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Updated: May 21, 2025
Sometimes they threw a solid shot at us, but mostly they fired shells. They were in plain sight, and we could see every movement connected with the firing of the guns. After a piece was fired, the first thing done was to "swab" it. Two men would rush to the muzzle with the swabber, give it a few quick turns in the bore, then throw down the swabber and grab up the rammer.
He was getting a little nervous, but Shorty deliberately withdrew his rammer, turned it, placed one end in the thimbles, deliberately covered the head with his little finger, exactly as the tactics prescribed, and sent it home with a single movement. The rebel had a little trouble in returning rammer, and Shorty and Si waited. "Cast about," "Prime!" Both men capped at the same instant. "Ready!"
He had completed the grave, and had squatted himself on his hams beside the coffin, swinging his body as the women had done, and uttering a low moaning sound, frequently ending in a loud pech, like that of a paviour when he brings down his rammer. I noticed he kept looking towards the east, watching, as I conjectured, the first appearance of the morning star, but it was yet too early.
Then I leaned against an angle of the rampart, overpowered and exhausted; a bayonet wound, which some soldier of our own ranks had given me when mounting the breach, pained me somewhat; my uniform was actually torn to rags; my head bare; of my sword, the hilt and four inches of the blade alone remained, while my left hand firmly grasped the rammer of a cannon, but why or wherefore I could not even guess.
Britisher and Yank, each crew could hear the hearty cheers of the other as they watched the chance to ply rammer and sponge and fire when the deck lifted clear of the sea. Somehow the Wasp managed to shoot straight and fast.
The British captain stood for a moment motionless, and then he picked up a rammer and ran it into the muzzle of the cannon which had been discharged. The great gun was empty. The instantaneous motor-bomb was not there. Now he was convinced that the Syndicate had not mined the fortresses which they had destroyed.
They had the gun, by this time, slewed round upon the swivel, and Hands, who was at the muzzle with the rammer, was, in consequence, the most exposed. However, we had no luck; for just as Trelawney fired, down he stooped, the ball whistled over him, and it was one of the other four who fell.
Oh, if it wasn't so dark! Big gun's crew!" he cried. "Is the tackle with her?" "Ay, ay!" came in answer, after a short bustle of movement, in which trained men took their places. "Here, run the rammer down her throat, my lads. She may be loaded." There was the sound of the stout ash staff passing down the bore of the gun, and the answer came "Right!" "Good," replied Joe. "Lower down that light.
Crockett's eye was on the nearest battery and he was slowly raising Betsy. "Which is to be first, Davy?" asked Bowie. "The one with the rammer in his hand." Crockett took a single brief look down the sights and pulled the trigger. The man with the rammer dropped to the earth and the rammer fell beside him. He lay quite still. Crockett seized a second rifle and fired.
There he was made to wheel about to the right, and to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march, and they gave him thirty blows with a cudgel. The next day he did his exercise a little less badly, and he received but twenty blows. The day following they gave him only ten, and he was regarded by his comrades as a prodigy.
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