Posted on 06/13/2011 8:32:12 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
THE GIST
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
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Curses, they found my booty, argh!
Arrrrrrrghh!
Arrrrrrrghh!
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)
you have one to go...
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...
Today, modern variations are used in aerial bombardment.
yep...canister and grape worked very well with field artillery, especially back in the day when you mustered your men, and marched them directly into the guns of your enemy.
Henry V won at Agincourt because a few thousand of his archers were able to fire so fast that they unleashed an “arrow storm” against the French and wiped out thousands of them in one enormous volley. That lesson was not lost on arms makers, and it wasn’t hard to turn a 6” cannon into a 6” shotgun...
Imagine what one of those canister rounds must have sounded like when it came shrieking at you....
They proved rather effective at the “wheat field” and other locales during the battle at Gettysburg and throughout the Civil War.
yep again, and mainly because during the Civil War both sides regularly tried to pit muskets against cannon with predictable results...
Hank VIIIth laid the foundation by introducing iron (as opposed to the earlier bronze barrels) into naval artillery.
I have a great book in my library that is loaned out at the moment, called “The Arms of Krupp”; and it details the dynasty’s efforts over 400 years to perfect all types of artillery and shells. At one time or another they armed just about everyone who ever fought the British, and during WWI somehow managed to sell the Germans fuses that were made in Britain.....
Fascinating and tortured history....
I’ve seen that book over the years, and read chunks of it in bookstores and whatnot, and yet have *never* picked up a copy (it’s a big ‘un). I read the section about the Paris Guns of WWI, that was fascinating.
As you no doubt know, Gerald Bull wound up tracking down the secrets of those guns (in WWII the Germans were building the London Guns, burrowed into the cliffs along the Channel, but those operated on somewhat different ideas, and weren’t mobile like the Paris Guns) and publishing a limited edition book about ‘em. He also by that time had used some of those secrets in his project (which was successful) to fire shells out of a cannon into space.
Remarkable that all that started from a family that was good at making suits of armor.
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