weapon well into the 19th century.
Another, somewhat later development of the matchlock caught on in Japan, where, again, the Portuguese introduced it. This was the “snapping matchlock.”
The gunner cocked the serpentine as if he were firing a single-action revolver.
When he squeezed the trigger, the serpentine brought the match into the pan with a snap, propelled by a spring. That made it possible for a gunner to fire the instant he lined up his gun on the target. The Japanese were still using this type of gun when Commodore Perry arrived. The snapping matchlock later went out of fashion in Europe because the serpentine sometimes snapped the match into the priming pan hard enough to put the match out.
European gunsmiths continued to improve what had now become the most important weapon on the battlefield. Barrels with spiral rifling appeared. Spinning the bullet gave it far more accuracy: A shot was effective at much longer ranges. These early rifles were difficult to load, however. The bullet had to be bigger than the bore so the rifling would cut into it and make it spin when fired.
That meant the bullet had to be pounded down the barrel. And the rather crude gunpowder of the time clogged up the rifling after a few shots making the gun impossible to load until the bore was cleaned. Some wealthy hunters bought rifles, but soldiers continued to use smoothbores. Loading a matchlock was slow enough, even without the need to pound a bullet down the barrel and clean it after every three or four shots. For safety, a soldier had to take the match off his gun before loading, hold it at a safe distance while he poured loose powder down the barrel, rammd a bullet and wad on top of that, and put more powder in the priming pan.
He then put the match back on the serpentine, blew on it to expose the burning coal, and aimed it at the target. Prince Maurice of Nassau, a 17th-century Dutch general, prescribed 43 separate movements for his musketeers’ drill.
Musketeers used muskets — the latest development of the matchlock. A musket was exactly the same as the earlier and lighter arquebus, but it was bigger. It was so heavy the musketeer had to fire it from a rest — a long forked stick or metal rod. The advantage of the musket was that its heavy bullet would penetrate armor at 200 yards. One marksman wasn’t likely to hit an individual enemy at 200 yards with a smoothbore musket, but infantry and cavalry in those days fought in dense masses that made large targets. A volley of musket balls would have a devastating effect on charging heavy cavalry or armored pikemen.
The matchlock quickly replaced the crossbow in continental armies, largely because it penetrated armor better. It didn’t make armor disappear, but it required soldiers to wear ever-heavier armor. By the time the musket appeared, most soldiers had stopped wearing most armor. Eventually, infantry wore little more than a helmet and the heaviest cavalry wore only metal cuirasses. Although for centuries, the English had an almost religious belief in the supremacy of the longbow over all other hand weapons, in the early 16th century, the gun replaced the longbow in England. As guns got better and better, armies included higher and higher proportions of arquebusiers and musketeers to other troops.
The use of muskets on a large scale required more complicated and rigor-ous training for infantry. Just to use their slow-loading weapons efficiently, soldiers had to be drilled until they could perform processes like Prince Maurice’s 43 motions almost subconsciously. Masses of musketeers had to be drilled so they could perform the loading and firing motions simultaneously, because generals had found that volleys had a greater shock effect on enemies than individual fire. The drilling of musketeers and arquebusiers had to be done with pikemen because they had to be protected from cavalry by pikemen while they were reloading. The musketeers had to learn how to move into or behind pike formations while loading and how to suddenly reappear and fire volleys when their pieces were loaded.
Warfare had become a lot more complicated. No longer could a country such as England field a highly effective militia whose main training was shooting arrows every Sunday afternoon. Even guard duty had become complex. Here’s what Virginia had to say about sentinels:
…he shall shoulder his piece, both ends of his match being alight, and his piece charged, and primed, and bullets in his mouth, there to stand with a careful and waking eye, untill such time as his Corporall shall relieve him.
To speed reloading, soldiers literally spit bullets into the gun. The idea was to enable the sentry to fire quickly if a number of enemies suddenly appeared.
But holding two or three bullets in his mouth probably also helped him keep “a careful and waking eye.”
Chapter 16
The Spark of Genius: Flint and Steel
Captain John Smith, the friend of Pocahontas, had a long career as a mercenary soldier before he came to America. Once, commanding a few soldiers, he learned that a much larger force of Turks was about to make a night attack.
He had his troops spread out and carry a long piece of rope. At regular inter-vals along the rope, he fastened a length of lighted match. Then his troops advanced. The Turks, seeing all those matches glowing in the dark, thought a huge force was about to attack them. They retreated.
Thus, Smith managed to take advantage of one of the matchlock’s characteristics. Years later, in Virginia, he demonstrated one of its disadvantages. In 1609, he was carrying a lighted match and seemed to have forgotten that he also had a pocketful of loose gunpowder. He put his hand, with the lighted match, into his pocket. It’s hard to believe an experienced soldier like Smith could be so careless, but he was. Fortunately, the powder wasn’t confined, so it didn’t explode, but Smith was severely burned. While he was laid up, his enemies seized him and sent him off to England to stand trial for alleged misconduct.
Gunpowder does not always have to be confined to explode. A large quantity of gunpowder — nowadays usually called “black powder” — will explode when ignited even when unconfined. Because it can be ignited by the merest spark or even by friction, black powder is a very dangerous substance. Using the matchlock meant manipulating black powder in close proximity to fire. The matchlock priming pan had a cover to minimize exposure, but even so, accidents were frequent.
The matchlock was also dangerous when the match was not lighted. A party of Spanish soldiers learned that the hard way when they approached an Indian village in what is now South Carolina. The soldiers planned to force the Indians to give them corn. Outside the village, some Indians met the soldiers and said they’d be glad to give them food, but the glowing matches made the women of the village nervous. Not wishing to alarm the villagers, the soldiers extinguished their matches and went into village. The villagers then massacred them. Only one man escaped.
Rain was an ever-present danger for troops armed with matchlocks. A down-pour could extinguish their matches and leave them defenseless. The matchlock also made a surprise attack at night impossible, as John Smith proved in his mock attack on the Turks. For all of these reasons, in central and western Europe (the area the Muslim Turks called “the Land of War”), there was a fervent search for some way to fire a gun without carrying fire along with it.
There was one attempt even before the matchlock was fully developed. An inventor in Dresden developed something called a Monchbuchse. It was a simple tube with a metal handle underneath it. Along the side was a leaf spring terminating in jaws that held a piece of flint. The spring pressed the flint down on a steel rasp equipped with a handle at one end. The gunner held the handle of the gun in one hand and pulled back the rasp with the other. That produced sparks that ignited the primer and fired the gun. Striking a piece of flint on steel to make sparks fall on dry tinder had long been used to start fires in Europe, but the Dresden invention was the first to use the principle to fire a gun. The Monchbuchse, however, was even clumsier than the hand cannon, so it never caught on.
Somewhere in northern Italy or southern Germany, somebody in the late 15th or early 16th century came up with a more practical gun. This was the wheel lock. It had a jaw that pressed a piece of iron pirates (the “fool’s
