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Firepower and Fertilizers Gunpowder arrived in the West from China via Byzantium and Islam, and directly from the Mongols. The Mongols pioneered the use of lengths of bamboo packed with gunpowder as "pipe bombs" to help blow open city gates, and they brought this technology with them during their ravages of Poland and Hungary in 1241. Roger Bacon already had a recipe for "black powder" before 1300, and a contemporary, Marcus Graecus, discussed it in his best-selling "Book of Fires for the Burning of Enemies." By 1326 there is a picture of the new European invention, the cannon. Since the Europeans had a thriving metal mining, smelting, and manufacturing industry, it was quickly converted to the improvement of the new weapon. Paradoxically, it was the skill of medieval bell makers, originally perfected to cast large bronze cathedral bells, that allowed the Europeans to jump quickly ahead of the Chinese in weapons technology. By 1430, European bombards were 4m long (12-15 feet), and fully capable of knocking down contemporary castle walls. Sultan Mehmed "the Conqueror" was able to take Constantinople in the great siege of 1453 because he hired Christian metal-smiths from Transylvania to cast him a new cannon, 8m long and firing stone cannon-balls that weighed 500kg (half a ton). At the same time the French were driving the English out of the last of their castles in northern France with the new weapons, bringing an end to the Hundred Years' War: the English leader, the old Earl of Shrewsbury, was actually killed by a roundshot at the battle of Castillon in July 1453. Another early casualty of cannon was James II of Scotland, who was killed in 1460 when his own cannon "The Lion" exploded as he was standing beside it watching it bombard Roxburgh Castle. Early Western gunpowder was called "black powder" because it consisted of a finely ground charcoal base, mixed with sulfur and saltpeter (potassium nitrate). Saltpeter was the ingredient that was most difficult to obtain, and since it is the major ingredient in gunpowder best suited for military use, it was the supply of nitrate that became strategically important. By the end of the 1500s, the standard formula for military-grade gunpowder was saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal dust in the ratio 6:1:1. At this time, the only source of potassium nitrate was from rotting organic matter, especially rotting meat and urine. The saltpeter supplier would send out teams of collectors who would locate promising places to dig (abandoned privies and dungheaps) by tasting the soil before digging it out and carting it off to be boiled, strained and evaporated to produce saltpeter of the required purity. It is said that throughout Europe no privy, stable, or dovecote was safe from saltpeter collectors or "petermen". The English set up a Parliamentary Commision in 1606 to look into abuses of property by petermen. However by 1624 King James I issued a proclamation complaining about citizens who were placing their selfish interest above that of their country by paving barns or putting down plank walkways, interfering with the accumulation and ripening of saltpeter in the dung and urine. Every kingdom was desperate for gunpowder, which probably accounts for the continuing use of swords, pikes, and bows, long after firearms had made them technically obsolete. Eventually a saltpeter industry grew up, based on artificial nitre beds, in which layers of decaying organic matter, old mortar, and earth were built up in a compost heap about a meter high, and sprinkled regularly with blood and/or urine. Nitrate crystals could be collected after about two years. In 1626, King Charles I of England ordered "his loving subjects [to] carefully and constantly keep and preserve in some convenient vessels or receptacles fit for the purpose, all the urine of man during the whole year, and all the stale of beasts which they can save and gather together whilst their beasts are in their stables and stalls, and that they be careful to use the best means of gathering together and preserving the urine and stale, without mixture of water or other thing put therein. Which our commandment and royal pleasure, being easy to observe, and so necessary for the public service of us and our people, that if any person do be remiss thereof we shall esteem all such persons contemptuous and ill affected both to our person and estate, and are resolved to proceed to the punishment of that offender with what severity we may." Naturally there was no gunpowder left over for commercial purposes such as rock blasting in mining or canal building. Hard rock had to be excavated out by hand with hammers and picks and wedges, or it had to be fire-mined. By the 18th century India had emerged as the principal source of saltpeter. During the Seven Years' War the British defeated the French in India, cutting them off from this supply. It is said that the French had to make peace partly because they were running out of powder. Guano is accumulated bird dung. It can accumulate only in areas with dense bird populations and little rain, but in those special environments it can eventually form deposits many feet thick. As it accumulates and dries, it becomes a dense organic material that is very rich in nitrate and phosphate. Around the world, guano deposits are usually found on dry oceanic islands lying in the middle of oceanic upwelling regions that support very rich fisheries. Living off the fish, and concentrated in great numbers by the small areas of available nesting sites, literally millions of seabirds, each excreting about 20 grams of dung a day, can generate massive amounts of guano. Around the world, the most productive guano islands have been along the equatorial upwelling zone, especially in the Pacific, and in the great cold currents of the world: the Humboldt current off South America and the Agulhas current off South Africa. The word guano is a corruption of a Peruvian word huano, written phonetically in Spanish as guano and then mispronounced by English-speakers. As far as we know, the ancient Moche people along the Peruvian coast were the first people to exploit huano on any large scale, mining the offshore islands to support large populations on their irrigated coastal fields. The tradition was continued by the Incas, so that huano ranked with gold in some ceremonies, and nesting seabirds were placed under protection. Guano usage dropped as the Spanish essentially destroyed Inca society, but the tradition was not lost. "Guano, though no saint, works many miracles," said a Peruvian proverb. One of the first acts of the newly independent Peruvian government was to exempt guano from taxes in 1830. As the old Spanish silver mines gradually were worked out, or flooded, the Peruvians began to try to export guano. Trial samples were well received in England, and the Peruvian entrepreneur Quiros put together a consortium of Peruvian, French, and English businessmen who bought from the Peruvian government an exclusive licence to mine and export guano for six years. In 1840 and 1841 they mined about 8000 tonnes of guano, and exported it, mostly to England, at an enormous profit on a wave of favorable publicity. Late in 1841 the Peruvian government realized that it had sold the monopoly too cheaply, and first negotiated a new deal and then nationalized the guano industry outright. It used much the same set of shippers as its agents, still leaving them a healthy profit, but keeping more of the proceeds. For many years the three Chinca Islands, 120 miles south of the major port of Callao, were the main focus of guano mining. The Peruvian government organized guano mining on the three islands. The guano was sold directly to the trading companies that held the government licenses to export it. Vessels from many nations were hired to ship out the guano, each vessel being loaded from barges in bad weather, and down long canvas chutes from the clifftops in good weather. Eventually, enough guano was removed that a flat area could be carved out on one of the islands, and on a very unsavory foundation of solid guano were erected the headquarters for the Peruvian Governor, the British consul, the offices of the exporting companies, and the barracks for the laborers and the guards that acted as their overseers. Peruvian, British, and United States navy ships called regularly at the islands to make sure that operations were running smoothly. Conditions were ghastly: the stench of ammonia pervaded the entire island. Probably the best living conditions were on board the dozens of guano ships that were there at any one time (it took about three months to load a ship from the barges that plied to and from the guano islands). Even then, as guano dust billowed out from the holds, crews often took to the rigging to avoid breathing it. The "trimmers" working to balance the load in the holds were not so lucky, and could only work twenty minutes at a time. A ghastly array of occupational diseases continually thinned the work force. The Peruvian government used convicts, indentured