George Hill....

I was referring to George Osborne's comments, not yours. My first name is George but I am called by shortened middle name. Too many Georges I guess.

Lafayette;

Indeed, the patron boxes were for paper cartridges. However, there is some debate as to whether or not the first ones were simply full of powder and a separate ball was carried, but they figured out pretty quickly that it was more efficient to combine the two into a single package. If you note the length of the box, it becomes fairly straightforward that it's the same length as a paper-cartridge, with perhaps some extra room for pyrites or something at the bottom under the wooden block. I just received a patron box that I had contracted for some time ago, so as soon as I get some photo's of it I'll post them.

Cheers!

Gordon

Lin;

Yup, Mike Venturino knows his stuff. I've shot with him before, but my good friend and co-worker Jim Milner shoots with him regularly in the long-range BP Cartridge matches. Jim is now using a .50-70, and that old man can SHOOT! He uses the SPG lube, which is really, really good stuff. I used to use it religiously back when I was doing a lot of BP Cartridge shooting too, and it's really good. It keeps your fouling nice and "damp", for lack of a better word, so that it doesn't turn into the concrete that it can with more modern style bullet lubricants. The US Army used a 50/50 mix of bee's wax and olive oil, and that makes just as good a lube as SPG, but doesn't come in the nice tubes that SPG does... :D Anyway, anything that Mike Venturino has written is pretty much dead on the money from my perspective. As you note, he's been doing this for a long time, and knows where-of he speaks.

Looks like you and I have been shooting black powder for about the same length of time. I think I started in 1968 too... :cool:

Cheers!

Gordon

[/quote] Now here's a question.... I have a "powder horn" (It's a brass tube, but still...) and it has a funnel measure on the end, separated from the main container by a switch. This end bit conforms to a set volume of powder, and is infact replaceable by other tips which conform to various volumes. One 'could' put their finger over the end, invert, flip the switch just below it which separates the tip from the main powder area, and measure a more or less given amount of powder from it, then pour said powder into a musket barrel. Loading direct from the horn is however specially prohibited by every MODERN set of safety directions I've ever seen. This is logical, as a stray spark could turn it into a grenade going off in your face.

But is that how people loaded from horns in the old days? I've never seen a switch like this on an old one, but that could be as I haven't paid attention.[/quote]

George...

I do not believe that folks loaded directly from the horn or flask in the old days, although I am not aware of any contemporary detailed description of how they used the horns. I guess that's just one of the things that everybody knew, so there was no reason to write it down. Modern day black powder shooters are admonished not to charge their gun directly from the horn (the grenade warning - which I see here), and it would not make sense to do so even if the danger of explosion were not there. If you are going to have consistent ballistics from your gun then you have to have a measure that will contain roughly the same powder charge for each shot. Simply pouring down the bore and guessing when to stop won't work. There are original horns and flasks with valves and I am sure they were sometimes used to charge guns. Powder flasks from the mid-19th century used that sort of arrangement for loading revolvers with loose powder, although paper cartridges were made for pistol loads too. But the best use of those flasks with the interchangeable tips is to pour the powder into your measure and then from the measure into the gun, rather than directly into the cylinder. Safety first.

While we are on the subject of horns and flasks, recent research seems to indicate that priming horns - separate, smaller horns that contained fine priming powder - were not in general use in the old days. Flintlocks were probably primed from the main powder supply.

George, I'm quite familiar with the process of loading with a paper cartridge--I've done that often enough in the British-style musket drills. It's just that I must have missed the reference to its use by 16th-century cavalrymen. And now that I think of it, it's quite reasonable that cavalrymen woudl have adopted paper cartridges first since such cartridges would have helped a lot with keeping the powder and ball in place against the motions of a galloping or jumping horse.

Quite funny, isn't it? I should stop musing and start planning the modifications to my poor old box...

George....

You really answered your own questions for the most part.

