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Updated: June 18, 2025
In half an hour afterwards, when we went on deck, we saw by the light of the moon, twelve eighteen pound carronades mounted, six of a side, with their accompaniments of rammers and sponges, water buckets, boxes of round, grape, and canister, and tubs of wadding, while the combings of the hatchways were thickly studded with round shot.
That regiment had behaved well but it caught the infection of demoralisation, the whole left collapsed, and the sepoys in utter panic, surrounded by and intermingled with the ghazees, rolled in a great wave upon the right. The artillerymen and sappers made a gallant stand, fighting the ghazees hand-to-hand with handspikes and rammers, while the guns poured canister into the advancing masses.
Things looked so quiet in front that the Captain gave them permission, and off they started. It seemed a hopeless quest. Everywhere men were ravenous for food. They found one squad toasting on their rammers the pieces of a luckless rabbit they had cornered in a patch of briars. Another was digging away at a hole that they alleged contained a woodchuck.
Among the equipment reported in 1834 one reads of two iron twelve-pounder cannon of the garrison type; three six-pounder iron cannon of the field type; and two five and eight-tenths inch iron howitzers. There was also equipment for these pieces of artillery carriages, sponges and rammers, lead aprons, dark lanterns, gunners' belts, gunners' haversacks, and tarpaulins.
Another man would then run forward with the projectile and insert it in the muzzle of the piece, the rammers would ram it home, and then stand clear. The man at the breech would then pull the lanyard, and now look out! Then we all drew a long breath.
A man, who looked like the captain, standing near the deserted wheel, looked at us intently for a few seconds, and then, observing that we were all ready to give him our starboard broadside, answered in the affirmative; whereupon our people, several of whom had a smattering of French, gave three hearty cheers as they dropped the lanyards of their locks to the deck, and laid down their rammers, sponges, and hand-spikes.
The wads were made of soft wood, oakum, hay, straw, or "other such like." The sponges and rammers were hooked to the beams above the gun ready for use. The rammers were of hard wood, shod with brass, "to save the Head from cleaving."
They were not pointed toward the sea when the castle was evacuated; I could not find any ammunition for them, either on the bastion roof where they stood or in the vaults of the castle below; there were no rammers or spongers on or about the gun-platforms, where they would naturally have been left when the guns were abandoned; and there was nothing whatever to show that they had been fired in fifty years.
The most impressive characteristic of the struggle was noise the incessant crash of the guns, the discharge of which set up a continuous tremor of the ship throughout the entire fabric of her; the rending and splintering of timber as the enemy's shot tore its way through the frigate's sides; the shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying, cut into at frequent intervals by some sharp order from the captain or the first lieutenant; the curt commands of the captains of the guns: "Stop the vent! run in! sponge! load! run out!" and so on; the creak of the tackle blocks, the rumble of the gun carriages, the clatter of handspikes, the dull thud of the rammers driving home the shot, the rattling volleys of musketry from the marines on the poop, the occasional rending crash of a falling spar, and the terrific babble of the Frenchmen on either side of us, sounding high and clear in the occasional brief intervals when all the guns happened to be silent together for a moment, I can only compare it all to the horrible confusion raging through the disordered imagination of one in the clutches of a fiercely burning fever.
The outer walls were of slabs of stone neatly chiselled, but badly mortared with felspathic clay and pounded slate, instead of lime; the partition walls were of clay, shaped in moulds of wood; parallel planks, four feet asunder, being placed in the intended position of the walls, and left open above, the composition was placed in these boxes, a little at a time, and rammed down by the feet of many men, who walked round and round the narrow enclosure, singing, and also using rammers of heavy wood.
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