Читать книгу The Complete English Wing Shot онлайн

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Sometimes the barrel was hinged in order to drop down at right angles with the stock, and this was really the forerunner of our drop-down guns of to-day, which are consequently some centuries old in principle, and had it not been for the absence of detonators there would have been nothing left for the nineteenth century to invent.

It has been said that the Prussians were first to take up the principle of the breech-loader for war, but that refers only to the detonated modern breech-loader. Some of the soldiers in the American War of Independence were armed with the breech-loader already mentioned, in which the trigger guard unscrewed the opening into the breech; but although this invention was possibly the soundest in joining of all the old ones, it was slow, and probably was not much used for that reason.

The Venetians had ships armed with cannon as early as 1380 A.D., and in Henry VIII.’s reign the wrecked Mary Rose carried breech-loaders, designed on a principle which may possibly have suggested the wire guns of the present. The tube of iron or brass (for both were used) was surmounted by rings of iron which had evidently been slipped over the tube and hammered on while red-hot. These then contracted upon cooling, and pinched the bore smaller, so that, intentionally or not, the bore was made to expand to its original size upon an explosion occurring before any stress was put on the metal of the internal surface by the powder-gas. That is to say, all the first part of the strain went to expand the rings on the outside of the gun before the inside had reassumed its natural dimensions; or, in other words, the tension between the external big circumference and the internal small one was equalised, just on the same principle as it is in the latest big guns. This is known, because some of the Mary Rose’s big guns were got up from the sea about half a century ago. She was over-weighted, and it is quite probable that her loss had a good deal to do with teaching the nation that before everything a warship must be handy, so that, when the Spaniards sent their great ships to fight Elizabeth, her smaller craft, and Britain’s uncertain weather, between them sank or squandered the whole Spanish fleet.