The revolver cartridges I was referring to were those made from combustible paper, as used during the Civil War. Also, many troops using revolvers carried one or more extra loaded cylinders.

Reloading pistols on horseback in the middle of a battle is problematic, no matter what method of reloading you use. I suspect that they weren't reloaded very often. Sabers and carbines, along with pistols were the full compliment of weapons. When you got close enough to use a single shot pistol you were far too close to the enemy to take the time to reload a pistol.

There have been all kinds of valves and spouts attached to flasks and horns for a very long time. Hard to say when the valve first came into use. However, for the edification of everyone reading this thread, loading a muzzle loader - especially one that has just been fired - directly from a horn or flask, valve-equipped or not, is dangerous and should not be done!

Flasks with cut-off valves definitely were used for Cavalry from the 16th Century on, and such a device probably pre-dates the pistol in fact. Cruso's "Militarie Instruction for the Caval'rie" (1632) devotes an entire fold-out page to the process of loading and firing from the saddle using a flask, in the event that the trooper ran out of paper cartridges, so it's obvious that it was an excepted method of reloading. All one needs is to place the pistol in the bridle hand, and manipulate the flask (and other items such as spanner, bullets and rammer) with the right hand.

I'll have to resize the photo-copy have of the loading drill in order to post it, but here's the book's illustration of a Cuirassier, complete with pistols, and holsters with their flasks and port-tasches.

Here are also a couple of 16th Century flasks, showing the cut-off valves fitted just under the nozzle.

[ Linked Image ]

[ Linked Image ]

Cheers!

Gordon

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But rate of fire and range are of no matter if the missile fails to injur or kill the target when it hits. Armour could be made arrow-proof but not bullet proof. Furthermore there was the psychological impact of firearms: noise, flame and smoke could be just as effective as a hit against certain types of troops.

And even nations which possesed the skill and tradition of horse archery abandoned the bow in favour of firearms, Poland-Lithuania and the Habsburg controlled parts Hungary are examples of this. In 1629 the Castellan of Cracow, Prince Zabarski, complained that 'kozacy' (Polish light cavalry equipped in what was called the 'cossack' style) were inadequate cavalry against the Swedes since the kozacy were unarmoured and used bows.

in the battle of Warsaw (1656) the Swedes and their Brandenburg allies fought with the Tartars who supported the Polish & Lithuanian armies in that battle. Dispite their famous skill with the bow the Tartars failed miserably when confronted with 'Western' troops armed with cannon, musket and pistol.

So clearly the issue is more complex than a compariosn of ranges & rates of fire makes it out to be.

Daniel

One additional note about very early paper cartridge combinations: The earliest I know of used a ball with the casting sprue still attached or even had a special sprue moulded into the ball itself. The open neck of the paper cartridge was tied with twine to the sprue so that the ball sat on top of the paper tube with the ball exposed. The loading was done by biting off the opposite end of the tube with all of the load going straight into the barrell with the paper/ball combination following thus giving a wad and ball at one stroke. As mentioned before, priming was done from a small flask of finer grain powder. Remember, powder at this early period was not milled or "corned" as it came to be called, but was termed "sepentine" powder and was much finer in texture. So much so that gunners were cautioned to turn the barrells in storage so that the heaver elements did not separate themselves by gravity and so corrupt the quality of the powder. Actually powder testers came into play about this time in order to assure the combustability and quality of the powder being used. Corned powder is wet after mixing and formed through a sieve with gives it the grain texture we know today. Different size seive, differt sizes of grains. Corned powder came in use sometimes in the early 17th century if memory serves me correctly. My impression is that the Patron was used by cavalry to hold the early cartridge combinations I mentioned above. Peterson has a couple of nice illustraions of these Patrons and catridge combinations in "Arms and Armor in Colonial America." Of course, this is also the book where he claims closed helmets were never used in early America...that is until the archeologists in Jamestown started digging them up in the late 1980s at Martin's Hundred and other sites!