APPENDIX L
CHAMPLAIN’S FAVORED FIREARM
The Arquebuse à Rouet
What European firearms did Champlain employ in his American campaigns? Many historians have written that Champlain used a matchlock, or a “matchlock musket,” in his major American engagements, ca. 1609–15.1 Close inquiry yields a different conclusion. Champlain’s texts and engravings, inventories of weapons in Quebec, and expert studies of the weapons themselves make clear that Champlain was using an arquebuse à rouet in his major engagements. This was not a matchlock but a wheel-lock. It was developed in the sixteenth century to correct some of the matchlock’s major problems.
In a matchlock, the smoldering end of a slow-burning cord was lowered into a pan of powder, and fired the charge. A wheel lock operated in a different way. The mechanism had a rough steel wheel which, when turned against a flint, sent a shower of sparks into priming powder, much like a modern cigarette lighter. Sometimes the wheel was a rough mineral that revolved against a steel platen, with the same result. This was the first self-igniting shoulder-fired weapon.
The advantages of a wheel lock were many. A slow-burning match cord was difficult to ignite and keep burning, especially in combat. Wet weather or even dampness and high humidity could render it useless. Once the cord was lighted, a matchlock was dangerous in another way, as the burning cord could ignite other powder in the vicinity. In battle, a matchlock with a lighted cord made surprise difficult, as its smoke and odor could alert others and betray the user’s position.
The wheel lock, or rouet, may have been invented by Johann Kiefuss in Germany in 1517. It solved some those problems but created others in their place. It was a complex and fragile mechanism that required frequent maintenance and careful handling. It was also very costly—twice the cost of a matchlock—and could not be produced on a large scale.
To solve those problems, other inventions followed. In the late sixteenth century, gunsmiths developed a new lock called a snaphance. A flint was fixed on a spring-mounted arm. When the trigger released the arm, the spring drove it forward with a snap against a metal plate and sent sparks flying into a separate priming pan.
The principle of the snaphance in turn was simplified by the invention of the flintlock, which combined the metal platen and the priming pan cover in one piece. It was invented by one of Henri IV’s expert gunsmiths, Marin le Bourgeois, who had his workshop in the basement of Louvre, and was in use by 1612. A flintlock was much cheaper to make, easier to maintain, and comparatively simple to use. In 1639–42, the average value of an arquebus à rouet was 80 livres; flintlock muskets were valued at 6 livres.
Champlain stated repeatedly that he and other Frenchmen with him used an arquebus, but what sort of arquebus? Russel Bouchard, an expert on firearms in New France, studied Champlain’s engravings, and concluded that he used an arquebuse à rouet, with a wheel lock. There is no sign of a match in Champlain’s engravings of his weapons, which look very much like a wheel lock. Inventories of weapons at Quebec refer explicitly to the presence of “harquebuses à rouet.” So also do probate records for the colony. Patterns of use changed after 1615. By 1619, the new flintlock muskets were becoming the weapon of choice in New France. A Quebec inventory in that year listed four “harquebuses à rouet” and forty “mousquets avec leurs bandoliers.” The proportion of muskets continued to increase in this period.2
In 1609–10, Champlain fought the Mohawk with this arquebuse à rouet, a wheel lock weapon that did not require a burning match. It was also an arquebuse de chasse, a weapon light enough to be fired from the shoulder without a fork. A matchlock would have been very difficult to use at Lake Champlain, perhaps impossible.
Historians mistakenly assume that Champlain used this weapon, a matchlock that required a burning cord and was so heavy that it could not be presented without a fork to support its barrel. This would not have worked well for him at Lake Champlain, given his tactics.
