A really big old Matchlock Fortress Gun

[Earlwb]

I got this many years ago, maybe around 40 years go now. I thought it would be quite fascinating. I had hoped I could salvage it and shoot it again. But alas the bore was bad and rusted out. Worse was the barrel had been bent in the past and someone straightened it out, but it left a dent in the side wall that protruded into the bore too. It is possible it was left over after a battle and a attempt was made to repair it. Or it was simply repaired to be sold for display too. The barrel was cast and bored from the looks of it. So it would need a new barrel to be shoot-able. It is impressive nonetheless. It is a little over seven feet in length and has about an .80 bore to it.

This one came from India originally. If I remember correctly, I think it was imported by Century at the time. They used to use these guns as fortress guns. They would shoot down on the enemy troops massing to charge the walls. Being a large bore gun, with a really long barrel, they had greater range over the shorter more portable guns. They actually were still using these guns up until the early 1900's.

My son is holding the monster to give you a sense of scale to this thing. He isn't very tall, so it makes it look even longer.

The matchlock mechanism actually works really well. The trigger is the simple plate that you push with your fingers. It then levers the arm with a wick smoldering on it, into the flash pan. They used some levers to cause the arm to quickly zip down towards the flash pan too. I have entertained maybe getting some good steel tubing and doubling it up. Installing a breech plug and flash pan on the tubing and making a new barrel for it. But I never got around to doing it though.

[waarp8nt]

That is one big front stuffer for sure! You seem to know some history on it too. Just curious, do you think they would have loaded buckshot or buck n ball loads at times when the enemy was closing in?

[prsman23]

Most likely bowling balls were loaded.....
Very neat piece of history

[Earlwb]

They would use just about anything to load it with. Big round balls, sometimes more than one would be fired at the enemy in the distance massing for the assault. Then yes they would load buckshot, balls, nails, small stones, glass, any mixture of things as the enemy was trying to assault the fortress.

Since the guns were too big and heavy, they rested them on the parapets, ramparts, etc. to shoot them.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

This type of gun in more normal size was known as a torador musket, and although they might have come from native princes' armouries fairly recently, I doubt if they saw much use after the mid-19th century. As well as a wall gun, one this size could have been swivel mounted on a camel. (Elephants, possibly endowed with imagination, don't stand gunfire as well.) I can't make out anything in the picture, but you might find some kind of fitting to show that it was used in a swivel or fork rest, or scoring in the woodwork to indicate such use.

Like the Kentucky rifle, its length probably owes much to the possibility of being used with inferior powder. The barrel is probably a simple welded spiral, and I would on no account use more than one ball, even in one in good condition. In the early days of the French in Algeria, with smoothbores on both sides, they found that the Algerians' long native-made muskets were accurate at longer range than the soldiers, due probably to better boring and tightly patched bullets. But I don't think this was the case in India.

It isn't, to put it mildly, an advanced or efficient firearm. But it has been places, and seen things.

[Earlwb]

This one doesn't appear to have been used in a swivel mount setup. I looked and although it has scuff marks everywhere, there isn't anything obvious for wear marks around where one might put it into a swivel mount. I think they simply propped it up on the castle/fortress ramparts and aim at the troops below. But it was repaired sometime in the past. So they could have replace the forestock as the barrel had been bent and straightened.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I notice that the spelling check had taken the responsibility of altering "torador" to "toreador". The authentic version now prevails, as it has nothing to do with any bull, particularly in the literal sense. A few of the hand-held ones, probably dating from before the arrival of "modern" firearms, were extremely well finished, with gold inlay, painted panels, etc,

I must have suffered a mental block, for I had forgotten the word "jingal", possibly of Chinese origin although the word was used by the British of both Chinese and Indian weapons. If it was Chinese it would most likely date the word to the 1840s or 1850s, by which time the weapon was greatly out of date in India. It may have been like the word "curry", the Anglo-Indian word for a wide class of food, which would mystify many Indians. But the British encountered jingals in Tibet in 1904. The one in this picture looks like it might have a simpler matchlock action, and is almost certainly of Chinese design.