Chinese, and kidnapped Polynesians as laborers in these terrible conditions. The Peruvians and Chileans practically depopulated Easter Island and Tongareva in this way, before international outcry stopped the virtual slavery. The Peruvian government derived most of its income from the guano trade from the early 1840s. Guano was Peru's leading export in the 1850s and its largest source of revenue, with 300 shiploads of guano a year leaving Peru, most of them in American ships. For a while Peru was the only organized nation in the world without internal taxation, and the Peruvian president's salary was twice that of the President of the United States. Peruvian Governments could issue bonds at 3% interest, lower than United States Government bonds! The first railroad in South America was built from Callao to Lima. However, it's hardly surprising that the money that flowed from guano should have been illegally diverted on occasion, and that successive Peruvian governments fell victim to greed, corruption, and overspending. The British firm of Antony Gibbs & Sons of London played a major role in the guano industry. Gibbs had been merchants in Lima since Spanish colonial days. They signed their first guano-trading contract with the Peruvian government in 1842, and their last in 1861, though there were periods where they lost the contract. At times Gibbs was the dominant company in the guano trade, primarily because from 1847 onward it held the monopoly of selling Peruvian guano (the best in the world) in Britain and North America. In the 1840s Gibbs was buying guano in Peru for $15 a ton, and selling it for an average of $50 a ton. In most years Britain was the major market for guano, generally importing about 100,000 tonnes a year, but 200,000 tonnes in 1850, and more than 300,000 tonnes in 1858. The peak for American imports was 176,000 tonnes in 1855. By the early 1850s, entrepreneurs were prospecting for alternative sources of supply, and lower-quality guano was being shipped to Europe and North America from various Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific islands. The State of Maryland even hired a guano inspector to test quality, and levied a charge of 40¢/tonne for the "grade stamps" on the sacks. Guano fever swept American farmers, especially those who had suddenly realized that crop yields were dropping as they exhausted their soil. The US Senate debated guano in 1850, and President Fillmore referred to the urgent question of the nation's guano supply in his State of the Union Address in December that year. The United States tried in vain to negotiate a treaty with Peru for a cheap stable guano supply. Guano made up 22% of the nation's commercial fertilizer in 1850, and 43% in 1860, at a price around $73/ton. Britain, the USA, France, and Germany were all major guano importers, and it was probably the interest of so many powerful countries in the trade that allowed Peru to keep control: each power would resists occasional attempts by the others to muscle in on the Peruvian end of the trade. In these early years of the guano trade, demand always outstripped supply. In 1852 there was a bizarre attempt by a Brooklyn entrepreneur, Alfred Benson, to persuade the US Navy to protect his ships from Peruvian "interference" while he mined guano from the Lobos islands, 20 to 40km offshore from Peru in what was commonly accepted at the time as international waters. Benson owned a fleet of ships that routinely made the Cape Horn voyage out to gold-rush California, but generally returned with little cargo. If they could load guano off Peru, reasoned Benson, he could make literally millions of dollars. However, the British and the Peruvians were well aware of the rich guano deposits of the Lobos Islands. The Peruvians had declared them off-limits to mining (they were to be a reserve to be exploited once the Chinca Islands were depleted) and the British were already on record as regarding the Lobos islands as Peruvian possessions. Benson's scheme was thwarted, but William R. Grace entered the guano market in 1854 in a much more legal way, by supplying the miners of Chinca and shipping out guano, in a trade that began the great W.R. Grace & Co. However, Americans looked toward discovering guano deposits in less contested territory, at a time when the United States was in an expansionist mood. In 1854 and 1855, Americans began to mine guano from several islands in the southern Caribbean, trying to keep ahead of the Venezuelan government's attempts to stop them or make them sign lucrative contracts. Meanwhile, in 1855 the ill-fated Alfred Benson formed the American Guano Company to mine some newly discovered islands in the equatorial Pacific, this time hundreds of kilometers from land, uninhabited, and rich in guano; and he persuaded Senator Seward (eventually of Alaska fame) to sponsor the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which encouraged entrepreneurs to claim such islands as American territory: the first American overseas territories. Within ten years, areas of the central Pacific were sometimes labelled "American Polynesia" in atlases, as 59 islands, most of them in the Pacific, were claimed and registered with the State Department as guano islands. Even the Hawaiian Navy got into the action, as Kamehameha IV tried to annex Johnston Island to his Kingdom in 1858, and succeeded in annexing Palmyra in 1862. By the time the guano trade had become large and profitable, and the Peruvian government was receiving a very healthy share of the proceeds, though Gibbs was flourishing too. From 1849 to 1861, for example, the Peruvian government's revenue was 65% of the gross proceeds from guano, with shipping costs eating up much of the rest. The problem for the Peruvian government was that it usually spent each year's guano income before it received it, borrowing money all the time. Thus the nation ended in 1861 practically bankrupt. For example, Gibbs paid the 1842 contract money in advance as a loan to the Peruvians, and 84% of it was spent on equipping the army for a war against Bolivia. Gibbs maximized their profit by selling 90% of their guano through their own agents in London, Liverpool, or Bristol, where Gibbs agents operated. Guano continued to be exported to Britain for a number of years at about 150,000 tonnes per year during the 1860s, but with the advent of nitrates and mined rock phosphate, the guano trade diminished considerably because the new products had a high and more reliable quality. In the 1870s the guano market crashed: tonnages dropped to about 100,000 a year, and petered out by 1885. However, I can still buy it for my organic orchard. Chilean nitrates were the chief source of nitrogen for explosives, fertilizer, and chemical industries from the 1830s to the 1930s, and were the only significant source of iodine from the 1870s (replacing seaweed) until the mid-20th century (when iodine began to be extracted from oilfield brines). In 1830, a shipment of 700 tonnes of nitrate left Tarapaca, southernmost Peru. The industry mushroomed, and annual exports were 16,000 tonnes by 1843. The peak was not reached until the rather unusual conditions of World War One, when production reached nearly 3 million tonnes. The all-time record was set in 1928, at 3.1 million tonnes. The nitrates occur in what are now Chile's two northern provinces, Tarapaca and Antofagasta, along a band 30km wide and 700km long. They seem to have formed in shallow playa lakes, where the saline water contained bacteria that fixed nitrogen into nitrate. In 1868 there was a boom in nitrate mining in the Atacama Desert, and major nitrate ports were developed from Iquique in the north through Pisagua and across the Atacama desert to Taltal. The nitrate mining was dominated by British and Chilean enterprises, even though the Atacama Desert was formally part of Bolivia. Chile had recognized Bolivia's title in an 1874 treaty, but was allocated economic rights there, including a guarantee that taxes on Chilean mining enterprises would not be raised. For Peru, nitrate was rather unimportant as long as the guano trade was flourishing: in fact, most of the early nitrate mining on Peruvian and Bolivian territory was done by Chilean and British entrepreneurs. However, in 1875 a particularly impoverished Peruvian government declared nitrate deposits to be the property of the state, copying the declaration covering guano decades before. By this time the governments of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, had all focussed their attention on control of the nitrate region. In another of its economic crises, the Bolivian government announced a tax increase of 10 centavos per hundredweight on nitrates in 1879. At that time the largest nitrate mining company was the Antofagasta Nitrate and Railroad Company, a Chilean firm controlled by British capital, including the merchant house of Gibbs. It's not clear what part was played by Gibbs in the politics of this incident, but the Chileans mobilized with the intention of seizing the desert. The Peruvians expressed the intention of mediating the dispute