Tough Jobs: Firing a 32 Pound Cannon

“Sponge out!” yells the gun captain. He’s the manager of your squad of sailors. He’s a somewhat more seasoned hand than you are, and has the responsibility of pointing and firing the weapon after he’s led your team in getting the beast loaded.

A sailor with a sponge…a wad of frayed rope or cloth mounted on the end of a long wooden pole…has already dunked it in the bucket of water on the deck. He now rams the pole down the gun’s barrel to make sure and put out any flaming fragments left over from the previous shot. The barrel hisses and steams as he pulls the sponge out.

“Load!” the captain roars.

You jump to it and heft the heavy cartridge, a paper tube that weighs about eleven pounds, into the mouth of the cannon. You make sure that the flannel end of the tube goes in first, because that’s the end that will burn most quickly.

You leap out of the way, and another fellow with a ramrod shoves your cartridge down the barrel. Another sailor rolls a heavy 32lb iron ball down the barrel, and the ramrod fellow shoves that home. Yet another sailor jams a thick plug made of rope, called the wad, into the barrel, and the ramrod man once more drives that all down to the end of the barrel.

“Heave!” is the next command, barked in the smoke and noise by the captain, whose voice has become raw with the excitement and stress.

You join with the four men on your side of the cannon in pulling on the gun tackle, the set of ropes and pulleys that allow you to haul the immense cannon up to the square gunport in preparation for firing. The five sailors on the other side of the gun also pull on the tackle, and the heavy weapon inches its way up the slanting deck.

The deck bucks around you, and the gun in the next port seems to explode in a shower of sparks. A French cannonball has hit it on the very tip of the barrel. The end of the cannon bursts and sprays its crew with shattered iron and lead fragments as the barrel breaks loose from the carriage, crushing the half of its crew that’s still standing before crashing onto the oak deck in a cloud of splinters.

“Heave!” your gun captain roars, and you tear your eyes away from the carnage, reminded of the task at hand. The gun feels immensely heavy, but finally reaches out of the port.

“Stand clear!” The captain jabs a quill down the cannon’s touch hole, tearing open the flannel end of the cartridge and exposing bare powder. He then jerks the lanyard, which is a string attached to a flintlock device on the top of the gun. The lock’s hammer snaps against the flint striker, creating a spark which ignites the flintlock’s priming powder, which sets off the powder in the cartridge in the barrel.

The cannon’s roar isn’t so much a sound as it is the tearing of the air around you. You feel like the very breath is sucked out of your lungs. A huge orange tongue bursts out of the gun’s muzzle, followed by great gouts of gray smoke. The cannon roars backwards past you, its wooden wheels squealing like tortured pigs, until it jerks against the seven-inch-thick breeching tackle, and slams to a violent stop.

And you do it again, and again, and again. An efficient crew could load and fire the gun three times in two minutes.

The 32 pounder remained popular until the invention of the exploding shell in the first half of the nineteenth century. The shell, offering literally more bang for the buck, allowed gun designers to develop breech loading weapons from more advanced alloys. This allowed for lighter, more manageable guns.

Even through breech loading guns and their modern counterparts are still dangerous weapons to use, they can never match the hazards surrounding the manhandling required of the 32 pounder. A most dangerous job indeed!