165562

As a weapon these were severely limited. A bigger ball can't kill a man any deader than dead, and both flatter trajectory and the sort of improvement in accuracy which comes from a longer sight base are wasted on a smoothbore musket. It could be that they were thought to give a better chance of incapacitating a war elephant, but that seems optimistic, and I don't believe elephants were used in combat far into the nineteenth century in India, and never in China or Tibet.

In China, much later, there were breech-loading jingals. In the UK we have a hard fought-for government list of cartridge firearms which are uncontrolled antiques if made up to 1939, and besides some very usable ones, it includes the .60 and .75 Chinese Jingal. Just what sort of return they got for making and carrying such things, in lead-bullet and pre-armour days, is hard to see.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com/rifles/chinese-jingal-wall-gun/

[Earlwb]

Thanks for that information. These wall or fortress guns are quite interesting. As you stated a piece of history. It would be interesting if they could tell us their stories.

My memory was jogged a little. I think my example came from Jaipur, their government armory at the time. They had released for export and sale a number of the big fortress guns. It was part of the Jaipur Old City Defense System. I gleaned this bit of history from another source. "Jaipur was first constructed in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh, ruled 1699-1744, who moved his capital to this new city from nearby Amber. Known as the "Pink City" for it's great beauty today it is home to almost 4 Million people. The current Maharaja is a Polo playing friend of Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales." Anyway, this may be one of those guns that were imported into the USA back in the early 1980's.

That breech loading Jingal article was interesting in stating that these guns were sort of like precision artillery at the time. Many people may not realize that muskets tend to be more effective or accurate than they think they are. The big long wall guns could easily hit a man size target at over 100 yards away. Shooting at massed troops would likely be quite effective out a couple of hundred yards or more too.

[Earlwb]

Wikipedia has some interesting information about the wall guns too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_gun
George Washington during the War of Independence acquired some wall guns. He found that they could hit a paper size target at 600 yards. This is a large caliber smoothbore musket too.

another reference:
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/01/the-wall-guns-some-epically-large-rifles-2550934.html

I hadn't thought of it before, but they used to issue wall guns to naval ships at the time. Plus artillery units would be issued wall guns to go along with their cannons too.

They may still be selling replica parts to make your own wall gun too. I don't know for sure though. It would be pretty spectacular and a lot of fun to shoot one at the range some day.
http://www.therifleshoppe.com/catalog_pages/english_arms/%28727%29.htm


This guy has a nice replica flintlock version of a wall gun.
165564

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Thanks for that information. These wall or fortress guns are quite interesting. As you stated a piece of history. It would be interesting if they could tell us their stories.

My memory was jogged a little. I think my example came from Jaipur, their government armory at the time. They had released for export and sale a number of the big fortress guns. It was part of the Jaipur Old City Defense System. I gleaned this bit of history from another source. "Jaipur was first constructed in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh, ruled 1699-1744, who moved his capital to this new city from nearby Amber. Known as the "Pink City" for it's great beauty today it is home to almost 4 Million people. The current Maharaja is a Polo playing friend of Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales." Anyway, this may be one of those guns that were imported into the USA back in the early 1980's.

That breech loading Jingal article was interesting in stating that these guns were sort of like precision artillery at the time. Many people may not realize that muskets tend to be more effective or accurate than they think they are. The big long wall guns could easily hit a man size target at over 100 yards away. Shooting at massed troops would likely be quite effective out a couple of hundred yards or more too.

Forty years ago seems about right. India included a very large number of nearly-independent princely states, which varied about as much as humanity can - from about the size of Li'l Abner's Dogpatch up to small nations, and from those which had to be leant on to restrict their allowance of beastliness, up to extremely well organized and benevolent ones. India took over some of them by force and gentler pressure after independence, and in the early 70s abolished the princely titles and privy purse. In some cases certain private gentlemen still receive just the same sort of respect as they always did, though no doubt others had to travel for health reasons. As they were often extremely well educated, business opportunities got put their way. But the 70s and 80s were a time when money was short.

