They Bear the Broad-Arrow: Schooner Days MCCLVII (1257)

by C. H. J. Snider

HERE they are, the guns of the Nancy, heroine of the War of 1812, as seen at Moy Hall, in Scotland last summer, though snowflakes may be mantling them on the broad stone coping of the ancestral castle of The Mackintosh at this moment.

Two thick brass tubes around 3-inch bores, rather like fat extended telescopes. They are 50 inches long, 9 inches diameter at one end, tapering to 6, through five ringed sections of varied lengths. All oxidized to the bluish-green that bronze and copper take on a hundred years’ exposure to air with enough salt and moisture in it - and Scotland has plenty of both.

At the butt of each of the Nancy's guns is a projecting knob called the pommelin. Near the muzzle the barrel bells out to 8-inch diameter, to give greater strength where the exploding charge exerts its greatest force. Beyond this flare, the barrel ends in a 6-inch lip ring, When afloat a wooden tompion kept the wave out of the gun if the ship dipped the muzzle in rolling.

From each side of the barrel, at the centre of gravity project two short fat horns or trunnions. These are the axis on which the gun moved vertically in its carriage. Both guns had been mounted on wheeled carriages of heavy wood. It is not known whether these came with them when Alexander, 26th chief of Clan Mackintosh, brought them from Moy House in Canada to Moy Hall in Scotland in 1836. They have no carriages now. Their own weight holds them snugly in the parapet embrasures.

THE BROAD-ARROW

Each is marked with the broad-arrow of ordnance stores and the figures 2-0-0, giving their weight - 2 cwt., no quarters, no pounds. They are an 18th century government issue, and may have been in the Nancy from her launching, for defense against hijackers, ruthless rivals, and Indians. The fur trade was no Sunday-school picnic.

Returns of 1800 list the Nancy as capable of carrying six 4-pounders and six swivels, It is not known what her whole original armament was, but it was sufficient to arm four row boats for patrolling the Detroit river when war was declared and leave her these two for use as an armed transport in 1812 and 1813. In the following year, when she was engaged in carrying cannon, stores and provisions for the British outpost at Michilimackinac, these small 4-pounder guns were apparently removed and mounted at Moy House. They had seen much war service.

So these were the little barkers with which the Nancy defied Indian savages and cutthroat fur pirates, and the whole United States of America, then 15 in number!

They did not look very formidable as they nestled there en barbette, last summer, like a pair of pea-pods. More pop-guns, smaller than some yacht clubs’ saluting cannon.

NEVER GIVE UP

After all though, it's not the gun but the man behind it that counts. Alexander Mackintosh, a three-year-old toddler when he saw the Nancy launched, knew what to do with her and her guns 24 years later when he we in command of her, a bearded man with a crew of eight Canadian lake tars. He was prepared to blow her up—but never to give her up.

“Reaume and Jacob advised me to heave the King’s gunpowder overboard and give the vessel up that there was no saving her. I reply’d that I would never heave any public property overboard, to save private, let the consequences be what they will. I will attempt to get into the lake and go for Makinac.” This from Alexander’s log entry Oct. 6, 1813, when trapped in the St. Clair River, four American men-of-war below him, American militia surrounding him.

With these two guns he made good his promise, as remains to be told.

ONE OF THEM - The Nancy’s starboard 4-pounder, and The Macintosh of Mackintosh, Vice Admiral in the Royal Navy, viewing it last summer with his friend Donald J. Macdonald, Yr.