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Before the arrival of the Spaniards they had bronze culverins and other pieces of cast iron, with which they defended their forts and settlements, although their powder is not so well refined as that of the Spaniards.
And being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying.
Woe's me, the sight of naked steel hath ever made me sick!" I drew my dagger, and flashed it before him. "Does 't make you sick?" I asked. "You shall be sicker yet, if you do not speak to some purpose." The fellow shrank back, his eyeballs starting from his head. "It's a tall ship," he gasped, "a very big ship! It hath ten culverins, beside fowlers and murderers, sabers, falcons, and bases!"
The forest is gone, and only represented now by patches of copsewood saved for cutting down every ten years or so for poles; but the iron lies there still in great veins or beds, though it is no longer dug out, the iron of to-day being found and smelted north and west, where coal-pits are handy; and the ironmasters of Sussex, whose culverins and big guns were famous all the world round, have given place to farmers and hop-growers, where grimy men used to tend the glowing metal and send it running into form and mould.
With a great show, and as much noise as possible by which Francesco intended that the herald should be impressed they were rolling forward four small culverins and some three cannons of larger calibre, and planting them so that they made a menacing show in the crenels of the parapet.
They abandoned their houses, and we found in them nothing except an image of the child Jesus, and two culverins, one of iron and one of bronze, which can be of no service to us; it is believed that they were brought here at the time of Magallanes.
By now the light was strong, and in it they saw that the signal fire had not been lit in vain. At the mouth of the cutting, just where the bar began, the channel was narrowed in with earth to a width of not more than fifty paces, and on one bank of it stood a foot armed with culverins.
It was difficult sufficiently to guard so many miles of water; above all because, as I say, its course was so much clearer, and its depth so much greater, that a flotilla of rafts or cutters could ascend it from its mouth as far as this town in the Middle Ages; in fact, more than once, corsairs from the Levant and from Morocco did so ascend it, and though they were driven back by the culverins of the citadel, they every time carried off to slavery some of the youths and maidens of the plain."
The fight was desperate, and though there was no marked success on the part of the besiegers, yet there seems to have been nothing to discourage them, as the fight raged on. Few were wounded, notwithstanding the noise of the cannons and culverins, "by the grace of God and the good luck of the Maid."
Besides harquebuses for the soldiers, there were many kinds of cannon with strange names, such as culverins, falconets, sakers, serpentines, and rabinets. Four of the cannon were large enough to shoot a cannon-ball eight inches in diameter. But it was on the skill and courage of her men rather than upon the size of her ships that England relied for victory.
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