Champlain’s weapons were also distinctive in another way. Many early models of an arquebus were heavy weapons. Some were mounted on a cart and fired a ball of three ounces. Others were carried by individual soldiers, but could be fired only with a fork or crutch supporting the barrel. This early model was called an arquebuse à croc, after the crutch that was needed to steady the weapon. By Champlain’s time, the wheel lock was combined with lighter weapons and shorter barrels, which could be fired from the shoulder without a fork. This lighter arquebus was developed for hunting and adopted by Champlain for use in America. It was between 32 and 52 inches long. It could be loaded with several one-ounce balls, which were lethal against large animals and men who were not wearing metal armor. These weapons were reported by contemporary writers to weigh in the range of 8.5 to 15 pounds, less than an arquebuse à croc. M. A. O. Paulin-Desormeaux, in his treatise on these weapons, called them the arquebuse de chasse, a hunting weapon. Champlain’s chosen weapon combined the characteristics of an arquebuse à rouet and an arquebuse de chasse.3
The technology that produced the arquebuse à rouet also led to the development of wheel-lock pistols, which were larger than modern handguns but small enough to be hidden in clothing. They became an assassin’s weapon, and were quickly put to that use. In 1584 a wheel-lock pistol was employed to kill William the Silent in the Netherlands and to murder Protestant leaders in France.4
In short, Champlain fought at Lake Champlain, and probably at the Rivière des Iroquois and the Onondaga Village, with an arquebuse à rouet that was fired by a wheel lock. It was light enough and short enough to be used as a shoulder weapon, but its barrel was forged with sufficient strength to allow triple or quadruple loading. This weapon did not require a slow match or a fork, which made it much easier to use in the field. The absence of a burning slow match helped Champlain to achieve surprise at Lake Champlain, and his independence of a fork permitted him to move more easily on the battlefield in all his engagements. The outcome of these battles, especially the first, might have been very different without the advantages of this highly developed, complex, and costly weapon.
APPENDIX M
CHAMPLAIN’S SHIPS AND BOATS
In more than forty years afloat, Champlain worked with ships and boats in great variety. He described them very briefly, usually in terms of tonnage and ship-types. His language of description is not self-evident to modern readers and problematic even to experts in the field. Notes and translations on ship types in the Biggar edition of Champlain’s works are frequently inaccurate, and even the sailor-historian Samuel Eliot Morison was mistaken on this subject.
Champlain’s ships were the products of a revolution in maritime technology during the early modern era. In his time, ships could move people and goods with more speed and efficiency than overland transportation, which had improved little since the Romans. Until the nineteenth century, water was more “permeable” than land, as today air is more permeable than water.1
The improvement of ships made it so. They were complex artifacts, the most highly developed industrial products of their age. Champlain’s ships were machines designed to convert the energy of winds and currents into motion. They were also homes for their crews, sometimes for months or years at a time. They were mobile warehouses for supplies, platforms for guns, tools of science, instruments of power, emblems of authority, and dynamic symbols of an expansive western culture that was spreading rapidly through the world. The characteristics of these ships created Champlain’s opportunities, and also set his limits. To understand them, let us begin with his terms of description: first the problem of tonnage, and then the problem of ship-types and their properties.
TONNAGE for Champlain, was primarily a measure of volume, not weight. It was an estimate of a ship’s capacity, in terms of the number of very large casks of wine or water, called tuns, that she could carry. This was an absurd way to measure a ship, but it was widely adopted because it was convenient to tax collectors and had long been used. In the ancient world, Cicero spoke of a “2,000
jar ship.” In medieval Europe, the unit of measurement changed from pottery jars to wooden “tuns.”2
By Champlain’s time this method was widely used throughout Europe, but the standard definition of a tun varied from one country to another, and also from one province and seaport to the next. In England a measurement-tun had a standard capacity of 252 gallons, and when full of water weighed 2,240 pounds, the origin of the English “long ton,” which became the basis of maritime measurement rather than the short ton of 2,000 pounds.3
In France, a standard tonneau de mer was equal to “four barriques bordelaises” of wine or water, which together equaled about 480 pots, and a pot was about .498164 of an English Exchequer gallon. French tonneaux de mer by that measure were approximately 239 English gallons, which made them about 5 per cent smaller than an English long tun.4
In Spain after 1590, the official unit of measure was the tonel macho or tonel de Vizcaya, which was “equivalent to the French sea ton (tonneau de mer) used in Bordeaux.” It was 1.2 times larger than the earlier tonelada or tonel de Andalusia.5
In ships of identical dimensions, the slightly larger size of an English ton yielded an estimate of total tonnage that was smaller by about 5 percent than did a French tonneau de mer or a Spanish tonel macho. But these variations were smaller than the range of error in actual measurements.
