You recently answered a reader’s question about how cannon and, in particular, the guns of Royal Navy warships were fired during Sharpe’s era. I may be able to shed some more light on this.

The Royal Navy moved to gunlocks (flintlock) in the 1740s, mainly to allow the gun layer to aim the piece from behind, by looking along the barrel, and fire it using a lanyard which kept him sufficiently far back to prevent injury from the recoil. This is supposed to have given greater accuracy, and it may well have done within the context of a gun with rudimentary sights on a heaving gun deck! The risk of igniting loose powder was real, but probably less than we might think. Charges were made up in cartridges by the gunner and his mates in the magazine, and loose powder wasn’t normally brought to the guns. The backup, in case a gunlock failed, was slow match which glowed, rather than producing open flame, and was held to the priming powder in the touch hole by a linstock, a type of pole or rod with a forked end. This worked well enough, but meant the gun had to be fired from the side, to avoid the recoil, and being unable to maintain line of sight until the moment of firing. Spare slow match, which was already burning, was usually kept over tubs of water during battle.

I think you’re right about the army sticking to portfire 9 which is essentially the same thing as slow match) ignition because of the flintlocks vulnerability to rain. There were a couple of ways to reduce this, by making the pan cover fit very closely to the pan during manufacture, which was expensive, and by running grease or wax around it after priming. These were feasible for sportsmen, but not infallible, and rather impractical for gunners during a battle!

Martyn Kerr