Curses, they found my booty, argh!
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Heck, cast iron frying pans were probably fired out of cannons with a large enough bore. This rates a duh from me and directed at the author. Nothing more than run of the mill, homemade grape shot.
geeze...
Blackbeard was NOT the only boat captain, pirate or not, to utilize such ammo methods...... =.=
The British Navy really knew how to properly load an anti-personnel round in a cannon...
At the battle of Trafalgar, the largest ships carried a pair of “smashers” in the bow; “Carronades” made by the Caron Company in Britain. They fired a 64 pound solid iron shot (that’s a bit over 10” in diameter...) with a cask of 500 musket balls rammed on top. Consider that a standard British musket ball weight right around 1 ounce and was 3/4” in diameter.
The smashers were very effective at clearing entire boarding parties, groups of snipers out of the rigging of enemy ships, or just ridding enemy ships of their rigging entirely. One well aimed smasher shot was perfectly capable of cutting the mainmast of a 80 gun vessel clean in two, sending the entire mass of sails, ropes, stays, deadeyes and blocks crashing down on the heads of the guncrews. When fired against a boarding party it left little but a spray of blood and raw meat.
Even the main 32 pound and 24 pound guns all fired canister, which was essentially a tin can filled with musket balls that disintegrated in the muzzle blast. You blew a great bloody hole straight through the wooden side of the enemy, then fired in canister rounds to bounce around inside the gun deck like BBs in a tin can and wreak as much havoc as possible. They also used to fire treble shotted cannon on a reduced powder charge so the 3 solid shot would ricochet around inside the enemy gundeck.
Pirates were ruthless, but the professional Navies of the world at that time were very bit as ruthless if not outright bloodthirsty...and they had to be in order to survive. British gun crews were the best in the world because they were the best trained and could get off three shots in five minutes, regularly, which was something the French and Spanish Navies could not do...
Naval trivia...
