Chapter IV · FAMOUS AND ANCIENT CANNON.

History shows us that in past ages there has ever and anon been in most countries a fancy for forging or casting ponderous cannon, even as there has been often in a spirit of rivalry, a fancy for building great ships; and the result has very generally been that, in both instances, there has been a mistake; for the great ships have been almost invariably cast away, and the great guns have proved useless, even for battery purpose; and it is not improbable that such may be the result eventually with our "Woolwich Infants" and our eighty-one ton guns.

Though cannon are mentioned as having been used in a sea fight between a Moorish King of Seville and a King of Tunis in the 13th century, they first marked the inauguration of a new era in war when Edward III. of England brought with him to the field of Cressi in 1346, five small pieces, made by whom is quite unknown; but there can be little doubt that they were constructed in the mode of all early cannon, of iron bars fitted together, hooped with rings and charged with stone shot—not iron balls.

Prior to Cressi, however, cannon had undoubtedly been used in sieges. In 1338 there was one used at Cambrai from which cross-bows were discharged, and several small guns of the same kind were used in the following year at the investment of Quesnoy; again at the siege of the then Moorish town of Algesiras, near Gibraltar, in 1342; and old annals tell us of the overwhelming terror their explosion excited among the enemy.

Iron balls were first cast in the reign of Louis XI. in 1461; but stone were in common use for a hundred years later.

As time went on, cannon, though primitively formed as described, increased in size that prodigious balls might be expelled from them against walled places, in imitation of the ancient machine which they had superseded; thus they soon became of enormous bore, until they attained the dignity of bombardes, like Mons Meg in Edinburgh Castle; but the difficulty of managing these pieces, and the growing knowledge that iron shot of much less weight could be impelled further by the use of better powder, gradually introduced the cast metal cannon used at the present day.

The five little cannon used at Cressi, to the wonder of the French who had none, were doubtless the same that Edward used at the siege of Calais in the following year.

In 1366 the Venetians, when besieging a town now named Chioggia in Lombardy, had with them two small pieces of artillery having leaden balls, worked by Germans, according to Le Blond's "Elements of War," dedicated to Louis of Lorraine; and battering guns were used by the Turks against the Christians at Constantinople in 1394; but the great bombardes were at their zenith when, in 1451, Mahomet II. began his march against the same city, with fourteen gigantic guns, which threw stone shot seventy-eight inches in circumference, weighing 800 lbs. In the siege, traces of which remain to this day, the Christians are supposed to have been without cannon, as they omitted to demolish the great bridge of boats which was constructed by the Turks and conduced so much to the reduction of the city.

For more than four centuries the guns of Mahomet II. protected the Dardanelles—the gate of the Eastern Empire; and, as an old traveller relates, that as they were shotted when fired on holidays, land was usually to be had very cheap on the opposite side of the straits.

Though practically these great pieces of artillery have given place to Krupp and other guns, they still remain on their old sites; but cannon of this description can only be discharged with effect when the object passes their line of fire, as they are not mounted on carriages but built into a wall. Some of those at the Dardanelles carry balls 26½ inches in diameter, and lie flat on a paved terrace near the level of the water, where they opened on our fleet in 1808, when Admiral Sir John Duckworth forced the passage of the Straits.

By a granite shot from one of these, when the fleet returned, H.M.S. Royal George had her whole cutwater carried away; by another, the mainmast of the Windsor Castle was cut in two like a fishing-rod; another carried away the wheel of the Repulse, at the same moment killing and wounding twenty-four men, and rendering the ship so unmanageable, that but for the noble seamanship of her crew, she must have gone on shore.

A granite ball burst through the bows of the Active, and rolling aft destroyed all in its career, till it was brought up abreast of the main hatchway; a second tore away the whole barricade of her forecastle and fell into the sea to starboard; a third lodged in the bends abreast of the main-chains, and then tumbled overboard. ("Duckworth's Dispatches," &c.)

