Mad About Science: Arquebuses, blunderbusses and muskets

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

We’ve explored the history of firearms before, but several thousand years is hard to cover in a page. Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the earliest firearms used widely in European warfare.

The arquebus was one of the first firearms widely adapted for use in late-medieval warfare, with some records of the weapon in Europe dating back to the 15th century CE. The arquebus was a long rifle that used lighter rounds than later weapons like the musket. 

These weapons were slow-loading, often unpredictable and extremely unwieldy to use. However, they had some major advantages over projectile weapons of their time. Training someone to use a firearm took less time than training an effective archer. Medieval longbowmen would train for their entire lives to use the weapon, and something as simple as an infected cut on the finger could end their career or even their lives. A soldier could be trained in the use of an arquebus over the course of a few months, becoming proficient enough to inflict similar damage as a longbowman in far less time.

Due to the nature of these weapons, they were extremely inaccurate. There was a reason that gun lines existed for several hundred years preceding the American Civil War. A lone soldier with an arquebus was unlikely to hit a specified target, but a mass of a hundred could fill a group of charging infantry full of holes in a flash of smoke and fire.

A wound from one of these early weapons was a grisly thing. Modern anti-personnel weapons are designed to impact and break apart inside a fleshy target, causing immense internal damage to kill a target quickly. An arquebus round was basically a miniature cannon ball that blew a hole into something. These shots weren’t always lethal, but they were guaranteed to penetrate light armor and flesh at up to 400 meters.

The firing mechanism of an arquebus was more complicated than later weapons. This was likely due to technological restrictions of the time, particularly in the refinement of black powder.

The arquebus used a matchlock system for firing the weapon. In an extremely simplified version of how this works, the soldier would carry a piece of slow-burning rope, which acted as a match, held by a serpentine lever attached to the trigger. This lever would force the match into the saltpan where it would ignite into the breach of the weapon, detonating the powder they had preloaded and flinging the projectile downrange — hopefully. 

The entire process took anywhere from 12 to 28 individual steps to complete, from loading the weapon to firing. Because of this, the arquebus would take at least a minute to fire between shots.

Understandably, generals of their day quickly developed the volley system, in which ranks of arquebusiers would stagger their shots to maximize the amount of time their weapons were firing. After the first rank discharged their weapons, they would fall back behind the second rank and begin the reloading process. The second rank would then fire, and move back while the third rank stepped up to fire. 

The exact number of ranks employed varied depending on the number of weapons available and what the military leaders required in the engagement, but there are records of up to five ranks being present in a conflict, which allowed for near-constant cycling of shooters.

The blunderbuss could be considered the predecessor of the modern shotgun, as it would fire numerous pellets, called shot, in a spread to maximize damage and area at close range. 

This weapon is often portrayed in cartoons as having a comically large and flared muzzle, which isn’t totally inaccurate. The classic blunderbuss had a slightly flared barrel so that it could be reloaded while on horseback. Early 19th-century U.S. explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark actually had these mounted on the front of their boats, similar to a machine gun mounted on the roof of a modern military humvee.

There existed a handheld version of the blunderbuss — a weapon called a dragon. This is the origin of the word “dragoon,” which was a mounted gunner who would ride quickly and blast an enemy line with their handheld firearm. The weapon was so named because of the large flame that would burst from the muzzle, making it appear as though a dragon were breathing fire onto an enemy line.

The blunderbuss and the dragon utilized a wheellock mechanism for firing projectiles. This was a spring-loaded metal gear that would rotate when the trigger was pulled. As it rotated, it struck a strip of pyrite to create friction and cause a spark, which would ignite powder leading into the weapon and trigger a blast of black powder to fling the projectile downrange. This was considerably more simple than trying to navigate a smoldering rope without blowing yourself or your friends to smithereens.

Muskets evolved alongside the blunderbuss, though their firing mechanism — the flintlock — was simpler and more closely related to the hammer-driven ignition system we use in modern firearms. Muskets came in a huge variety of calibers, shapes and sizes. By the 18th century, muskets were hurling .72 caliber munitions at targets, though these weapons still weren’t accurate. Musket lines and broad formations remained in use among the large and organized militaries of the time, as muskets still took several seconds to load and volley systems of bunched rifles were more likely to hit targets than individuals. 

At least, that’s what the British Empire believed well into the American Revolutionary War. It turned out that ambushes, subterfuge and guerilla warfare did more to disrupt an army than walking at each other as big, organized, easy-to-hit targets. Spreading their resources thinly across the entire planet probably had something to do with it, too.

Stay curious, 7B.