between Bolivia and Chile, but when it turned out that there was a secret treaty between Peru and Bolivia, the Chileans declared war on them both. The War of the Pacific may have been started as much by national rivalry and runaway emotion as by the economic prize of the nitrate deposits themselves. However, the nitrate prize was enough to give the victor the income of an entire nation, and the combatants were acutely aware of that. Peru's income had been largely based on guano and nitrate for decades; Bolivia's economy was ramshackle at best, but its foreign income was based on metal mining in the Altiplano; and Chile had already had a taste of the riches to be gained from the Atacama mines it was already operating. Early in the War, W. R. Grace allied itself with the Peruvian government, and became a clandestine arms shipper to Peru. It bought and shipped millions of dollars' worth of armaments, including guns from Krupp and a new naval weapon, a torpedo boat. However the Chileans quickly beat both their opponents and went on to occupy Lima. Chile's victory in the War of the Pacific gave it full control of a large northern strip of coast. Iquique was the terminus of the Nitrate Railways and the most important outlet. At first Tarapaca province was dominant, with 48 out of Chile's 53 nitrate works in 1892. But twenty years later the southern fields of Antofagasta, linked by a new railroad, the Longitudinal Railway, overtook the northern field in production. Nitrate played an increasing role in Chile's economy after the War of the Pacific, as copper production declined. By the late 1880s an export tax on nitrate was earning 43% of Chilean government income, and in 1894 it was 68%, and the wealth was used to improve the country's infrastructure. The nitrate industry, however, was largely foreign owned. European capital had bought out Chilean entrepreneurs in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, even before the War of the Pacific. The major reason was the large amount of capital needed to set up the nitrate works, the infrastructure in the difficult desert regions that contained the nitrate deposits, and the railroad and port facilities that were needed, and the continuing requirement for importing supplies. Capital on this scale was simply not available in South America, nor were the basic supplies to support the industry. For example, foreign coal constituted 20% of Iquique's imports in 1909. In fact, a convenient two-way trade of coal for nitrate favored British shipping firms, who loaded 60% of the nitrates even though most of the nitrate went to European countries. Synthetic production of nitrates surpassed Chilean mining production in the 1930s. By 1950 the Chilean production was only about 15% of world supply, and by 1980 it was only 0.14%. Today the Chilean reserves total only about a year's worth of world consumption, not because they are close to exhaustion, but because world demand has increased so much. — Notes for Geology 115, by Richard Cowen Geology Department, University of California at Davis More about Cannons and Gunpowder |
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Nowadays, cannon and other forms of artillery from the 1700s and 1800s are nothing more than quaint noise-makers. We see them only in the movies and on TV, or at occasional demonstrations at historic sites. In their day, cannons were the most powerful, far-reaching and fearsome weapons available. From clumsy beginnings in the mid-1300s, by the 1700s cannons had become products of sophisticated technology that required advanced design and manufacturing techniques available only in a few leading industrial countries. Beginning in the 1600s, the technology of artillery was strongly influenced by scientific developments in physics (force, pressure, acceleration, gravity), mathematics (trajectories), chemistry (explosives) and metallurgy. Cannons were complicated and expensive to manufacture and hazardous to use. They could be operated only by highly-trained gunners – secretive men with mysterious knowledge and skills and limited life expectancy. Artillery could destroy walls of cities and fortresses. It could annihilate whole bodies of troops instantly, and at a greater distance than any other weapon. Excerpted and adapted from A Primer on Artillery by Joe Craig, Saratoga National Historical Park http://www.thenortherncampaign.org/past7.htm |
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The early cannons were more likely to kill the gunner than the person he was shooting at. Cannons were (and are) extremely dangerous to operate, because what makes a cannon do its thing is a quantity of gunpowder, a powerful explosive. You had to use as much gunpowder as you dared, to get more range. Unfortunately, if you used a bit too much gunpowder, the cannon blew up. The problem was, when a cannon blew up the only people who knew how much gunpowder had been used almost always were unable to tell anyone. Just how much gunpowder could safely be used to charge a cannon? There was only one way to find out — test-fire the cannon repeatedly, each time putting in a little more gunpowder, keeping a written record and standing well away (at least a kilometre). When the cannon blew up you knew how much was too much, and you could figure the safe charge to be something less. The manufacture of cannons was not a highly-precise process. For each cannon produced, the metallurgy and other important factors would vary. That is, every cannon was different to some extent. When you measured the maximum charge by test-firing a cannon to destruction, you then knew what was the safe amount of gunpowder for that cannon (the one that had been destroyed). There was by no means a guarantee that other cannons like it (same material, same design, same size, same manufacturer) would be able to handle a similar charge; often they could but sometimes they couldn't. Of course, the gunpowder itself was not exactly a reliably-uniform product, making the firing of a cannon even more unpredictable. A safe quantity using one batch of gunpowder might or might not be safe when another batch was available. There were various ways a cannon could kill its crew. The most common problem was that occasionally, when the cannon was fired, the cannon tube would explode near the breech where the internal pressure was greatest. Another problem could occur during the loading of a cannon, if something (such as a glowing ember deep in the gun from the previous firing, or careless handling of the explosive charge) caused the propellant to explode prematurely. Over the centuries, thousands of gunners and other soldiers died when a nearby cannon exploded. And from time to time, prominent officials were killed by the explosion of a cannon. A few examples: On 3 August 1460, an exploding cannon killed King James II of Scotland during the siege of Roxburgh Castle. The king, an enthusiastic believer in the use of innovative military technology, was watching the operation of a new cannon and was standing too close when it blew up. (1) James II (1437-1460) http://www.nwlink.com/~scotlass/jamesii.htm (2) King James II http://www.tartans.com/articles/famscots/stewartjamesII.html (3) James II, King of Scotland http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/britain/lmid_james_ii.shtml On 28 February 1844, the captain of the United States warship Princeton took U.S. President John Tyler, several federal Cabinet officials, and about four hundred other dignitaries on a Potomac cruise to demonstrate one of the ship's large guns. The cannon was fired several times successfully, but the last time, about 3pm, the breech burst, killing the Secretary of State Abel Parker Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Walker Gilmer, Senator David Gardiner, Charge d'Affairs of the United States in Belgium Virgil Maxcy, and several others. On 14 April 1861, Private Daniel Hough of the 1st U.S. Artillery was the first combat soldier to die during the American Civil War. He was killed by an accidental explosion while the garrison was firing a salute during the evacuation ceremonies at Fort Sumter on an island in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. On the 50th round of what was to have been a 100-gun salute to the United States flag, the premature discharge of a cannon and the explosion of a pile of cartridges resulted in the death of Private Hough. Another man, mortally wounded, died several days later. The 50th round was the last. Historical Handbook Number Twelve United States National Park System http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/hh/12/hh12g.htm On 19 April 1989, at sea 330 miles northeast of the island of Puerto Rico, 500 pounds (225 kg) of high explosive propellant charge exploded in the open breech of the center 16-inch cannon in gun Turret No. 2 on the USS Iowa, killing 47 crewmen within the turret. The Iowa, one of four World War Two battleships taken out of mothballs during the Reagan arms buildup, had been about to commence a day of test firing its guns, the world's largest naval weapons, 16-inch (40.6 cm) cannons that