This idea of tonnage was called “tons burden,” because it measured not the ship itself, but the volume of what a ship could carry. All Champlain’s tonnage estimates were tons burden. This measure of “tunnage” as units of volume should not be confused with other measures of weight that developed later, such as “displacement tons.” This was the Archimedean idea that a ship’s tonnage should be the weight of water displaced by the ship. Displacement tonnage became the standard measure for warships in the twentieth century. For the same vessel, tons displacement came to a much larger number than tons burden, which Champlain used.
By Champlain’s era, most western states had settled on conventional ways of calculating tonnage by an equation from the length of keel, internal breadth, and interior depth of a vessel. In England, the number of tuns burden that a ship could take aboard was estimated by multiplying length of keel, times breadth, times depth, and dividing by 100.
The relationship between tonnage and dimensions such as length, breadth and depth was highly variable, mainly because of differences in design and construction from one ship-type to another. But rough estimates were made for specific classes of ships and boats, on the basis of actual measurement and prevailing patterns of proportion. Let us review them in order of size.
LARGE FULL-RIGGED SHIPS (350–1,000 tons burden) included vessels that Champlain and his contemporaries called navires, naos, hourques, felibotes, flutes, and galleons. One of his largest vessels was his uncle’s Saint-Julien. By Champlain’s reckoning and Spanish accounts, her size was estimated at 500 tons burden. He described her as a “grand navire,” a great ship. In Spanish records she was variously called a nao or felibote or hourque.
A grand navire was a generic noun for any large ocean-going vessel, usually a merchantman, and was also called a navire de commerce. One French treatise defined a navire as “un vaisseau rond et de hauts bords tels que sont ceux de l’océan, a round ship with high sides, such as those of oceangoing vessels.” These “round ships” were powered entirely by sail, unlike other “long ships” that used sails and oars.
A nao was a Portuguese term (nef or nau in French) for a full-rigged round ship, with large square-rigged sails on two or three masts, sometimes with a lateen-rigged mizzen and a smaller mast called a bonaventure abaft the mizzen.
A hourque (or hulk) denoted a large ship with a distinctive hull type, designed for maximum cargo volume, broad in the beam, with a rounded bow and stern, a comparatively flat bottom, high sides curved out and then in again, in a pattern that sailors called “tumble-home.” They were constructed in northern Europe, on the model of large freight-carrying Dutch canal boats.
A felibote (Spanish) or flibot (French) or “flyboat,” in one of its early meanings, was, as defined by R. M. Nance, “an enlarged, ship-rigged barge, contrived to carry as much merchandise as possible with the smallest possible crew.” Hourques and felibotes as large as 600 tons were not uncommon in Champlain’s era. They were reputed to be crudely constructed and slow sailors. Champlain described the Saint-Julien as “unfort navire et bon de voile, a staunch ship and a good sailor.” If so, she was exceptional for her class. In service she was unsound and leaked so badly that several times she was close to foundering. From the proportions of other ships in her era, we might guess that her deck length was about 100–120 feet, and her beam about 36–40 feet.6 Later, as we shall see, flyboats were given another and entirely different meaning: small fast-sailing vessels, often heavily armed for their size.
The galleon was another type of large ship that Champlain knew well. He sailed in company with these great ships during his visit to the Spanish empire, from 1598 to 1601. Their design evolved through time. In the mid-sixteenth century, galleons tended to be ships of moderate size, often about 200 tons, with high forecastles and sterncastles. They grew rapidly larger. The Spanish Armada in 1588 included three Portuguese galleons of 1,000 tons, and six Spanish galleons of 800 tons, which were among the largest ships of their time in the western world. By Champlain’s time they had changed again. In the early seventeenth century, they tended to stabilize in the range of 400–600 tons burden, with a deck-length of about 100–120 feet (120–140 feet overall including her prow but not her bowsprit), a beam of about 30–35 feet, and a ratio of about 1:3.5 to 1:4 compared with merchantmen such as the Saint-Julien, which would have been closer to 1:3.
