Grapeshot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Grapeshot is a type of anti-personnel ammunition used in cannons. Instead of solid shot, a mass of loosely packed metal slugs is loaded into a canvas bag. Grapeshot can also be improvised from chainlinks, shards of glass, rocks, etc. The balls assembled resemble a cluster of grapes (hence the name). On firing, the balls spread out from the muzzle at high velocity, giving an effect similar to a shotgun but scaled up to cannon size. Upon impact with a person, debris could go flying and become secondary projectiles. This effect was especially devastating against densely massed troops, where high-velocity bone fragments could greatly magnify the number of casualties.
Cannons would fire solid shot to attack enemy artillery and troops at longer range (although the Shrapnel round was invented to increase the effect of grape shot at a distance), and switch to grape when they or nearby troops were charged.
Conflicts in which grapeshot was famously and effectively used include:
- Battle of Culloden - 1746, Jacobites under Bonnie Prince Charlie v British forces under the Duke of Cumberland
- Battle of Guilford Court House, when Cornwallis ordered two Grapeshots to be fired into the middle of a battlefield, where hand-to-hand combat between the British and Rebels was taking place.
- 13 Vendémiaire - Napoleon, then a brigadier general during the later stages of the French Revolution, famously dispersed a Royalist mob on the streets of Paris with a "whiff of grapeshot" on 5 October 1795. He was rewarded with the command of the Army of Italy in 1796, and his victories at the battles of Lodi, Castiglione, Arcola and Rivoli provided a springboard for his military and political ambitions.
- During Irish Rebellion of 1798, widely used by British forces against Irish rebels, notably in battles of New Ross, Arklow and Vinegar Hill
- Battle of Borodino, 1812 (Prince Mikhail Kutuzov (Russia) v Napoleon Bonaparte (France) ).
- In Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, grapeshot was the weapon used against the barricades in the 1832 insurrection in Paris.
Since the passing of muzzle loaded cannon, and the introduction of the fixed round, grape has been replaced by canister or case round, where a brass cartridge contains the shot.
