Inside the Crosshairs (5 page)

Despite Cordoba’s success, crossbows remained the primary infantry weapon in the French army until 1566. The English did not totally adopt firearms until 1596, and the Turks did not replace their archers for another decade after that. But from the time of Cordoba, armies began to increase the number of firearms they employed, and warfare, long characterized by the arrow, the sword, and the pike, became dominated by gunpowder and shot.

Firearms also began to replace bow- or crossbow-launched arrows as the primary civilian hunting weapons. They became even more dominant in hunting and target competitions with the fifteenth-century discovery, attributed to either Gaspard Kollner of Vienna or Augustus Kotter of Nuremberg, that adding grooves to a barrel’s interior made the bullet spin rapidly in flight and stabilized its path. This “rifling” gave its
name to the more accurate weapons it produced, and rifle marksmanship that would ultimately lead to modern sniping began.

Shooting contests, both for sport and for the maintenance of marksmanship proficiency, rose in popularity with the advances in firearms. Early in the fifteenth century the Holy Roman Empire encouraged the formation of shooting clubs in order to maintain a reserve of marksmen in the event of an invasion by the Turks.

The earliest known, documented, club dedicated to the shooting of firearms began in Lucerne in 1466. Members used their own weapons but the club provided powder and shot for the weekly Sunday competitions. Targets were set at a maximum range of about 100 meters, and the winner of each match judged the results of the next.

Shooting guilds spread rapidly in central Europe during the first decades of the sixteenth century, and soon cities and towns sponsored competitions with their neighbors. More than 200 shooters from as far away as Frankfurt am Main and Innsbruck competed at Zurich in 1504. As shooting skills and weapon manufacturing techniques improved, competition ranges increased to 200 and 300 meters.

Despite continuing technical improvements, firearms remained dependent on dry weather conditions, causing battlefield commanders to continue to rely on pikes, bows, and crossbows in combat. When weather permitted, commanders still used arquebuses to fire in volley and placed little emphasis on marksmanship.

Rifled weapons were expensive to manufacture but their primary limitation in military use was the slow process of having to tamp a leaden bullet down the barrel to ensure it would “take” to the rifling when fired. A few well-armed marksmen, however, began to display the merits of single, well-aimed shots from firearms. Leonardo da Vinci included marksmanship among his many talents. During the defense of Florence in 1520, Da Vinci fired a rifle of his own design from the city’s walls to kill enemy soldiers at ranges up to 300 meters.

Another Italian artist, metalsmith, inventor, and marksman,
Benvenuto Cellini, also displayed the merits of accurate gunfire and the spirit of future snipers. During the siege of Rome in 1527, Cellini fired the shot that killed the opposing commander and ended the battle. In his autobiography, Cellini outlined mental characteristics of a good shooter and commented on the “relaxation” produced by engaging a target at long range. Cellini stated, “I will give but one particular, which will astonish good shots of every degree; that is, when I charged my gun with powder weighing one-fifth of the ball, it carried two-hundred paces point-blank. My natural temperament was melancholy, and while I was taking these amusements, my heart leaped with joy, and I found I could work better and with far greater mastery than when I spent my whole time in study and manual labor.”

Cellini would not be the last man to experience the satisfaction of skilled marksmanship. As the development of weapons continued, so did individual mastery of their use.

CHAPTER 3
 

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the same time that the advancements in the uses and delivery systems of gunpowder were expanding the capabilities of expert marksmen, European explorers were adding to the potential territories where lone shooters would impact history. Hernando Cortés, with a force of fewer than 600 men—supported by twenty horses and ten cannonlike arquebuses—conquered more than five million people by defeating the Aztecs of Central America in 1519. In 1533, another Spaniard, Francisco Pizarro, defeated the Incas in South America with an army of 200 and less than half a dozen firearms.

Both Cortés and Pizarro depended on crossbows as their primary weapons, but the surprise and firepower of their few arquebuses directly influenced their victories over far larger forces. In less than two decades, with only a few hundred men and less than two dozen firearms, they had delivered Central and South America to the Spanish Empire. The culture, language, and religion of the entire region remains today mostly Spanish—a direct result of the introduction of firearms into the New World.

North American explorers and settlers also used firearms to occupy land where native inhabitants, initially armed only with bows and arrows, vastly outnumbered them. French explorer Samuel de Champlain used matchlocks against the Iroquois in July 1609. This account appears in Champlain’s diary: “We took, each of us, an arquebus and went ashore. I saw the enemy come out of their barricade to the number of 200, in appearance strong and robust men. I marched on until I
was within 30 yards of the enemy. When I saw them make a move to draw their bows upon us, I took aim with my arquebus and shot straight at one of the three chiefs, and with the shot two fell to the ground and one of their companions was wounded. I had put four bullets into my arquebus. The Iroquois were much astonished that two men could have been killed so quickly. As I was reloading my arquebus one of my companions fired a shot which astonished them again, so much that, seeing their chiefs dead, they lost courage and took flight.”

While the use of firearms in the New World expanded during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the major improvements in weapons design continued to take place in Europe. In the early 1600s, gunmakers experimented with mechanical devices, first designing wheel locks that rubbed steel and flint together to create sparks that, in turn, ignited the priming powder in the pan. The rotating parts quickly gave way to the “snaphance,” an improved mechanism in which flint and steel were propelled together by a heavy V-shaped spring. Even though these were significant developments, both devices were too complex and expensive for general military use. As a result they remained mostly in the hands of wealthy sportsmen and hunters instead of soldiers.

