A LIVING HISTORY BLOG.

18TH CENTURY LIVING HISTORY IN AUSTRALIA.

Thursday 21 April 2011

On Powder & Lead.

On Powder & Lead.




What are the heaviest items that we carry on a trek? I would think it was water, lead, & food. Food we can cut back on. I don’t mean that we should all start just carrying flour, bread or corn & hunt for our meat, but we can cut our provisions back to just two items, perhaps bread & hard cheese, or bread & meat. That should be fairly light & last us for a weekend or more.



Water we can’t do anything about, unless you know that you have good water where you are going. I carry water anyway, & either boil any water I find, or I collect rainwater in my kettle.



Lead can be reduced in weight because we can retrieve spent lead from shot game & remould it. By reducing the amount of lead we carry we can carry more gunpowder.



My fusil takes 60 grains of gunpowder. 60 grains = 1 Dram.


1LB of gunpowder = 256 Drams. So that is 256 shots from just one pound of gunpowder. My powder horn holds roughly one pound, & my gunpowder bag roughly two pounds. So if I only took my horn & gunpowder bag, I would still have 768 shots to hunt with. That is a lot of meat when hunting large game, & most of the meat would come from a trap line. So barring any skirmishing, I could take one shot per day for 2 years, or one shot per week for 14 years from just 3 pounds of gunpowder!




5 comments:

Gorges Smythe said...

Interesting. Few folks bother to think it through.

Jenny said...

At the swoopy camping stores they now have the neatest thing yet - freeze dried, dehydrated water.

REALLY cuts back on the weight.


:p

Keith said...

Jenny, what can I say!?
Thank you for sharing that with us :)
Regards, Keith.

Martin said...

Hi Loup,

I understand that the dehydrated water goes down particularly well with doughnut holes, according to the Central Indiana Snipe Hunter Association.

Martin
(Sorry. I couldn't resist!)

Keith said...

Martin, a very good come-back & a very light alternative!