More on Musket Balls

Hi everyone!

Thanks for the comments on my last post. It was made early on in my research of 17th century ammunition and contained some misconceptions, and I appreciate the people who pointed them out for me. Since then, I have spent a lot of time reading and taking notes.

Firstly, I was wrong about oversized ammo being used in the 17th century. This practice came much later and as was correctly pointed out, is much more common in breech-loading firearms, not muzzle loaders. Balls of the time were made to be smaller than the diameter of the bore, to account for fouling of the barrel (Hamilton 1987). The difference between the diameter of the ball and the barrel is called “windage” and is an important variable. Too little windage causes the barrel to foul quickly and become unworkable, and too much windage causes the gas to escape past the ball, causing the final velocity of the ball to be significantly lower than a properly sized ball. As for the use of paper wrapped cartridges at the fort, the reason why I said in my original post that “some” balls would be wrapped in paper is because it is my understanding that the practice of wrapping the ball and powder in a single cartridge was adopted by the French military in North America in 1738 (Gallup & Shaffer 2008). This was around 50 years after Fort St. Joseph was established. Gallup and Shaffer (2008) even goes so far as to say that “It can be assumed that fixed ammunition was reserved for a time when speed was important” and that a soldier would be more likely to use a patched ball and powder flask when hunting or on guard.

Before the next part, I should add some context. Fort St. Joseph was established in the 1680’s, being operated by the French until 1761. The British then took control of the fort for a few years on and off before a one day occupation of the fort from a Spanish raid. The point of saying this is to show that the fort was occupied by a small garrison of French soldiers for a majority of its life. This is important because according to Hamilton (1976, 1987), while we don’t know too much about British guns of the time, we actually know quite a bit about the standard bore sizes, ball weight, ball diameter tolerances, and acceptable amounts of windage of French guns from the 17th and 18th century. He uses this information to assign excavated balls to the firearm that it probably was intended for.

On the topic of trade guns, while it is true that there is a wide variety of bore sizes that would be impossible to account for, it does not seem to be true that there was a wide variety of French trade gun bore sizes. In fact, Hamilton (1976) claims that the French had two trade gun bores that were “more or less standard” as well as evidence of the standard infantry bore being traded. These bores being the calibre 32, the calibre 28 and the calibre 18. Of course, calibre in this context does not mean the same thing as our modern understanding of caliber, instead having to do with the weight of the ball that the musket fired. A “calibre 18” gun means that the gun would have fired balls that weighed 18 to the livre. However, evidence is shown that despite the balls being classified by weight, they still had standardized diameters. (Hamilton 1987:125) 

While Carson and I don’t expect to be able to assign every ball to a particular musket, but we do expect to be able to make a nice graph that we can learn something from. Thanks for reading!

Kieran

Sources:

Hamilton, T. M. (1976). Firearms on the frontier: Guns at fort michilimackinac, 1715-1781. Mackinac Island State Park Commission.

Gallup, A., & Shaffer, D. F. (2008). La Marine: The French colonial soldier in Canada, 1745-1761. Heritage Press.

Hamilton, T. M., & Baird, D. (1987). Colonial Frontier Guns. Pioneer Press.