18th Century Hand Mortar
In this Musing we demonstrate another French weapon of the late 17th and early 18th Century…a hand mortar. Basically, a hand mortar is a device to throw a grenade. The French grenade in Louisiana was a 2- 2 1/2 inch sphere in this case made of iron very similar, yet smaller than the 4 1/2 inch diameter mortar bomb featured in the 18th Century Mortar musing. The Louisiana grenades weighed 3 pounds and, like the mortar bombs, used a fuse and powder to explode the iron shell.
As you can imagine, you couldn't throw a 3 pound sphere very far. A baseball is about the same size as the grenade but only weighs 5 to 5 ¼ ounces. So the grenade is 8 times heavier. If you were attacking the Chickasaw from one of their forts and they were firing smoothbore flintlocks at you, you would want to be at least 60 yards away, or you wouldn't be in this world long. So the French and other Europeans developed a tried and true method to throw the grenades further. They used a flintlock gun that was cut short and fitted with a reinforced barrel capped with a metal cup such that the grenade fuse would be lit while the grenade was in the cup and the gun fired to hurl the grenade from 80 to 120 yards. Specialists called grenadiers practiced to exact this procedure.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this video demonstrates a grenadier firing a hand mortar and grenade.
After suffering two losses at the hands of the Chickasaw in March and May 1736 Bienville and Salmon in September 1736 ask Minister of the Marine Maurepas, "we ask for 50 small hand mortars of the invention of Thomas in order to throw the grenades of which we think the 500 that we have are enough …" MPA I 323.
Did the hand mortars reach the battlefield against the Chickasaw in 1740? Read Bienville's Revenge Musing.
Regards from Tupelo,
Steve Cook
June 9, 2022