anyone watching closely what a Maxim could do. The insurgent tribesmen, whom the British called the Yonnies, occupied a network of crude forts in the jungle, from which they had been raiding neighboring towns and threatening the area’s trade. The colonial administration sent to London for help. Sir Francis de Winton was dispatched from England, and arrived to marshal a small force: four hundred men from the First West India Regiment, a hundred local Sierre Leone police officers, and a few dozen sailors from the sloop HMS
The force marched for Robari, the insurgents’ stronghold. When they arrived, they found a tiny fortress, less than eighty yards across, ringed by a deep ditch and a mud wall. Eleven watchtowers looked down over the approaches. The Yonnies were confidently inside. Against enemies with primitive equipment, the Robari defenses might have proved sturdy. But the fort’s builders had never seen the type of weapons the British dragged down the trail. The invading force stopped on the opposite bank of a stream, took stock of the defenses, and went to work. From a distance of less than five hundred yards, they leveled the artillery piece and fired into the buildings and walls. The tribesmen scrambled to the roofs to remove the thatch and contain the risk of fire, and unwittingly presented themselves as targets to a weapon they had not known existed. The result was reported by
The Maxim, which here administered rather than received its baptism of fire, was turned on them, and they dropped off the roofs by dozens. …When the leading troops entered the gate on the Mafenbeh side there was not a living Yonnie left in the town, although there was no lack of their dead.
The British saw the rout for what it had been: “a complete, if not particularly glorious, victory.” Then they ransacked Robari. Three days later, de Winton began to move on the tribe’s smaller forts, where he repeated the slaughter. The destruction of Ronietto made for a particularly ugly account. A Yonnie waved a white flag of surrender, and yet the tribe fought on. The British reply was so overpowering that
The gates were flung open, and the defenders came streaming out. The Maxim was planted opposite one gate at a distance of little over two hundred yards, and under the frightful rain of bullets that it poured upon that narrow entrance not one of the hapless wretches that came out escaped alive. The slaughter of the war-boys on this occasion was greater than at any of the other towns. It was necessary to give them a lesson to respect flags of truce, and in any case one severe example is with the savages the most merciful in the end.36
The growing interest from buyers, combined with the results of field tests and in West Africa, brought more interest from potential partners. It was obvious that the Maxim gun outperformed all the manual guns of the era, and one competitor realized it was better to join efforts with Maxim than to be pushed out of the field. In 1888 Maxim joined with Thorsten Nordenfelt, an arms dealer, financier, and steel producer from Sweden, to form the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company Limited. The firm manufactured his patterns from a factory in Crayford, a short drive to London’s east. Nordenfelt’s switch from Maxim rival to Maxim partner signaled the beginning of the end for sales of manual machine guns. With the association of his new partner, Maxim also picked up the sales support of Basil Zaharoff, a corrupt and mercurial arms salesman with an array of contacts in the war ministries of Europe. It had been Zaharoff, known in his time as the Merchant of Death, who had tricked the journalists after the firing trials in Vienna. Now he was on Maxim’s team. His black arts would be used on Maxim’s behalf.
As its inventor’s business prospects were brightening, the Maxim gun continued making the rounds in Africa. In 1893, in what became known as the Matabele War, the British South Africa Corporation moved to put down a rebellion by Ndebele people, an offshoot of the Zulu nation in the area that would become Rhodesia, and then Zimbabwe. The corporation had at its disposal fewer than one thousand police officers, soldiers, and mercenaries in all. The forces of the opposing king, Lobengula, outnumbered the whites by many times. While they were not as uninformed as the defenders of Robari and Ronietto—the Ndebele had knowledge of the power of the colonial columns’ other weapons—they began the war without the benefit of knowing about a Maxim gun.
As one of the British columns moved toward the capital, Bulawayo, the Ndebele picked at it along the way, trying to ambush or surround it. Each time the Maxim helped push them back. George Rattray, a British gunman who had traveled to Matabeleland in his late teens,37 had joined the expedition, and sent a detailed account of several skirmishes home to his mother in Surrey. By his description, the British with their Maxims were all but invincible. They moved across the countryside toward the capital, razing villages along the way.
We continued our march straight for Bulawayo capturing cattle as we went, burning every Kraal we came near and destroying the grain, the niggers having left everything behind. I suppose we have burned about some six thousand huts.
About twenty miles short of the capital, the column met resistance from two experienced Ndebele regiments. A skirmish became a larger clash as the regiments pressed near. This time the Maxim did more than hold the attackers off. The Ndebele, Rattray said, were “mown down just as if with a scythe.” The events showed how far machine-gun and ammunition technology had advanced since the 1879 Zulu War. Rattray’s long letter home described Ulundi in reverse. Rather than depending on the support of the infantry’s rifles to assist in battle between jams, the machine guns left little work for the infantry to do.
Our two foot regiments, the redoubtable foot sloggers, were ordered out with fixed bayonets to clear the bush. This they did in about twenty minutes, the firing on both sides being heavy but strange to say not a man of ours was hit while the Matabele dropped in all directions. The enemy then retired leaving over 1500 dead.38
Accounts of this sort accumulated, including the most lopsided tally perhaps ever recorded to that time—a claim that about four dozen policemen with four Maxims withstood repeated charges, killing more than three thousand African men in front of a police station. The round numbers are suspicious. But the larger point is unmistakable. A few hundred men with a few Maxims had subdued a king and his army, and destroyed the enemy’s ranks. Hiram Maxim’s business was secure.
This was obvious in the market as well, where the Maxim’s rise signaled the Gatling’s decline. In 1876, after weathering worries over debt and sales, the Gatling Gun Company had been solidly in the black. Its $31,000 in debt had been paid down,39 and the company had sales that year of seventy guns, signaling the start of a period of profit. Gross receipts for the fiscal year were $81,290. Profits were $47,495.40 Then came Maxim. By the end of its 1889 fiscal year, the Gatling Gun Company had grossed $13,006.48 on gun sales, and had only $1,794.55 in hand. It sold thirty-seven guns that year, a small fraction of what it had sold fifteen years before.41 The American army had tested the Maxim at least twice—in 1888 and 1890.42 In 1888 it had been intrigued, but the gun was withdrawn by the owners before follow-on tests were held. In 1890, the Maxim was found to be less reliable and more prone to rusting in endurance tests than the Gatling, which by then had been largely perfected. But by 1894, the U.S. Navy testing board had recommended the Maxim for acceptance for the fleet over the Gatling and several other weapons.43 With the prospect of obsolescence looming, the Gatling Gun Company was developing a means to relieve gunners of the chores and risk related to turning the crank.44 Its proposed solution was to attach an electric motor to keep the barrels spinning.
By this time, Gatling had refined the basic operations of his gun and embarked on the process of miniaturization. Gatlings of the time weighed 224 pounds, the carriage an additional 202 pounds, and the limber another 200.45 With a reasonable load of ammunition, the weapon, ready for movement about the battlefield, weighed more than a half ton. To expand markets, the Gatling Gun Company offered a smaller and more portable model, sold under the name Camel gun. The Camel gun was made not for forts or warships, but for
