You need to train from youth to be an expert longbowman. You can’t just pick it up as an adult (or so I’m told.)
So when a cheap musketman is almost as good as an expensive longbowman, no one will be trained from youth as a longbowman because no one will hire them – they will just hire two (or more!) musketmen instead.
So therefore no one took bows to America because no one knew how to use it. And the Indians certainly couldn’t, as they had certainly not been trained from youth to use a longbow.
European muskets were superior to Indian’s bows (we overplay the bow and arrow thing with Indians). And hunting is different from combat. In hunting you are sneaking up on your victim, and guns have the advantage of only having to squeeze the trigger after it is loaded and cocked. To hold an arrow ready to fly while you wait for a clearer shot isn’t practical, and you can’t easily rest the bow on something while you wait. So the motion of aiming and drawing back the bow may alert the animal, and has to be done quickly, decreasing the accuracy. Modern compound bows help to alleviate that.
But longbows were as much hunting weapons as weapons of war. The fact people stopped using them when the musket came along must have meant the musket was superior as individual hunting weapon, to some degree, not just a more efficient way to equip an army.
My WAG is because the Native American’s didn’t need it to be any more advanced. They had what they needed for hunting and tribal warfare. In hunting terms there is a sustainability issue, once a weapon gets too effective you can start diminishing the number of animals to much for them to repopulate. Below that level of weapon advancement there is a unlimited amount of food.
Native American’s seem to be more tied to the land in a spiritual sense of oneness with it, which is a spiritual reason for not developing such weapons that could overstress the environment. Or for a natural counterpart, you have the ant eater, which will only feed as a termite mound for s short time, not destroying it, so both species survive.
Were they training more? Or were they able to train in marching in formation because now they had plenty of spare time not being used in archery practice?
There was a love-hate relationship back then of the sovereigns toward archery practice, so I’d imagine that few peasants would be able to train covertly to use the longbow in order to hunt mostly illegally. By that time the King might have even forbidden archery practice in order to keep his peasants in line, but I don’t have a cite for this (kings did indeed outlaw archery practice at times, I’m just not sure if they did it at the turn of the gunpowder era.)
But in addition to what others said about the ease of shooting a gun once loaded, there is the rate of fire issue. Another advantage longbows held was that they could be shot several times for every time a gun was shot, at the time. While this has its advantages in mass battle, it’s a rare quarry that will let you shoot at it several times before disappearing
I’d be interested in seeing evidence that Indians actually acted that way. There is evidence that they destroyed the Chesapeake Bay shellfish population. Maybe their oneness was only tied to the land, and not the water.
I’d have to disagree; while there remained some outlier use of bows as you have mentioned, the firearm very quickly replaced the bow on European battlefields. There was no place for the bow in the tericos in the late 15th century, for example. The bayonet wasn’t an important factor in this; it allowed the firearm to replace the pike, not the bow. Formations of bow and pike became firearm and pike, then with the invention of the bayonet formations purely of firearms. On paper the longbow still retained the advantage of greater accuracy and rate of fire over the Brown Bess musket used in the Napoleonic wars. Ease of training alone doesn’t explain why the firearm entirely replaced the bow rather than supplanting it. I seem to recall Gwynne Dyer noting the huge advantage that the firearm had over the bow was moral, they made a great deal of noise and smoke making them far more psychologically intimidating than the plinking of bows. As Napoleon famously noted, the moral is to the physical as three to one. I might be wrong on where I read the idea, so don’t quote me on it coming from Dyer.
A little of both. yes, the gun is easier to use, but in order to effectively deploy it on the battlefield, you needed more training. These effects fed each other, and the side with high morale and discipline could utterly crush the enemy. Instead of the medeival model of hiring numerous skilled but low-class (and disrespected) archers, basically to soften up the enemy, gunner became a critical and valued part of the rank-and-file.
Also, the exact same scenario played out in Japan, too, so it was clearly a rational reaction to the ongoing changes.
as early as the battle of crecy the cannon was already in use (1346, still disputed but italians and french were manufacturing cannons long before this.) the first recorded hand cannon used as standard issue and not just a novelty weapon was in 1419 in the hussite wars. not sure what the other side used but this proved the superiority of personal fired guns.
1448 in the battle of kossovo, hungarians employed mercenaries armed with matchlocks against turkish janissary archers. the archers won! however, the ottoman sultan murad II was sufficiently impressed to order muskets for his elite troops.
long bows and composite recurves continued to be the favorite field weapons up to the 1500s. but long before this, the musket was already widely used as castle and fortification weapons, replacing the crossbow. the main reason was the shooter was protected from direct attack by the fortress so he could reload and aim at his own sweet time. he could also fire over parapets, throught appertures and slits, which was difficult for the bowman.
there were many battles that were decided by the use of cannon and heavy artillery but the first decisive victory by massed muskets i know was the battle of mohacs wherein sulayman’s janissaries armed with matchlocks defeated the hungarian cavalry in 1526.
