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):—

[Sidenote: On bat la Ville avec une nouvelle espèce de balles qu’on nomme Bombes.]

“Il n’y avoit rien qui épouvantait davantage les assiégés (in Wachtendonck) que de certaines grosses boules de fonte creuses, et remplies de poudre et d’autres matiéres inextinguibles, qui étant poussées en l’air avec de gros mortiers, accabloient par leur pésanteur tous les lieux sur qui ils tombaient, et en même tems, comme le feu s’y prenoit par des buses qui y étoient attachées, ils rompoient en se crévant et embrasoient tout ce qui étoit à l’entour, sans que l’eau le put éteindre.

[Sidenote: L’inventeur de ces sortes de boulets.]

“Cette sorte de boulet, que nous avons vû ajoûter aux grenades, aux pots à feu, &c. ... fut, dit on, inventée un peu devant le siége de Wachtendonck par un artisan de Venloo.... Je sais que quelqu’un (_i.e._ Reyd) a ecrit qu’une pareille expérience avait été faite a Berg-op-Zoom ... avec un pareil succès par un Italien deserteur des troupes d’Espagne. Au reste, le Comte Mansfeld se servit de cette machine qui fut inventée à Venloo et faisoit dans Wachtendonck une déstruction des maisons et des hommes aussi inévitable qu’elle étoit inopinée.”

These passages possess at least one quality of good evidence—they differ about details and agree on the main points; and it is difficult to see how they can be gainsaid or overlooked. We may take it, then, until further evidence (which may possibly exist) is produced, that explosive shell were first used in large numbers and with good effect in 1588.