Baron de Tott tells us that he had seen one of these guns, which had been cast in the reign of Amurath, fired. Its ball weighed eleven hundredweight, and required a charge of powder amounting to 330 pounds. At the distance of 800 fathoms he saw this enormous globe divide into three pieces, which crossed the strait and rebounded from the rocks opposite.

One of these guns was sent to Woolwich, in exchange for an Armstrong breech-loader, and bears the inscription—

"Help o Allah! Mahomet Khan, the son of Murad!"

Louis XII. of France had a bombarde cast which is said to have thrown a ball of 500 lbs. from the Bastile to Charenton; but the guns of these times were destitute of trunnions, dolphin-rings, or breech-buttons.

Another enormous cannon of Mahomet II. is still to be seen, at Negroponte, used at its capture by him from the Venetians in 1470. It defends the south side of Kastro, and is the most remarkable monument there.

There is now preserved in the Castle of San Juliao da Barra, ten miles from Lisbon, a gun that was captured at the siege of Diu, on the southern coast of Gujirat, in 1546, by a gallant Portugese cavalier, Dom John de Castro, which is destitute of the appliances named, and is of some remarkable metal. It bears upon it a Hindoo inscription, to the effect that it was cast in 1400. It is 20 feet 7 inches long; its external diameter at the centre is 6 feet 3 inches, and it discharges a ball one hundredweight.

In ancient times there was a fondness for bestowing upon these great guns some peculiar and dignified name. Twelve brass cannon cast in 1503 for Louis XII., being all of remarkable size, he named after the greatest peers of France. The Spaniards and Portuguese named them after certain saints; thus, when the Emperor Charles V. departed to attack Tunis, his bombardes were named after the Twelve Apostles.

In the Malaga there is still an 80-pounder of great antiquity named the "Terrible." Two very curious 60-pounders in the arsenal at Bremen are each named "The Messenger of Bad News;" an 80-pounder at Berlin, now in the Royal Arsenal, is named "The Thunderer;" at Milan there is a 70-pounder called the "Pimontelle" (or the little spicer); and another at Bois le Duc is styled Le Diable. A third in the Castle of St. Angelo at Rome, made of the nails which fastened the copper-plates composing the roof of the ancient Pantheon, bears upon it this inscription—

"Ex clavis trabalibus porticus Agrippæ."

Many of the cannon of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were remarkable for their beautiful and ornate character. A decorated Spanish cannon now preserved in the Paris Museum, is a fine example of these florid pieces, which were always cast of brass or mixed metal.

Diego Ufano, in his treatise on Artillery, published in 1614, shows us the metallic mixtures of copper, tin, and brass, and the proportions of these, then used for cast pieces of cannon.

The Russian arsenals are very rich in great and ancient cannon and others of historical interest.

In front of the first arsenal at the Kremlin, are ranged a wonderful memorial of Napoleon's terrible retreat from Moscow, in the shape of no less than 875 pieces of captured ordnance; of these 365 are French, 189 are Austrian, 123 are Prussian, and the remainder bear the royal insignia of Italy, Naples, Bavaria, Saxony, Westphalia, Hanover, Spain, Würtemberg, Holland, and Poland. Many of these (says Sutherland Edwards) are inscribed with pretentious names that contrast strongly with their present humble position, such as the "Invincible," the "Conqueror," the "Eagle," and so forth. In front of the second arsenal is a wonderful collection of colossal cannon, ranged in a long line, with the shortest in the centre; thus their muzzles present a complete arc. The largest of these is a 4800-pounder, weighing, however, only forty tons! It has never been fired, and is only remarkable as a piece of casting.

An inscription on it tells that it was cast by the Russian master-founder named Chokoff, in 1586, by order of the Czar Feodor, who in that year conquered Siberia (the way to which was discovered by the Cossack warrior Jermack), and of whom a clever representation, on horseback, with crown and sceptre, appears close to the muzzle. Beside it are six other large pieces, the smallest of which weighs nearly four tons.—("The Russians at Home.")

