Note 96 — Chapter VI · THE TRUCK CARRIAGE

In the margin of the copy of The Art of Gunnery, Thos. Smith, A.D. 1600, in the library of the R.U.S.I. in Whitehall, is the following note, written in legible seventeenth-century script: “Some make a device to discharge at a distance by a long string, fixed to a device like a cock for a gun with a flint or like a musket cock with a match.”

In the same work are instructions as to firing in a wind, when the train of powder might be blown from the vent before the linstock could be applied. The gunner was to form a clay rampart, a sort of tinker’s dam, on the metal of the piece on the windward side of the touch-hole.