fired 2,700-pound (1225 kg) projectiles up to 24 miles (38 km). [The following refers to the British Expeditionary Force (the British Army) on the Western Front in France, 1914-1918] ...When the shell was fired from the gun, the pre-cocked detonator would be activated inside the barrel of the gun or, perhaps, within a few feet of emerging from the barrel with catastrophic results for the gun crew and anyone else in the vicinity. In 1916, during the First Battle of the Somme, these 'prematures', as they were called, occurred in around 1 out of every 1,000 shells fired. In some divisions during the Somme Offensive, 500 rounds were fired every 24 hours, thus, on average, one 'premature' was occurring every two days or so. The effect on the morale of the gunners of this macabre game of 'Russian Roulette' can be readily imagined... Source: Duds On The Western Front In The Great War 1914-1918 The Western Front Association http://www.westernfrontassociation.com/thegreatwar/articles/ research/dudswestern.htm More about exploding cannons: The Cannon is Broken! by Edwin R. Scollon http://www.historiclakes.org/vbrp/vbr5.htm A cast-iron cannon is known to have exploded in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, in 1897. It was located on Oxner's Hill, at the mouth of the LaHave River, and was one of three cannons being fired in a Royal Salute probably at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne in June 1837. |
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There was much variation in the quality and propellant effect of different batches of gunpowder. Cannons and Gunpowder; Their History and Lore by J. B. Calvert http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/tech/cannon.htm Gunpowder Manufacture http://www.geocities.com/jswortham/gunpowder.html Firepower and Fertilizers http://www.geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/115CH16fertilizer.html Black Powder by Tenny L. Davis The discovery that a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur is capable of doing useful mechanical work is one of the most important chemical discoveries or inventions of all time... http://internet.cybermesa.com/~sam1/powder/bp.html The Gun and Gunpowder by W.L. Ruffell http://riv.co.nz/rnza/hist/gun/gunpdr.htm Instructions for the Manufacture of Saltpetre by Joseph LeConte published at Columbia, South Carolina, 1862 ...under the most favorable circumstances saltpetre (potassium nitrate) cannot be made in any considerable quantity in less than six or eight months... http://docsouth.unc.edu/lecontesalt/leconte.html The Augusta Powder Works: The Confederacy's Manufacturing Triumph by C. L. Bragg ...The Confederate government recognized the need for a large gunpowder mill somewhere in the South. The ultimate choice of location would be Augusta, Georgia... Enough gunpowder was produced at the Powder Works to fully meet the needs of the Confederate armies, and still retained a surplus of 70,000 pounds of gunpowder in the magazines at the end of the War Between the States... http://www.rose.net/~clbragg/apw.htm Confederate Production of Gunpowder During the Civil War http://nairobi.mwc.edu/~dgran5mt/productionofgunpow.html Adding Firepower with the Invention of Gunpowder http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-1225.html Caveman Chemistry: Chapter 18, Spot and Roebuck You take something that everybody's got and nobody wants and turn it into something that every government needs if it's going to be a government for any time at all... http://cavemanchemistry.com/cavebook/chsaltpeter.html June 1740: Testing the Strength of Gunpowders from each of four ships http://www.researchpress.co.uk/firearms/gentleman.htm More about Cannons and Gunpowder |
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Iron and an Early Military-Industrial Complex This is a story about a military-industrial complex, about power and politics and propaganda, about efforts to prevent high-technology weapons from reaching the hands of the enemy. It is about the tension between armaments production and environmental damage. It documents interference by intelligence agencies in political affairs. But it's not about the United States or the Soviet Union, or the nuclear arms race or intercontinental ballistic missiles. It's about cast-iron cannon, and it took place four hundred years ago in a small corner of England. And we wonder why Shakespeare conveys messages to us that are relevant to our modern world! So far in this book, I have written as if there was very little politics in technology. Certainly, metals had value, and sometimes were valuable enough militarily or economically to fight over, or to alter the course of history. But for ancient times we do not have enough documentation to be able to see the intricacies of political decision-making that must have been associated with such events. There are much better records from Renaissance times, and in the rest of this Chapter I will recount the complex maneuvering that went on around the iron industry in the Weald district of southern England. The main point is not the actual events, though they were important to European history in the 1500s and 1600s. The point is that we can see the same sorts of behavior among living politicians dealing with rather similar questions: people do not change! And in the end, everyone lost. The Weald is an area of hilly country south of London, most of it in the county of Sussex. Small streams have cut small valleys into the landscape, and a belt of iron-bearing rock can be found at the surface in many places. The iron ore is moderate to high-quality, though a rather high percentage of phosphorus means that it is not the best. The Weald, however, is not attractive for large-scale farming, and was originally covered with great hardwood forests of oak, beech, and chestnut that had been there since the Ice Age retreated. As we saw in Chapter 5, there was a local tradition of iron-working dating back to Roman times, when the Weald supplied much of the iron for the Roman army and fleet in northwest Europe. Iron production dropped dramatically with the breakdown of Roman authority, but by late medieval times, iron production was enough to fill local needs, with an occasional large order from the King. In 1242 the Archbishop of Canterbury was asked to provide 8000 horseshoes and 20,000 nails from his estates in the Weald, to be delivered to Portsmouth, almost certainly for Henry III's campaign in France that year. The largest order for which we have records was in 1253, when the Sheriff of Sussex had to provide 30,000 horseshoes and 60,000 nails. The typical Wealden iron-works in medieval times was a bloomery furnace, which produced wrought iron. The bloomery was typically built in a valley, and the local stream was dammed into shallow ponds, or had a sluice cut from it, to run a mill with a water-powered hammer that would help forge the bloom into wrought iron. As far as we can tell from the scrappy records, the workers dug ore from shallow pits during the summer, when they ran into less trouble with water collecting in their diggings. The ore was roasted in piles, to help to break up the nodules of ore. The nodules were damp as they came out of the ground, and roasting not only drove off much of the water, but cracked them, saving workers time and trouble in hammering them into suitably small pieces. At the same time, much of the iron carbonate was converted to oxide. All this preparation made the smelting easier, faster, and cheaper on charcoal fuel, because the roasting could be done with brushwood, log wood, or charcoal, whichever was available and cheapest. The smelting and forging, however, required charcoal, and this was done during the winter, when the streams would run more strongly and reliably to run the water-hammers. Medieval iron production was never intense enough to run into a fuel problem. The local woods provided enough brush and branches to make into charcoal. Cannon changed warfare. Although the earliest cannon were dragged along to battlefields in the 14th century, they were ineffective: their rate of fire was too slow, they were inaccurate, and they were very expensive. Eventually they found their niche in siege warfare, which was a major part of many campaigns at the time. The English word "gun" comes from the predecessor of cannon, the catapults that were used to fire stones over and against castle walls: they were often called Gunnhilda, from the Norse. Catapults were more accurate, faster-firing, lighter, and cheaper than cannon at first, but eventually cannon were designed that could compete effectively. By the early 1400s cannon could do serious damage to castle walls. Castles had to be redesigned to resist them, and until that happened, kings and princes who invested in cannon and used them efficiently waged successful campaigns. When Henry V called in 1415 for "Once more into the breach, dear friends!" he was encouraging the troops into the ruined barbican gateway at Harfleur that had been smashed open by his new cannon. In 1449-1450, French cannon battered into submission 