About the end of the fifteenth century the following guns were in universal use:—

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the largest cannon generally used in the field were 24-pounders, or others like the culverins of Nancy (18-pounders), so called from being first cast in that city; while the smallest were 6 and 3-pounders.

Mortars were first used to expel red-hot balls and large stones, long ere shells were known. They are believed to have been of German origin, and were used at the siege of Naples by Charles VIII. in 1435; but shells were first thrown out of them at the siege of Wachtendonk in Gueldres, by the Count of Mansfield. Shells were first invented by a citizen of Venloo, who, at a festival in honour of the Duke of Cleves, contrived, unfortunately, by the explosion of them, to reduce nearly the whole city to ashes. Maltus, an English engineer, first taught the French how to use them at the siege of La Motte in 1634. (Le Blond.)

The howitzer differs from the mortar, being mounted on a field carriage, like a gun; the chief difference being that the trunnions of the first are at the end, and of the other in the middle. The invention of the howitzer is subsequent to that of the mortar, as from the latter it originated.

The first man who invented the spiking of artillery was Gaspar Vimercalus of Bremen, who thus nailed up the artillery of Sigismund Malatesta.

Rifled cannon are by no means a modern invention, and can be traced far back into antiquity, as the arquebuse-rayée of the French.

No kind of gun has been more universally known and used all over Europe and America than the carronade, or "smasher," as it was called. Cast at the Carron Works in Scotland (hence their name), they were the invention of General Robert Melville, an officer who served under Lord Rollo of Duncrub, at the capture of Dominica in the West Indies. Peculiarly constructed, and having a chamber for powder like a mortar, they were shorter and lighter than ordinary cannon.

Cast in mighty numbers for more than seventy years at Carron, they were employed by the fighting and mercantile marine of all Europe and America, till the time of the Crimean War. The first of them was presented by the Carron Company to the family of General Melville, with an inscription on the carriage, which records that the guns were cast "for solid, ship, shell or carcase shot, and were first used against the French fleet in 1799."

Mr. Smiles, in his "Industrial Biography," tells us that when cannon came to be employed in war, the vicinity of Sussex to the Cinque Ports gave it an advantage over the iron districts of the north and west of England, and for a long time the iron works of that county had a monopoly in the manufacture of guns. The stone balls were hewn from quarries at Maidstone Heath. An old mortar, which lay on Bridge Green, near Frant, is said to have been the first used in England. The chamber was cast, but the tube consisted of hooped bars.

In the Tower are some old hooped guns of the date of Henry VI. The first cast-iron cannon of English make were made at Buxtead in Sussex, in 1543, by Ralph Hogge, master founder, whose principal assistant was Pierre Baude, a Frenchman. About the same time, Hogge employed Peter Van Collet, a Flemish gunsmith, who, according to Stowe, "caused to be made certain mortar pieces, being at the mouth from eleven to nine inches wide, for the use whereof the said Peter caused to be made certain hollow shot of cast iron, stuffed with fyrwork, whereof the bigger sort has screws of iron to receive a match to carry fire, to break in small pieces the said hollow shot, whereof the smallest piece hitting a man would kill or spoil him."

This is undoubtedly the parent of the explosive shell which has been brought to such terrible perfection in the present day. Many of Baude's brass and iron guns are still preserved in the Tower; and perhaps from his foundry came that very beautiful gun which bears the name of Henry VIII., 1541, and is preserved now at Southampton.

Two old English guns are at present in the ducal castle of Blair, whither they had been brought by the Athole family when Lords of the Isle of Man.

One is inscribed thus:—

"Henricus Octavus; Thomas Scymoure Knighte, Receyvour of the Peel, was Master of the King's Ordynans, when John and Robert Owyn made this pese. Anno dni., 1544."

The other has the legend:—

"Henry, Earle of Derbye, Lord of this Isle of Man, being here in May, 1577; named Dorothe. Henry Halsall, Receyvour of the Peele, bought this pese, 1574."

