Muzzle loaders and aiming downward?

[Husar]

A question that I have had for some time but came up again when I saw a pirate movie lately where the captain aimed a small deck cannon downward to sink his own ship so that the crew would either capture the enemies' galleon or die trying. Well, old muskets and cannons were loaded from the muzzle and the ammunition was usually round if I'm not mistaken. Now if you put a round ball into a long pipe or barrel and let the barrel point downwards, the ball will fall out of it on the lower end of the barrel. Now of course under certain conditions pressure etc could prevent that but they should also prevent you from loading the gun if they applied here. So I wonder whether this was a problem back then or whether there was anything that prevented muntion from simply falling out of the barrel when pointed downwards?

Would be quite bad to have a hill position and not to be able to use muskets because the munition always falls onto the ground before you can fire.

edit: I just remembered they had those long sticks to stuff the munition into the barrel, guess friction stopped it from moving around until the shot was fired.

[InsaneApache]

I thought they used wadding. Or was only for the powder?

[Incongruous]

I thought muskets could be aimed downwards due to wadding?

[Kagemusha]

Insaneapache and Boba are right.The wadding causes for the ball to stay in the barrel,even if one would hold the barrel towards ground it will not drop out. The barrel has to be tight,or else the musketball would just drop of from the barrel,when fired,since the power of the gunpowder would just come out from the sides of the ball causing minimal velocity.

[Hosakawa Tito]

When I use my muzzleloader shotgun the loading sequence is: powder charge, wad, shot/projectile, wad. The last wad prevents the shot from rolling out the barrel, or worse, creating too much of a gap between the propellant and projectile which can lead to a catastrophic bursting of the gun barrel. Powder fouling in the barrel could hold the projectile in place long enough to fire it too. Though I don't think one small cannon shot through the multiple decks of a ship would cause enough damage to sink her right away. Sounds like Hollywood artistic license, but hey, nothing like a good pirate story.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Nice comment my buccaneer friend....

Yes, you could shoot through the bottom of your own hull -- probably the thinnest portion of it after years of service. Most movies depict such shots as being fired through a hatch (presumably a cargo hatch) with a direct line of fire to the bottom deck.

No, your ship will not sink any more rapidly than from any other shot below the waterline.

Might do better if you shot through the hull and THEN dropped the 3k pound cannon onto the damaged deck below -- but you never see that in the movies.

[Watchman]

Well, cannon didn't come all that cheap. And manhandling 1.5 metric tons of cannon and carriage anywhere is kinda demanding.

Didja know, in Gibraltar they actually had to come up with specially designed carriages so that the batteries located high up on that mountain thingy could depress enough to fire at ships close to the coastal fortifications ? Engravings I've seen about those suggest a forty-five-plus degree depression was achievable easily enough, and being coastal fortress artillery these would not have been very small cannon either...