60 castles in four days, driving the English out of most of northern France. The Spanish reconquered southern Spain from the Moors with the aid of cannon to batter breaches in the walls of fortresses. The early European cannon were made of long wrought iron bars forged together to form a circular barrel, with wrought iron hoops fixed around them to hold them together. When well made, these were effective, but there were naturally many points of potential weakness, especially after repeated firing. King James II of Scotland met his end this way in 1460. Eager to use the new technology in the border wars against the English, he went over to watch his new cannon "The Lion" knock down the walls of Roxburgh Castle. He was standing beside it when it burst. These early cannon were heavy, and very difficult to move. Commanders quickly realized that cannon were easiest to use in fixed positions, and before long, cannon were mounted as defensive weapons in and on forts and city walls. The city of Dijon, in Burgundy, had 92 cannon in 1445, and the style, lay-out, and design of fortresses changed to accommodate cannon as well as to resist artillery bombardment. In an ironic twist of fate, Burgundy came to be the source of the best cannon. The same craftsmen who had for several centuries been casting the great bronze bells for Gothic cathedrals and abbeys throughout Northwest Europe turned to casting bronze cannon instead: the shape and size were not too different, and both required strong flawless manufacture to precise specifications. Bronze cannon were lighter than wrought iron, much safer to use, more accurate, and more powerful at any given size. The great Turkish sultan Mehmed the Conqueror blasted great breaches in the walls of Constantinople in 1453 with a giant bronze cannon cast for him on site by a renegade Christian, before the apocalyptic final assault that ended the thousand-year Byzantine civilization. In retrospect, it is astounding how quickly cannon technology spread throughout Europe and the Moslem world. This was truly a military revolution. But it was a revolution that was applied to set-piece siege warfare. There were no effective cannon at sea, and there were no effective cannon (or hand guns) in armies on campaign. The next step was the development of cannon that were light enough to mount on ships, yet powerful enough to be ship-killers in battle. Those same cannon were light enough to drag around in the field, and for the first time it became possible to envisage personal firearms, light enough for a soldier to carry. All this happened during the 16th century. In 1485 the Welsh rebel Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, aided by a large contingent of French troops, defeated and killed the last Plantagenet King of England Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth. Henry proceeded to legitimize his seizure of power by marrying Richard's niece, Princess Elizabeth, and then quietly murdered her brothers, the male Plantagenet heirs, the so-called Princes in the Tower. Henry VII needed military strength against several major uprisings, and invited many foreign gun-makers and gunners to help him build up his artillery. In 1496 he needed another build-up, this time against a threatened Scottish invasion. He authorised and financed the construction of a major new ironworks at Newbridge, in the Weald. This was the first recorded blast furnace in England, and it was built to produce cannon-balls and all the iron fittings that were needed for gun-carriages. Blast furnaces were already being used in Europe to make iron cannon balls: cast iron rather than wrought iron. Cannon-ball technology had advanced along with cannon. The days of stone cannon balls were over, though cannon-balls were still called "gunstones." Iron was denser than stone, so had more hitting power. Stone cannon balls had to be carved one at a time, and were never perfectly spherical. This meant that they did not fit the barrel well, wasting the energy of the gunpowder. Instead, smiths in England and elsewhere made composite cannon balls. First, a mass of wrought iron was forged into a rough lump that would make most of the volume of the ball, then it was placed in a mold, and molten lead was used to finish it to shape. This process was still time-consuming and expensive, especially the forging of the iron, though it was cheaper than casting balls from pure lead, or from bronze. Casting also gave cannon-balls of uniform size, which allowed gunners to fire more accurate, more powerful shots. Once cast iron was available from blast furnaces, cannon balls could be mass-produced fairly cheaply. Workers would pick up gobbets of molten iron in large ladles with long handles, then pour the iron into waiting molds. The resulting cannon-balls had the great advantage of uniform size. The Weald iron industry really took off under Henry VII's successor. The new King, Henry VIII, came to the throne at the age of 17 in 1509, as the new era of warfare was settling into maturity. England was holding precariously to the last remnants of its centuries-old territory in northern France, centered on the fortress-ports of Calais and Boulogne. These outposts gave political and military leverage both against the traditional enemy France, and the powerful duchy of Burgundy, which was usually a military ally but always an economic competitor. But England was relatively backward militarily, and had been left behind in terms of artillery and fighting ships. Henry VIII seems to have felt very conscious of his frail claim to the English throne, and this paranoia played itself out in various ways throughout his long reign (1509-1547), ranging all the way to bouts of murderous rage at enemies real and imagined. Henry was the first English King to require the address "Your Majesty" instead of the simpler "Your Highness" which had been good enough for his Plantagenet predecessors. We all know that Henry beheaded two of his six wives, but he also executed many of the nobility who had the misfortune to carry Plantagenet blood (they were potential claimants to the throne) and many other courtiers on suspicion of treason of one sort or another. On a larger scale, Henry broke with the Pope and declared himself head of an independent English Church, and almost as soon as he inherited the throne he picked fights with his neighbors, Scotland and France, declaring war on France in 1512. Immediately this military activity brought orders to the Weald ironmasters. Although Henry had some bronze guns, they were very expensive, and Henry chose the cheaper, local solution that also fostered an early equivalent of an English military-industrial complex. One agent alone supplied nine tons of iron "gunstones" [cannon-balls] in August 1513. At first, the English had great success. They defeated the French at the Battle of the Spurs, and this early success in France allowed Henry to take over the city of Tournai, a major center for armaments production. The Queen of France apparently appealed to the misplaced sense of chivalry of the Scottish King James IV (grandson of the unfortunately exploded James II), who led the Scottish army to total destruction by the English at the Battle of Flodden, also in 1513. Almost all the Scottish nobility, including King James, were wiped out. But low-level war and uneasy peace with France was to go on for many years. And that meant money for military preparations, and military preparations meant iron, for weapons, armor, and especially for guns: personal firearms for an increasing proportion of the army, cannon for ships, bigger cannon for shore forts and castles, small field guns for the army, and huge guns that could be used in sieges. And to a large extent, iron production meant the Weald. By 1520 the Weald had begun a rise in iron production that was to reach very high levels. Iron workers were brought in from the iron-making areas of northern France, probably as expert engineers in an early example of technology transfer. In principle, blast-furnace technology could also be used to cast iron cannon. But early attempts in Europe did not work. Partly, there was little incentive: iron guns were markedly heavier than bronze, so more difficult to move around and to handle in battle and in sieges. Bronze was readily available, and bronze-casting furnaces did not have to reach the high temperatures required for casting iron. In England, where bronze was not readily available while iron was, there may have been more incentive to persevere after early failures. In 1541, William Levett was the royal "gunstone maker", that is, he made cast iron cannon-balls at a foundry in the Weald built by his elder brother in 1534. Levett is not a normal English name, and the brothers may have originally come from an immigrant family. Certainly Levett was an innovator, and in 1543 he built a new blast-furnace at Buxted, to try to cast iron cannon. He brought in another foreign expert, Peter Baude, who had been casting bronze cannon for the King in London. Levett and Baude were successful, and the Buxted works produced the first one-piece cast