This was the fourth Earl of Derby, a K.G., and he had named the gun from his mother Dorothy, who was daughter of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

The old brass gun, popularly known as Queen Anne's Pocket Pistol, was once called Queen Elizabeth's, according to Colonel James. It was cast at Utrecht in 1544, and is a 12-pounder, twenty feet long, finely ornamented with figures in bas-relief.

Scotland, which is rich in military and historical antiquities of all kinds, can also boast of several ancient cannon, extant or in her annals.

In 1430, James I. had cast for him in Flanders a cannon of brass, called the Lion of Scotland, bearing this inscription:—

"This," says Balfour in his Annales, "was the first canon or bombard of any strength or bignes, that ever was in Scotland." Among several ancient guns in the armory of the Grants of Grant in Strathspey, is one of singular beauty, covered with figures of men on horseback, and animals of the chase. It is four feet two inches long, and seems to have been a Moyenne or wall piece, and is inscribed:—

"Dominus . Johannes . Grant . Miles . Vicecomes de Invernes . Me fecit . in Germania, 1434."

The most ancient gun made in Britain is undoubtedly that bombarde known as Mons Meg in Edinburgh Castle. An inscription on the new stock, cast at Woolwich in 1835, states that the gun "is believed to have been forged at Mons, in 1486." But this is proved now to have been a gross mistake, an assertion which is utterly without warrant, as an elaborate "History of Galloway" shows from proofs indisputable that it was made by a smith of that county, in 1455, for the service of James II. (then besieging the Castle of Threave), at a place still named Knockcannon. It weighs six tons and a half, is composed of malleable iron bars hooped together, and its balls, which are all of Galloway granite, are twenty-one inches in diameter.

Two of these shots fired from it compelled the castle to surrender in the summer of 1455, and both were found in 1841 amid the ruins—one in the wall, the other in the draw-well; and both lay in a direct line from Knockcannon to the breach in the huge donjon tower. For his work, M'Kim received the forfeited lands of Mollance, pronounced in Scottish parlance, Mowance, and hence the tradition of "Meg" being forged at Mons. In 1497, it accompanied the Scottish army into England in the cause of Perkin Warbeck; to the siege of Dumbarton in 1489, and many other scenes of strife. In 1681, the gun burst, when firing a royal salute for James Duke of Albany, as two of the fractured hoops still show. On these occasions, like the old bombardes of the Dardanelles, it was generally shotted, as the Royal Treasurer's Accounts contain many entries of payments, for "finding and carrying her bullet from Wardie Mure to the Castell."

In 1509—thirty-four years before Ralph Hogge began to cast guns in Sussex—James IV. employed Robert Borthwick, his master gunner, to cast a set of brass ordnance for Edinburgh Castle. Seven of these were named by the king the sisters of Borthwick—being all alike in size and beauty. They were inscribed—-

"Machina sum, Stoto Borthweick Fabricata Roberto."

With ten other brass field-pieces, these guns were all taken by the English at the battle of Flodden, where Borthwick was killed, and the Earl of Surrey, who saw them, asserted that there were none finer in the arsenals of King Henry. Several of these guns were retaken by the Scots from the Earl of Hereford's army in 1544, and were long preserved in the Castle of Edinburgh, on the walls of which, in the siege of 1573, were a number of guns that bore the crowned salamander, the badge of Francis I., and had perhaps been brought from France by the Regent Duke of Chatelherault.

An old cannon named Dundee, which had been used in war by the Viscount of that name, was long preserved in the Castle of Kilchurn; but has now disappeared.

In the heart of British India there was, singular to say, found an antique Scottish cannon, which is now shown in Edinburgh, and the story of which is remarkable. At the siege of Bhurtpore in 1826, among the guns on the ramparts was one of great calibre and destructive power, popularly known among our soldiers by the absurd name of "Sweet-lips," which was taken at the point of the bayonet by H.M. 14th Foot.