Guns you could call wall guns were quite common in the British and other navies, mostly in the fighting tops for use in close action. They were usually very much like large swivel blunderbusses, loaded with shot. A few years back there was a "Gun Digest" article on multi-barreled "Roman Candle" guns, in which each load communicated the flash through a hole in the bullet behind it. It had many of the qualities of the machine-gun, but the big snag was that once started, you couldn't turn it off. It had to be kept in a direction safe for your own side, and a hangfire in one barrel could easily go unnoticed.

Very large smoothbore elephant guns were usually quite short, but a type of gun sometimes confused with wall guns were punt guns of up to 2in. bore, used for stalking waterfowl in a punt resembling a large modern sport canoe. Some had a swivel set in a spring shock absorbing device fitted to the boat, others a hole through the butt for a breeching rope, and some a sort of hinged spade-shaped butt to be held under the firer's chest.

I'm sure a smoothbore wall gun couldn't possibly hit a sheet of writing paper at 600 yards, or a medium-sized van either. In fact I don't believe a rifled firearm used in the American Revolution could have done it dependably, although later ones certainly would. What we are told is that someone made this claim in a letter, and in war truth is the first casualty.

[Earlwb]

I used to think that about the smoothbore muskets. Typically a musket was only good for maybe 100 yards top with a clean bore that hadn't fouled yet. Sort of like a modern shotgun firing slugs. A 4 to 6 inch group was about it. Unfortunately most all of the muskets of that time had no sights. They typically used them in volley fire, so sights weren't important. But the big wall guns with their large bores may be more like the old cannons of the period. The big wall guns usually had sights on them for better aiming. They used to be amazingly accurate firing the cannons back then. But we need to find out if anyone firing modern replica wall guns had anything to say about their accuracy.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

That would be strikingly different from what people on the "Casting for Shotguns" board say about shooting round ball with the best of bores and sights. It then compares surprisingly well with modern slugs up to about 50 yards, with groups like those you mention. But at 100 the groups are strikingly more than double the size, and at 600 more than six times the size for 100. Even quality muzzle-loaders weren't bored to the standard customers started to demand when they got to look through the thing, and military muskets were often extremely bad.

Eastern American Indians mostly did go over from bows to muskets, but the got results on the above scale by wadding the ball more tightly than the military, who were more interested in rapidity of fire. We have to remember that battlefields were wreathed heavily in smoke, and it would have been a perpetual wall if volley fire hadn't been used. But if a regiment could advance to twenty or thirty yards while the enemy was reloading, the musket was as deadly as any firearm ever made. They almost all did have rudimentary sights, good enough for that purpose, as the front sight was also the locating stud for the socket bayonet.

[Multigunner]

The range for an unpatched round ball is greatly reduced due to the ball rolling in the bore causing a reversed Bernouli effect when it comes out.
A tight patched ball doesn't roll in the bore.

Elephants weren't much used in warfare in the 19th century but were often used in hunting tigers. The Howdah pistol for example was intended for use if the Tiger attacked the hunters or the Elephant.

[725]

Except for the matchlock, that wall gun reminds me of a Chesapeake punt gun used in market gunning for ducks. Outlawed around here for years.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

The range for an unpatched round ball is greatly reduced due to the ball rolling in the bore causing a reversed Bernouli effect when it comes out.
A tight patched ball doesn't roll in the bore.

Elephants weren't much used in warfare in the 19th century but were often used in hunting tigers. The Howdah pistol for example was intended for use if the Tiger attacked the hunters or the Elephant.

A tightly patched ball won't roll in the bore, but if it isn't spin stabilized it will commence rolling at some unpredictable path in its subsequent flight. General Hatcher likens it to what is apparently called the spit ball in baseball, although that sounds quite horrid. A cushion of air builds up in front of the bullet friction doesn't spin it off as it does with a rifle, and eventually the bullet slips out on one side, picking up a roll as it does so. Air speed is then higher on one side than the other, producing deviation.

Smoothbore artillery was very inaccurate as well. That is why with roundshot artillerymen tried to bounce the shot from the ground, as from the first to the final bounce it would remain at a dangerous height to troops on the ground.