Colonial Weaponry | Saints & Strangers

[Music]

Radio weapons, push off, push off design. Mr. Bradford, fire!

This is your standard, uh, standard matchlock musket. It was the earliest firing, uh, musket that there was. This over here is a match cord; both sides were normally kept lit in case one end was extinguished. And, um, in over here you’d put your, um, your black powder. This would essentially be locked up. Take your shot, load it into the pan, close it. Then, now the musket ball. Take the scouring stick, reverse it, reverse it, scour down your charge.

Now take your purchase, gentlemen. Willington, they need to place their match. [Music]

Cord, I was testing them, of course. And are you ready to go? Um, so what would essentially happen would be, uh, you would pull the trigger here. The, uh, lit match cord would light the, uh, pow in the pan, igniting the pow in the barrel, propelling the bullet. No, no, this thing is really heavy, um, and it's obviously very long.

You would, you would have two things, so you’d be holding this in the stand, and you stick the stand in the ground, and then you could aim it like this. These were pretty inaccurate in terms of, yeah, right, very inaccurate, extremely inaccurate. Very rarely would you actually hit your target, so also it was also rare for them to actually fire because they were so unreliable.

I expect there was a lot of kind of, "Oh booger!" It just hit people with it. Bton, that's what your, um, Apostle.

This would carry, uh, black powder in it. And yeah, your sword, chest, plad helmet, and this, this was, um, solid iron. This was solid iron. So was, was that plastic?

Yeah, this, this is plastic. Now, they wouldn't necessarily keep their eye on the target. They'd almost like drop their head like this because it would, because it would, there would be a puff of, the other thing they told us about it doesn't have a trigger, as we saw.

These were really rudimentary at this stage, so couldn't carry them like this. So you set them off, and you, you know, you had to be really careful. Apparently, a lot of people did end up blowing things or appendages off because they were so easily set off by mistake.