British India has produced many pieces of ordnance, great in calibre and remarkable in history; among them may be enumerated the great gun of Hyder and Tippo, and the enormous cannon found at Agra, when that place was captured by Lord Lake in 1803. It had trunnions, and was furnished with four rings, two at the breech and two at the muzzle. It was of brass, says Thorne, "and for magnitude and beauty stands unrivalled. Its length was 14 feet 2 inches; its calibre 23 inches; the weight of its ball, when of cast iron, 1500 lbs.; and its whole weight 86,600 lbs., or a little above 38 tons."
Though called brass, it was, according to common report, composed of a mixture of precious metals. The Shroffs, or native bankers, were of that opinion, as they offered £12,000 for it, merely to melt down. Lord Lake preferred to send it as a trophy to Britain, and proceeded to have it transported to Calcutta on a raft. It proved too heavy for the latter, and capsizing sunk in the waters of the Ganges.
Another curious piece of ordnance, locally known as Jubbar Jung, fell into our hands at Ghuzuee in 1842. It was of brass and beautifully ornamented; it carried 64-pound shot, and these being of hammered iron whizzed as they passed through the air. It made some havoc among the tents of our 40th Regiment, and the Huzarehs, followers of Ali, who joined General Nott at the siege, implored him to destroy "Jubbar Jung," for which they appeared to entertain a deep religious horror.
There are at this hour cannon at Bejapore, beside which our "Woolwich Infants" and Armstrong 100-ton guns sink into insignificance. One of these, called the Mulk-e-Meidan, or "Sovereign of the Plains," cast by Roomi Khan, "the Turk of Roumelia," or first Monarch of Bejapore, an Ottoman of Constantinople, weighs forty tons; and, to crown all, Major Rennell mentions an old iron cannon at Dacca, which threw a shot 465 pounds in weight!
The last great gun actually used was King Theodore's huge bombarde at Magdala in 1868, for which he had an enormous number of stone balls made, and which he believed to be the Palladium of Abyssinia. It was shattered to pieces among his troops, on their first attempt to use it.
The last and most remarkable invention in artillery is a much needed fire-arm, which may supersede our boasted steel mountain ordnance, "the jointed gun" of Sir William Armstrong, which can be unscrewed into three separate pieces, each of which is light enough for conveyance on the back of a horse, and when put together form a powerful and long-range cannon, similar to the present field-piece.
Such a gun would have been invaluable in Ashantee, or among the mountains of Abyssinia; and the want of some such fire-arm was sorely felt at times during the Indian mutiny, especially about its close, when our moveable columns pursued the rebels in the deserts of Bekaneer, where the gun carriages of even the flying artillery at times sunk axle deep in the dry heavy sand, rendering them almost useless for service.
In Europe, this is peculiarly the age of enormous cannon. "Armour of two feet in thickness," says a recent writer, "and guns of one hundred tons in weight being now accomplished facts, and ships already bigger than the Inflexible being already in hand, we may well ask ourselves, What will be the next step?"