Study of cannons recovered from a sunken Portuguese galleon

[Cannoneer]

A study of cannons recovered from a sunken Portuguese galleon that went down off the coast of Brazil in 1668.

The Guns of the Santissimo Sacramento 

[cannonmn]

That's certainly a classic piece of work, would like to hear Bob Smith's opinion of it sometime.  It gives the typical locations of iron chaplets, or cruzeta, in bronze guns of that period   I've used the presence or absence of iron chaplets in bronze guns as a means of authentication for any bronze gun purported to be pre-1750 or so.  Even the maker's models of those periods had chaplets in them, since they were cast exactly like the full-sized pieces they represent.  In a bronze gun that hasn't been long submerged, the chaplets will often be hidden by bronze so it is necessary to go over the likely areas with a magnet, and they are easy to find.  The cross-section of the end at or near the surface of the bronze varies quite a bit, circular or square or oblong.  I've also got a bronze gun or two which seems to have bronze chaplets-not sure how that worked!

There are more secrets to be learned about these old cannons than most of us will have time to learn during our relatively short lives.

[Cannoneer]

I thought you would appreciate the diagrams of the positioning of the cores in the barrels by the cruzeta, the first thing I did was bookmark the site, and save the drawings.

[dan610324]

WOW  thanks Boom J

[Bob Smith]

By a happy coincidence, exactly a year ago Ruth and I went to Rio for a conference and managed to see most of the guns from the wreck. I had met Armando Bittencourt, the director of the Brazil's naval museum at an earlier conference and he sent me some pictures. Ruth had been doing work on the Elizabethan archives and found out some extra information and the guns and together they put an article together which is online here: http://www.revistanavigator.com.br/navig2/art/N2_art2.pdf

The first part is the Portuguese translation, with a large number of pictures; the second half is the article in English.

Bob Smith

[Cannoneer]

Bob.

That's an interesting article by your wife Ruth, and somewhere in it she states that Portuguese cannon makers kept using lifting rings beyond the time when other European gun founders had gone on to using dolphins/handles that were cast integrally with the tube. Would you ask her if it's a certainty that the Portuguese (and other Europeans) were influenced by the "Eastern," cannons that they saw in their travels, and then emulated the use of lifting rings on their own cannon?
Is it known if China, or another Eastern country were also the first to use dolphins/handles that were cast on the barrels, or is it possible that handles were a European developement?