfire,” and a match (i.e. fuze) “that the firework might be set on fire for to breake in smal pieces, whereof the smallest piece hitting any man would kill or spoile him.”582 Stow, to whom we owe these facts, began life as a tailor, and was not familiar with the intricacies of Artillery matériel; but it is sufficiently clear that he speaks here of two kinds of projectiles—incendiary shell filled with wildfire, and explosive shell filled with firework. Whether these shell were ever used and, if so, whether their action was successful, there is no evidence to show; but in 1588 took place the sieges of Bergen-op-Zoom and Wachtendonck at which explosive shell were used with much effect, for the first time according to the evidence we at present possess. Reyd, whose Belgarum aliarumque Gentium Annales was published in 1600, tells us (lib. viii., p. 182) that during the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom “an Italian deserter to the Dutch devoted himself to the art, hitherto unknown, of making hollow balls of iron or stone, which, when filled with a certain composition and ignited, burst into innumerable fragments like grape stones.”583 Father Strada, S.J., in his Hist. de la Guerre des Pays Bas, Brussels, 1739, speaks as follows (iv. 415):—