By Champlain’s time the high forecastle had been cut down, and the sterncastle was higher than before. The foremast was canted forward, the main mast was nearly vertical, and a small mizzen was raked slightly to the stern. The big foremasts and mainmasts were surmounted by topmasts and sometimes topgallant masts. A spritsail on the bowsprit and lateen (or latine) on the mizzen were used for trim and balance, to make the helmsman’s work easier. There were no jibs, but extra sails called bonnets could be rigged in light breezes.
The Spanish galleon was a product of long development in the 16th and 17th centuries. This was the type that Champlain would have known in 1599—smaller than the biggest galleons in the Armada of 1588, but very capacious. The foremast was canted forward, and the mainmast was raked aft. The high poop gave a platform for fighting.
This navire (from Champlain’s 1612 map) was typical of vessels he used in North American trade—a midsized merchantman with square-rigged courses and topsails, a martingale beneath the bowsprit, and a lateen-rigged mizzen or bonaventure aft. They were not fast ships, but they were sturdy and seaworthy. Champlain never lost one.
These galleons carried battery of great guns on two or even three gun decks, and were crowded with men. Altogether they were highly refined ships, the product of long experience. Their officers in Spanish treasure fleets were highly skilled navigators. Champlain learned much from these ships, and from the men who sailed them.7
The vaisseau des indes, which the English called an East Indiaman, was another specialized type of large navire that developed in the early seventeenth century. This was a hybrid design: a large and very capacious merchantman designed for voyages as long as two or three years. She was built as stoutly as a man of war, heavily armed, and broad at the waterline to bear the weight of guns and cargo. Examples were two Norman ships owned by merchants of Rouen and Dieppe, which were sent to the East Indies and provisioned for two and a half years. One was Le Montmorency, 450 tons, 22 guns, and a crew of 126 men and boys. The other was L’Espérance, 400 tons, 26 guns, and a crew of 126. The officers and crew in these East Indiamen also sailed on American voyages in smaller ships. Robert Gravé, Claude du Boullay, Claude de Godet, and sieur des Maretz were all as familiar with the East Indies as with the waters of New France. But they us
ed different ship-types when they moved from one theater to another. The vaisseau des Indes rarely appeared in North American waters, where voyages were shorter, capital was scarce, rivers and ports were shallow, security was less of a problem, and speed was more important than strength or endurance.
MID-SIZED SHIPS OF 100–350 tons were the result. These were Champlain’s “navires de moyen calibre.” Nearly all his Atlantic crossings were made in them. A great many mid-sized navires appear in his published Voyages. Most were in the range of 100–200 tons burden. Champlain’s crossings in 1603 and 1604 were made in La Bonne-Renommée, which was variously rated at 100–120 tons, with a length of about 90 feet overall including her long prow. In 1605, he sailed in Don-de-Dieu, which was estimated at 120–160 tons, with an overall length of about 100 feet. His largest ship in the North Atlantic was the Saint-Étienne, 350 tons, which he used in 1615 and again in 1620.8
These mid-sized navires tended to be longer in relation to their tonnage than grand navires such as the Saint-Julien, a proportion that gave them more speed. With good weather and fair winds, they were capable of sustained runs of eight knots, which meant, for shorter periods, speeds of ten knots or a little more.9
They were rigged in various ways. A manuscript by Jacques de Vaulx, a pilot from Le Havre, described them in detail. Most appear to have been three-masted and ship-rigged, like their larger cousins. Their fore and main masts were square-rigged, sometimes with topsails and sometimes not, but rarely with the topgallants that were beginning to appear aboard larger vessels. They carried a spritsail on a yard under the high-angled bowsprit, and a lateen sail on a mizzen or a bonaventure. The spritsail was square-rigged, but could be close-hauled so tight as to be nearly fore-and-aft. Maritime paintings of the seventeenth century often show spritsails braced that way, at angles that seem improbable to modern sailors, but may well have been correct. The purpose of the spritsail and the mizzen lateen was to trim or balance the ship, more than to add driving power. When properly trimmed, the ship could ride more easily, and helmsmen had an easier time. In light winds the main sails could be rigged with extra sails called bonnets to port and starboard, “when chased by an enemy.” This combination of hull-type and rigging plan created an extraordinarily safe and stable vessel—one reason why Champlain never lost a navire.10
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