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To stay indefinitely where he was would have proved an impossibility, and amid the confusion necessary to the shipping of his army, how could he have protected himself by six demi-cannon placed on the sea-beach?
"I tell you, on the credit of a poor gentleman," he said, "that there were five hundred discharges of demi-cannon, culverin, and demi-culverin, from the Vanguard; and when I was farthest off in firing my pieces, I was not out of shot of their harquebus, and most time within speech, one of another."
In those days a great variety of ordnance were employed, to which our ancestors gave the odd-sounding names of cannon, demi-cannon, culverins, demi-culverins, sakers, mynions, falcons, falconets, portpiece-halls, port-piece-chambers, fowler-halls, and curthalls. These guns varied very much in length and in the weight of their shot.
What, do you call this a sleeve? it is like a demi-cannon, carved up and down like an apple tart. The tailor said: 'You bid me make it according to the fashion of the times'; and Katharine said, she never saw a better fashioned gown.
The works thus established on the dry side crept slowly on towards the walls, and some demi-cannon were soon placed upon, them, but the besieged, not liking these encroachments, took the resolution to cut the pea-dyke along the coast which had originally protected the old harbour.
In the sieges of the American civil war there were sometimes three thousand shots an hour, and from guns compared to which in calibre and power those cannon and demi-cannon were but children's toys.
Thus the weight of shot fluctuated too much to serve for the classification of the gun from which it was fired. Ships' guns in those days were known as cannon, cannon royal, cannon serpentine, bastard cannon, demi-cannon, and cannon petro. The Sovereign of the Seas was built at Woolwich Dockyard, in 1637, by Mr Phineas Pett, and Mr Thomas Haywood was the designer of her decorations.
In the sieges of the American civil war there were sometimes three thousand shots an hour, and from guns compared to which in calibre and power those cannon and demi-cannon were but children's toys.
"I tell you, on the credit of a poor gentleman," he said, "that there were five hundred discharges of demi-cannon, culverin, and demi-culverin, from the Vanguard; and when I was farthest off in firing my pieces, I was not out of shot of their harquebus, and most time within speech, one of another."
"I tell you, on the credit of a poor gentleman," he said, "that there were five hundred discharges of demi-cannon, culverin, and demi-culverin, from the Vanguard; and when I was farthest off in firing my pieces, I was not out of shot of their harquebus, and most time within speech, one of another."
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