iron cannon in 1543. Their early cannon went into fixed positions in coastal forts, where weight did not matter much. Progress was rapid. A foundry with two furnaces was built in 1546, so that enough molten iron could be supplied at one time to pour into larger molds and produce larger cannon. By 1549, 53 forges and blast furnaces were operating in the Weald – not all for military iron, of course, but a dramatic increase. And the industry more than doubled over the following 25 years. By 1574 there were 110 furnaces and forges in the area, producing several thousand tons of iron each year, including several hundred tons of cannon. The new iron cannon were excellent guns, and in particular they were excellent value for money. They were not only cheaper than bronze, and harder and stronger, so had more hitting power. Their only disadvantage was weight. For a hundred years, English iron cannon were the best in the world. It's not clear why, because cast iron was widely produced in Western Europe. The historian Ernest Straker thought that the secret may have lain in the mold-making from the local Sussex clay. Whatever the reason, iron cannon became important strategic weapons, comparable to modern fighter aircraft. The English supplied iron cannon to friendly powers, as we do today with our fighters, and they tried to keep them out of the hands of potential enemies, as we do. It is not an exaggeration to call the Wealden iron industry a military-industrial complex. Many rich and powerful families were connected with the iron industry – the Boleyns, the Sidneys, the Howards, the Nevilles, the Dudleys, and the Sackvilles were all landowners in the Weald. The political controversies that swirled around it make the story of the Weald eerily similar to 20th century examples. A new industry does not evolve in a vacuum: it requires supplies and services, and it may well compete for those with activities and industries that are already well established. This means confrontation, and controversy, and sometimes dislocation and disturbance. We are accustomed to this today: container freight, for example, has altered the transportation industry at sea, at ports, on railroads, and on the roads, and there have been disputes and strikes over it. Participants rage and posture, and engage in publicity stunts, and hire PR agents, and threaten boycotts or lawsuits, and appeal to Congress about unemployment or economic hardship or unfair practices, and predict dire consequences for the nation, in the end the decisions that are made are swayed by politics as well as economics. It's naive to think that all this is a feature just of our modern society. It's been going on since there have been changes in manufacture and commerce, in other words, since people began to make goods and trade them. The Weald serves as an example of events over 400 years ago that show many of these features. Some of the tactics, and the language, and the response of the Government, are amazingly similar to the reactions one is used to seeing today. The new Wealden iron industry required water, fuel, and transport, and there were disputes about all of them. Neighbors complained as streams were dammed and diverted, and roads were ripped to pieces as wagons loaded with charcoal, iron ore, iron, and iron products churned along them. Queen Elizabeth's Government passed laws in 1584 requiring every sixth ironworks wagon to carry stone and gravel to re-surface the road it was using. But there were continual complaints and prosecutions and fines of ironmasters who ignored the law, and none of the fuss did much good to the roads. Coaches were allowed to charge higher fares in Sussex than in any other county in England in the 1650s, and as late as 1786, an observer commented that the only road in Sussex fit for carriages was the 1700-year-old Roman road, Stane Street: ironically enough, Stane Street was so well constructed because the Romans had built into its foundations the slag from their ironworks in the Weald. I want to concentrate here on fuel, and on the wider political arena. There had been enough wood to supply the medieval industry, but the pressure on the Wealden forests grew enormously, beginning in the 1520s and accelerating with the tremendous growth of the iron industry from the 1540s onward. Henry VIII's government was seriously concerned about timber supplies. The problem was not just economic, it was strategic. The new large warships the Navy was building required large, old oak trees (one battleship of the time required more than 2000 100-year-old oak trees) and to be useful, the trees had to be growing within reasonable distance of water transport because they were too large to haul very far overland. The best oaks grew in southeast England, close to London and close to the Wealden iron industry. So Parliament passed a law that said that after 1544, a certain number of mature oaks were to be left (for national needs) during logging. Woods could not be cleared and converted to fields, and so on. However, the Weald was specifically excluded from the provisions of the law, and one must assume that this was the result of pressure on behalf of the vital military supplies being manufactured there. But iron-making was not the only industry in the Weald. In particular, wood was exported to the English-controlled areas in northern France, and these shipments (also strategically important) formed much of the trade of the old, silting ports of Rye, Hastings, and Winchelsea, on the coast south of the Weald. Other industries also exploited the woodlands: suppliers of wood and charcoal for brewing, glass-making, dyeing, home construction, carpentry, and domestic fuel. When Henry VIII died in 1547, leaving the boy King Edward VI as monarch, England was governed by a regency council of noblemen led by the "Protector of the Realm," the new King's uncle, the Duke of Somerset. Somerset was a military commander, and was probably concerned more about the strategic value of the Weald than anything else. To a military commander, the Weald was vital for two things: military iron, and the wood supply for the English-held outposts in northern France. One of Somerset's early acts was to set up a commission of inquiry to look into the whole question of wood, timber, and the relative merits of the iron industry in relation to the southern ports and their trade. The people of the ports took the opportunity to vent their anger with a vengeance, and the commission reported their words. Today, people who get a chance to appear at televised Congressional hearings are acutely aware that they have to produce a "sound bite" that may be broadcast on the evening news. That will do more for their cause than anything written in the eventual dry pages of the Congressional report, which few people will read. In Tudor times, reports were read, and people seem to have crafted their language very carefully to achieve comparable results. The language is vivid and powerful, and the themes are universal. These writers knew how to press every available political button: rising prices, physical and economic hardship for many people, prospects of massive unemployment and social disruption, damage to trade and danger to strategic national interests. There were more than fifty ironworks close to the south coast, complained the "jurors" (sworn witnesses) from the seaports. Each works consumed 1500 loads of wood a year, and caused collateral damage to the remaining forests during the harvesting. The price of wood had more than doubled in 15 years, while the average size of a "load" had gone down by a quarter. The ironworks were using so much wood that there was a danger that the wood supply for the ports would be exhausted, and there would be no wood for shipment to the English territories in France. There would be no building timber for houses, windmills, bridges, piers and jetties, or boats; there would be no wood for military or domestic needs
A great number of people would be put out of work by the iron industry:
Only a few people were benefiting from the ironworks, while
And, said these pitiful petitioners, adding the poignant human touch, the ports of Hastings and Rye would
Ironworks should be closed down unless they were at least ten miles (some ports said 20) from the sea, said the petitioners. Thomas Darell, one of the commissioners, put in his own complaint. Alexander Collyn had built a furnace at Lamberhurst, and had bought timber rights from Sir John Gresham. Collyn had apparently felled most of the oak trees and was now beginning on the beeches. Given that there were six other ironworks nearby, this would mean that the woods would be
Furthermore, Collyn had diverted a stream to power the water-hammer at his furnace. Given that the former stream bed had acted as a property line for several landowners, and the county boundary between Kent and Sussex, Darell predicted that