It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that manufacturers perfected the flintlock mechanism, which would dominate weaponry for more than two centuries.
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The flintlock consisted of a spring-loaded hammer that held a flint. When released by the trigger, the hammer-held flint struck a steel edge to produce a spark that ignited the primer powder.

The advantages of the flintlock was that, without the need for lighted matches—which required several yards’ separation between soldiers to prevent pre-ignition of each other’s weapons—formations could be tighter and produce a heavier volume of fire. However, even though it was a great
improvement, the flintlock still had limitations. Despite having a cover for the primer pan that offered some protection against rain and damp, moisture continued to cause ignition problems.

Reliability and safety had increased, but because of the cost and time-consuming reloading procedure inherent to rifles, smooth-bore muskets remained the primary military weapon. In 1645, Englishman Oliver Cromwell’s two infantry companies armed with smooth-bore flintlocks directly contributed to the defeat of the Royalists. Other countries quickly adopted the weapons for their armies. By 1670 France had an entire regiment carrying flintlocks.

But soldiers, steeped in tradition and familiar with simple, basic weapons like pikes, did not necessarily trust the new inventions, especially in unfavorable battle conditions. When a rainstorm threatened or a fast advancing enemy did not allow time to reload, infantrymen found their flintlock muskets of use only as clubs. At such times, many infantrymen rammed broken pikes into the musket barrels to form crude bayonets. This did make the weapons into pikes, albeit short ones, but, of course, it also prevented their use as firearms.

About 1680 the Frenchman Marshall Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban invented the socket bayonet, which mounted outside the barrel and did not interfere with firing the weapon. With that each infantryman could fight as a musketeer and a pikeman. By the end of the century all major armies in Europe were armed with socket-bayonet flintlocks.

The development of paper cartridges further enhanced the flintlock’s capabilities. First suggested by Leonardo da Vinci, paper cartridges became common by the end of the sixteenth century and were standard by the end of the seventeenth. With paper cartridges, which contained premeasured amounts of powder, soldiers could reload quickly by biting open the end of the cartridge, pouring the powder down the barrel, tamping the charge with the remaining paper, and then adding the shot.

By the end of the seventeenth century, smooth-bore flintlock muskets dominated civilian and military weaponry in the New World. The first American contribution to firearms
manufacture occurred in the Pennsylvania Colony early in the eighteenth century. Immigrants from Germany and Switzerland brought with them skills in crafting weapons and an appreciation for marksmanship and shooting competitions.

Because of the expense of shot and powder, those early American gunsmiths modified European designs to be more economical. They reduced calibers from .69–.75 to .40–.50 and lengthened the 42-inch barrels to as long as 48 inches, which increased velocity by ensuring that all the powder burned before the shot left the barrel. They also greased patches of cloth with pork or bear fat to wrap the shot, which helped seal the charges and prevented gases from escaping. These modifications also improved accuracy by flattening the firing trajectory. As a result, Pennsylvania long rifle flintlocks became the weapons of choice for hunters and frontiersmen. However, the costs of the long rifles, which could not be mass-produced, prevented their issue to local militias or to the English troops overseeing the colonies’ security.

Instead the British army used the relatively inexpensive, mass-produced English Long Land Service Musket, better known as the Brown Bess. Ten pounds in weight with a forty-six-inch-long, .75-caliber barrel, the sturdily built Brown Bess could sustain the rigors of military field action. Its one-ounce lead ball measured only .71 caliber, so it loaded quickly and easily down the slightly larger barrel.

While the smaller-diameter ball positively affected speed of reloading of the Brown Bess, it had a negative impact on accuracy. The lead balls bounced from side to side in their passage out of the barrel. Consequently, the path of the shot varied widely in elevation and windage from its intended mark.

The French, the other major military force of the eighteenth century, developed their own standard military flintlock. Other than having a slightly smaller .69 caliber, the French Charleville closely resembled the British Brown Bess—down to the lack of accuracy. Even the most skilled marksmen had little control over where the shot landed.

A common military rhyme of the period about both British and French musket shots summed up the situation:

British Brown Besses and French Charlevilles faced each other in North America during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), an extension of the two countries’ conflict in Europe. American colonists, who accompanied the British as members of local militias, were also armed with the Brown Bess or other smooth-bore muskets that were “accurate” for only eighty yards or less. Toward the end of the conflict, the British formed the 60th Royal Americans as sharpshooters equipped with Pennsylvania long rifles. There is no record, however, that those marksmen had any influence on the war’s final battles, perhaps because British commanders saw little use for weapons that could not mount bayonets. Cold steel rather than hot shot remained the deciding factor in most battles.

The first accurate long-range shooters to influence a battle in America came forward in the Revolutionary War. Americans armed their rebel army with Brown Besses captured from the British, with Charlevilles purchased from the French, and with locally produced .75-caliber flintlocks—called Committee of Safety muskets, authorized by the Continental Congress in November 1775. All of these weapons shared the inaccuracy common to smooth-bore muskets. Except when fired in volley at close range or employed as holders for bayonets, they were so ineffective that Benjamin Franklin recommended arming the revolutionary army with bows and arrows rather than the unpredictable muskets.