Beside it was found a Scottish brass cannon, an 18-pounder, inscribed:—

"Jacobus Menteith me fecit, Edinburgh, Anno Dom., 1642."

It at once attracted the attention of Captain (afterwards Colonel) Lewis Carmichael, an old Peninsular officer, then aide-de-camp to Sir Jasper Nicolls. On the day before the storm, with six grenadiers of the 59th and four Ghoorkas, he had made a gallant dash into one of the breaches, to reconnoitre it for the desperate work that was to come, and he asked for the old Scottish cannon as a reward. It was at once given, by order of the Governor-General, and he brought it with him to Edinburgh, where it is preserved in the Museum of Antiquities, with several other ancient guns, some of which belonged to Sir Andrew Wood of Largo, Admiral of James III., and captain of the Yellow Frigate; but how it came to be so far up country in India, among the Jauts, it is difficult to conjecture, unless it had belonged to one of the ships of the old and ill-fated Scottish East India Company, which was ruined by the enmity and treachery of William of Orange.

British India has produced many pieces of ordnance, great in calibre and remarkable in history; among them may be enumerated the great gun of Hyder and Tippo, and the enormous cannon found at Agra, when that place was captured by Lord Lake in 1803. It had trunnions, and was furnished with four rings, two at the breech and two at the muzzle. It was of brass, says Thorne, "and for magnitude and beauty stands unrivalled. Its length was 14 feet 2 inches; its calibre 23 inches; the weight of its ball, when of cast iron, 1500 lbs.; and its whole weight 86,600 lbs., or a little above 38 tons."

Though called brass, it was, according to common report, composed of a mixture of precious metals. The Shroffs, or native bankers, were of that opinion, as they offered £12,000 for it, merely to melt down. Lord Lake preferred to send it as a trophy to Britain, and proceeded to have it transported to Calcutta on a raft. It proved too heavy for the latter, and capsizing sunk in the waters of the Ganges.

Another curious piece of ordnance, locally known as Jubbar Jung, fell into our hands at Ghuzuee in 1842. It was of brass and beautifully ornamented; it carried 64-pound shot, and these being of hammered iron whizzed as they passed through the air. It made some havoc among the tents of our 40th Regiment, and the Huzarehs, followers of Ali, who joined General Nott at the siege, implored him to destroy "Jubbar Jung," for which they appeared to entertain a deep religious horror.

There are at this hour cannon at Bejapore, beside which our "Woolwich Infants" and Armstrong 100-ton guns sink into insignificance. One of these, called the Mulk-e-Meidan, or "Sovereign of the Plains," cast by Roomi Khan, "the Turk of Roumelia," or first Monarch of Bejapore, an Ottoman of Constantinople, weighs forty tons; and, to crown all, Major Rennell mentions an old iron cannon at Dacca, which threw a shot 465 pounds in weight!

The last great gun actually used was King Theodore's huge bombarde at Magdala in 1868, for which he had an enormous number of stone balls made, and which he believed to be the Palladium of Abyssinia. It was shattered to pieces among his troops, on their first attempt to use it.

The last and most remarkable invention in artillery is a much needed fire-arm, which may supersede our boasted steel mountain ordnance, "the jointed gun" of Sir William Armstrong, which can be unscrewed into three separate pieces, each of which is light enough for conveyance on the back of a horse, and when put together form a powerful and long-range cannon, similar to the present field-piece.

Such a gun would have been invaluable in Ashantee, or among the mountains of Abyssinia; and the want of some such fire-arm was sorely felt at times during the Indian mutiny, especially about its close, when our moveable columns pursued the rebels in the deserts of Bekaneer, where the gun carriages of even the flying artillery at times sunk axle deep in the dry heavy sand, rendering them almost useless for service.

In Europe, this is peculiarly the age of enormous cannon. "Armour of two feet in thickness," says a recent writer, "and guns of one hundred tons in weight being now accomplished facts, and ships already bigger than the Inflexible being already in hand, we may well ask ourselves, What will be the next step?"