It is difficult to tell whether Somerset's commission had the same motivation as our present-day congressional inquiries, namely, mainly to allow people to vent their anger, and to allow Congressmen some TV time and publicity. Thomas Darrell's testimony certainly suggests that some commissioners were genuinely horrified at the impact of the industry, though the Darrell family went on to become ironmasters themselves in later years. However, the chairman of the commission, Sir Thomas Cawarden, was an ironmaster, and the eventual result of the enquiry was much the same as most Congressional hearings today: nothing was done. One assumes that the political power of the ironmasters blocked action, especially the draconian closure that the seaports demanded. One has to be fair, however. The complaints were obviously exaggerated for dramatic effect, just as happens today in Congressional hearings. Counter-arguments have been offered by modern scholars, and were no doubt included in the discussions at the time. Somerset's question was really about fuel supplies, and that meant charcoal for the iron industry. But charcoal is best made from small branches, not from construction-grade timber. Foresters had already had several centuries experience with the process of coppicing. The main trunk is cut off a young hardwood tree, which sprouts several new, thinner trunks from the edges of the cut. After several years of growth, these slim straight trunks are large enough to be cut off, whereupon new sprouts begin the process again. Hazel was coppiced to form the flexible laths used in wattle-and-daub wall construction. As early as the 13th century, coppicing hardwoods for firewood in northern Kent, close to the voracious appetite of London, yielded more money per acre than cattle pasture. But coppicing hazel, hornbeam, sycamore, chestnut, and willow also provided a great deal of medium-sized wood from a comparatively small area, to make into charcoal, in a sustained, long-term yield. Meanwhile, the rest of the forest could be managed to provide shelter for game, and to grow the larger mature trees needed for timber, and especially for ship-building. Very few people see coppicing these days, but you can get some idea about it by thinking of the pruning that's done to urban trees or to fruit and nut trees in orchards. Young branches sprout back, so that the urban tree can look ornamental and the orchard tree can produce the best branch system to hold lots of crop. The pruned branches are often large enough to be sold as firewood. I feed my wood-burning stove with pruned fruit wood (cherry or almond), which not only keeps me warm outside, but gives me the satisfaction of knowing this is Ecologically Correct firewood. No trees have been deliberately felled to feed my stove. Coppicing has another advantage. Charcoal (real charcoal, as opposed to the clay-filled charred sawdust briquettes sold to us as "charcoal") does not transport very well on carts over rough roads: it is brittle and breaks up into fragments that are useless for an iron furnace. Charcoal had to be made near the furnace, which again means that each furnace was drawing on a fairly limited area of forest. Modern calculations suggest that a furnace and forge could be supplied from a 3-mile radius if 25% of the land around it was properly coppiced. As far as we can tell from the records, coppicing in the 1550s was not up to modern-day efficiency, but certainly enough to qualify as legitimate careful forestry. Landowners would sometimes specify a continuation or an extension of coppicing in their wills. Certainly forest clearing was going on, but the iron industry was not usually a major offender. It did take a lot of the blame, however, now and at the time. Whatever went on behind the scenes in 1548, no action was taken to apply national forest laws to the Weald. The exemptions continued for the ironmasters. The feelings of the locals reached breaking point in short-lived rioting and sabotage, and his political enemies used the disturbances as one of the pretexts for getting rid of the Duke of Somerset, who was dismissed as Protector in 1549. Charged with treason, he was executed in 1552, one of his crimes being that the work of his commission had stirred up "sedition, insurrection, and rebellion"! In 1558, the first year of Elizabeth's reign, the government passed a law forbidding the felling of trees to make charcoal for iron smelting, but again political and economic pressures forced the exemption of the Wealden charcoal-makers from that law. By 1581, in the face of an increasing threat from Spain, the supply of timbers for shipbuilding was so endangered that the Government forbade felling of trees for any reason within three miles of the coast, within 22 miles of the River Thames, or within the Weald. By this time the law could pass without effect on the strategic production of cannon in the Weald, because coppicing rather than tree-felling supplied almost all of the charcoal. For example, Sir John Pelham directed in his will in 1580 that coppicing should be promoted on his estate, and even eighty years later we find the Pelham estate producing hundreds of cords of "copse wood" a year, and only a few dozen cords of "log wood". In short, the iron industry has been unfairly blamed for the deforestation of the Weald. Deforestation was not confined to the Weald: whatever caused it was more than iron-working, and I shall discuss the problem much more in the next Chapter. However, the accusation of deforestation was used as a powerful propaganda weapon against the iron-masters. By the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign in 1558, it was clear to everyone that the English (to be precise, the Weald ironmasters) were producing the best iron cannon in the world. Immediately, there is a problem. The entrepreneurs that have developed the technology surely have some sort of right to make money from it, yet it is against the national interest that these weapons fall into the hands of potential or actual enemies. For England and Elizabeth in 1560, potential or actual enemies included strong neighbors: Scotland, France, and the Spanish who were firmly established in what is now Belgium. The French had retaken all of northern France, including the fortresses of Calais and Boulogne, and the two countries were officially still at war. The Scots had strong ties with France ("the Auld Alliance"), and Mary Queen of Scots, the heiress to the English throne after Queen Elizabeth, was already calling herself "Queen of England". Queen Elizabeth and her ministers had a very difficult task in threading through the complexities that threatened to unite England's enemies against her. England's only two advantages were her fighting ships and skilled seamen, which made any invasion across the Channel dangerous, and they depended on the iron cannon that they carried. Late in the 1560s, more trouble arose. The Spanish, now under the fanatically Catholic King Philip II, shipped 20,000 soldiers to take the city of Antwerp, in an attempt to stifle a rebellion by their Flemish provinces, and to re-establish Catholicism among these heretical Protestants. In 1568 they beheaded twenty prominent Flemish leaders in Brussels, and this drove the provinces into an open war against Spain that would last 80 years. By the end of 1572 the Spanish had gathered an enormous army and were making major headway into the heartland of the rebellion, now Holland. The English watched carefully. The Spanish army was renowned and feared throughout Europe. Equipped with the most modern firearms, it was the largest army seen so far in Renaissance Europe; its ranks included many battle-hardened veterans of Spanish wars against the French and the Moslems, many of them professional mercenaries. In August 1572 the part of the Spanish army fighting against the Dutch contained 67,000 men, and by March 1574 it reached 86,000, at a time when England could raise a total of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 men, less well equipped, less well trained, and less experienced. The situation was much like that facing England in 1940: if an invading army could reach the English shore, it could not fail to conquer the island. England's defense had to rely on stopping the invader from crossing the Channel, and that meant relying on English ships, English sailors, and most of all, on English cannon. The English could not face the Spanish in open battle on land, but they could do so at sea. As we saw in Chapter 8, Elizabeth helped Sir Francis Drake equip a major raiding expedition to Spanish America. But although it was astoundingly successful, it did not bear on the main problem. In 1573 Elizabeth appointed Francis Walsingham, her chief spymaster, as Secretary of State. Walsingham faced a difficult situation. English cannon were the best in the world, and the English faced a potentially deadly array of enemies. Cannon were being produced for army and navy in the Weald. However, cannon were also being shipped overseas, and unless they were going to the Dutch, they were going to actual or potential enemies. But the ironmasters of the Weald included some of the most powerful families in England. How should Walsingham deal with this? National survival might depend on keeping iron cannon out of enemy ships. The historian Ernest Straker suggests that Walsingham deliberately engineered a publicity drive against the ironmasters. His vehicle was to generate public complaints to the Privy Council (the body that officially provided advice to the Queen). Walsingham knew exactly which buttons to press. First, Christopher Barker complained that a hundred ironworks were ravaging the forests of the Weald. Furthermore, cannon were being sold secretly to foreigners. Barker raised two horrifying prospects: that English cannon mounted on foreign ships would strangle English trade:
More important, perhaps, was a petition from Ralph Hogge, for many years the principal maker of cannon-balls for the Queen. Hogge reminded the Privy Council that there were persistent complaints that cannon were being sold surreptiously to enemy ships, and that he (Hogge) was being blamed for it. Hogge pointed out that he provided the Queen with cannonballs for £8 a ton, while others charged her £12 and £13, and that he never shipped any cannon overseas without a licence. However, many furnaces were shipping cannon illegally out of the southern ports to the French and Spanish without a licence. Hogge named names in a separate sheet attached to his complaint, and he warned that the leakage of cannon abroad would only get worse unless action was taken. (Hogge's English is wonderful, but so badly spelled that I cannot quote much of it! A sample:
Whether Walsingham engineered the complaints or not, they hit the target. On February 3, 1574, the Privy Council issued subpoenas for 77 ironmasters to appear in person to testify about their activities. The Royal messenger Richard Pedley rode 483 miles in 19 days over winter roads to deliver them. Some of the ironmasters, the most powerful, including Sir Thomas Gresham of Gresham's Law, ignored the summonses. Others made excuses: "an old man of 80 years and not able to travell" or "lame in his legges and feete"; but Walsingham probably succeeded in choking off much of the leakage. As the great Spanish Armada was being prepared in January 1588, the Spanish were trying to buy iron cannon, but in vain. In the event, most of the guns on the Armada were bronze. After the Armada was destroyed by a combination of English tactics and bad weather, the Privy Council instructed the English High Admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, to send "a discreet gentleman" to visit the iron foundries and stop the casting of guns. No-one imagines that the smuggling trade in iron cannon was choked off entirely. The decaying ports along this coast probably had smuggling as their major industry until well into the 1800s. The point is that cannon are not like brandy or tobacco or silk, low-volume, high-value goods that can easily and quietly be transported on horseback across the countryside. Rudyard Kipling wrote about the smugglers riding through the villages of the Weald on winter nights:
But you can't carry a cannon on a pony, and illegal cannon exports had to be institutionalized, with forged licences, or fake delivery addresses, exactly as happens today in the international arms trade. Any government determined to stop the trade can certainly do so; most governments are content to choke it to a trickle. The comprehensive defeat of the Spanish Armada did not put an end to hostilities between England and Spain, but it did remove the immediate danger of invasion. England thereafter became a major exporter of cannon. In 1592 the Dutch received 200 cannon to help them fight the Spanish, and there are estimates that over 2000 tons a year of iron cannon were exported in the last years of Elizabeth's reign around 1600. Even when England was at peace, there were continuing orders for cannon to be mounted on merchant ships for protection against pirates (the East India Company was a big customer for the Weald). In 1610 William Camden could still write:
The iron industry began to change in the 17th century. The Swedes in particular were mining very high-quality iron ore, had vast forests, and cheap labor. They began to ship iron (even to England) at prices that the English could not match. They designed new, lightly built cannon for use by field armies, and the astounding successes of Swedish armies in the 1620s and 1630s led other nations to buy or imitate their weapons in the same way that Israel has become an important weapons exporter in our times. The Swedes certainly took cannon sales away from the English. When 4000 tons of cannon were shipped to Holland in 1628, it was not a cash sale: it was to redeem the Crown Jewels, which King Charles I had pawned to the Dutch! An explosion in charcoal prices after about 1630 in England essentially closed down the cheaper end of the English iron industry, which could no longer compete for fuel on the domestic market, or for sales on the international market. The primary reason for the price increase and falling sales was relentless pressure on English forests by all kinds of interests, but, of course, someone had to take the blame, and the natural reaction was to blame the foreign competition, which was portrayed as evil and unfair. There was political pressure for banning the cheap imports. (This is playing out today in the United States in the chip-making industry, but it has also happened to shoes, clothing, ships, televisions, and cars.) In 1664 an petitioner to King Charles II asked for an import duty on foreign iron. He complained that
The petitioner predicted the end of the English iron industry, massive unemployment, dependence on an unstable foreign source for iron, and loss of business for English ships. (Exactly the same sorts of arguments are being made today about cheap Chinese products, many of which are manufactured by prisoners in labor camps, or cheap Indonesian products, made with cheap child labor.) The petitioner of 1664 was complaining about Sweden. The Swedish iron mines were indeed worked by slave labor, mostly prisoners of war from the campaigns of the Swedes into Germany, Poland, the Baltic, and Russia during the religious wars in 17th-century Europe. The petitioner got his import duty, but it did not help. The Wealden iron industry was forced to concentrate more and more on high-quality cast iron, which largely meant cannon production. There was still domestic demand for armaments. The King's ship Sovereign of the Seas, launched in 1637, carried 102 guns, and by 1673 the English battle fleet totalled well over a hundred ships with a firepower of nearly 10,000 guns. (The Royal gunmaker made 1500 cannon in 1665 alone.) The pattern of low-level, high-quality production for the Army, Navy, and English merchant ships continued during the early 1700s until the invention of coke as a cheap fuel for blast-furnaces killed off the last charcoal-fired furnaces of the Weald and transferred a revitalized English iron industry to the coalfields. In the last days of the Wealden industry, charcoal accounted for over 80% of the cost of making cast iron. Today, the ruins of furnaces and forges, scatterings of slag, and the ponds that supplied the water for bellows and hammers are dotted all over the landscape of the Weald, but are fading with time. In some places only the place-names remain. They look simply like quaint Englishisms unless you are attuned to the meanings behind them: Abinger Hammer, Upper Forge Pond, Hammerwood, Ordnance Place, Hammerfield, Gun Green, Furnace Farm, Hammerden, Burners Hill, Smithy Wood, and many other names that contain Minepit, Cinder [=slag], Forge, and Furnace. And then there is that fine old English pub The Neville Crest and Gun at Eridge, in the heart of the Weald. In its name and its sign, the pub features the family crest of the 19 generations of Nevilles that have owned the Bergavenny estate for over 500 years, and were landlords drawing rent from ironmasters and woodcutters in the heyday of the Weald iron industry. And, of course, the pub had a Gun on the front lawn until someone stole it. Since it lost the Gun, the pub has gone sadly downhill, and its ancient frontage is polluted by a large plastic play house. — Notes for Geology 115, by Richard Cowen Geology Department, University of California at Davis More about Cannons and Gunpowder |
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1543 – 1813 The best iron cannons made anywhere This region produced excellent iron cannons for 270 years Iron guns 'After the English Fashion' In 1567 Queen Elizabeth granted Ralph Hogge the monopoly of exporting 'cast iron ordnance with gunstones' to foreign countries, provided that they were not required by the Office of the Ordnance in London. From Hogge's complaint against an infringement of his rights we know into which countries ordnance was exported, namely Denmark, Flanders, France, Holland, Sweden, and Spain... http://www.landguard.com/casting.htm Wealden Iron Masters and Cannons, 1543-1813 http://www.villagenet.co.uk/history/1543-ironmasters.html |
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2004 May 90
2004 Apr 115
2004 Mar 100
2004 Feb 0
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W3C CSS Validation Service |