Kevlar alone is designed to essentially disperse the force of the bullet over a larger area by “catching it” essentially in a net that stretches a little bit as the bullet runs out of steam. Bullets are fast and rip through flesh because they exert a huge amount of force on a small area.
Arrows actually penetrate through a piercing action, which is a bit different. This is why stab proof vests are not the same product as bullet proof vests. In correctional facilities this is very important, as an inmate will virtually never have a gun but may have a shank or other form of piercing weapon, and a standard bullet proof vest will fail to a piercing attack, which is essentially what a bow is.
That is so true. That weight drop off on a compound bow makes it much easier to hold at full pull. Plus you basically can’t pull it beyond a certain point so you always draw it to the same point every time. I can’t imagine how tiring it must have been to precisely pull an 80-100 lb draw long bow to let off 10 arrows in one minute would have been. (It doesn’t sound like alot of weight but just try to draw even a 55lb compound bow if you haven’t done it before.)
Indians did have a certain spirituality with nature, but that never stopped them from bending nature to its whims. They repeatedly burned back forest for agriculture, kept animals in check with their hunting, and during the fur trade nearly hunted beaver to extinction.
I’m not judging them in the least. I’m just saying that falling for that “noble savage” trap isn’t good and it’s an insult to Native Americans.
one important point: the bow was the best cavalry weapon up to the 1700s when light and multiple/repeating firearms could finally be carried and used on horseback.
Yup, but the drilling had little to do with accuracy, and everything to do with reloading as fast as possible and do the revolving ranks thing in a coordinated and if at all possible not clusterfucky fashion.
Welsh bowmen on the other hand drilled endlessly to land their arrows at precise ranges (trivia: English longbowmen never really train in an aiming fashion, because much of the time they were in the back ranks anyway and couldn’t see what they were shooting at. Also it’s hard to aim at something straight ahead when your bow is angled 20+ degrees up. So instead the regiment commander called ranges, which the bowmen knew how to hit by rote)
[QUOTE=Brainglutton]
Yeah, but how come Musketeers only ever seem to fight with swords?
[/QUOTE]
If you’re talking about French Musketeers, they started off as just that: a bunch of courageous bastards who went into battle carrying muskets at a time when firing guns was taking one’s life into one’s hands. In doing so, their regiments earned a reputation for bravery, or depending on who you ask, for recklessness.
When muskets were phased out, or rather became the norm and much safer ; the King kept the core of the original regiments around as his personal bodyguard/honour guard and factotums because they were pretty much the Special Forces of the time - best training, biggest balls, loudest mouths.
In times of war, they were also typically the ones to lead the charges or exploit breaches in fortifications - tasks that call more for close combat weaponry than long arms. And of course, when you’re in town having illegal duels with the Cardinal’s men to get under the skirts of some tavern wench, you don’t take your rifle with you, that’d be unsporting
That has more than a bit to do with the core principle behind the weapon. With a bow, you use your own strength to propel the arrow - if you’re a weakling, whelp, you won’t do much damage if you can even pull it taut for any length of time.
Crossbows were a step further in the weakling’s favour: you still use your own muscle strength, but you can take your time, you get to pull with your legs or even with a windlass, and the weapon will remain ready to fire as long as it has to.
A firearm uses the strength of a chemical reaction alone - even a baby can kill someone using a gun. The reaction also produces more force than any man could ever hope to. And guns are even better than crossbows at staying loaded and ready to fire, because there’s no string pulled taut or anything that “works” and might break over time.
At least, that’s true of 17th century guns - earlier you had to light a long fuze and keep it burning all day long just in case you had to fire. Not exactly civilian-friendly. But a 17th century flintlock pistol ? It’s compact, it packs a hell of a punch, and if it misfires you can still brain people with the pommel. No wonder civilians fell in love with them.
But the training of musketeers (not the French ones) involved far more tactical drills. There is a big gap in terms of the level of strategy displayed between pre-firearms armies and post-firerams ones. And muskets had a range quite inferior to those of bows, so it also included facing the enemy way closer.
It might take more training to drill musketeers to walk into sure death than it took to train archers to fire accurately and in sync.
Not sure about that one. There was a special term* during the *Guerre en dentelle *time for young officers that volunteered for first charge duty(usually on fortifications). It was almost sure death but if you made it, it would improve conisderably your chances of rising in rank.
It ceased to be a Musketeer thing pretty fast, both because the Musketeers ceased to do it (when they became a prestigious bodyguard unit instead of a purely military one), and because it was used at large by all of the army.
*if someone can find me the name of this, been looking for it for the last five minutes. I remember it being mentionned in the Vauban wiki page but cant find it again.
