2023-12-16 05:52:51
The topics about the conquest of America number in the thousands; as many as books have been exported throughout history. The myth shows us Spaniards dressed in armor and helmets advancing, weapons at the ready, through the jungle. But don’t believe that the photograph was like that. The reality is that, during the 15th and 16th centuries, harquebuses were a ‘rara avis’ in the The new World because of its high price and the long time it took to recharge it. In fact, experts maintain that, for every bullet fired by a peninsular, a native could return twenty arrows at him.
It was then the first decade of the 16th century, a time when much of the planet was unknown to Europeans. Those were times of true adventure in which hundreds of Spaniards left for the New World accompanied by swords, halberds, the occasional firearm and, above all, a courage that led them to leave the peninsula, leaving everything they loved. behind him.
The traveler profile
However, for experts like Juan Sánchez Galera, co-author of ‘Let’s tell lies. A review of our historic complexes‘ (Edaf), there has been a tendency to distort the image of that subject who, one day, collected his few personal belongings and embarked towards America in an old dilapidated boat. To begin with, the writer considers that it is generally believed that soldiers armed to the teeth traveled to the New World at the expense of the king of Spain, when in reality the majority of people who crossed the Atlantic were nothing more than colonists who intended to settle in South America and noblemen of low-key in dire need of getting some cash.
«There are two very different profiles of people who traveled to America. The first is the hidalgo, someone of noble birth who was second to none because he was not going to inherit anything. He was a guy who had a last name but no money and needed, therefore, to gain some assets and build a future. At the same time, the typical Andalusian, Extremaduran farmers… who did not have an important surname or money and wanted to work also traveled to America. But what is clear is that the profile of the conquistador is not that of a soldier whom the king paid to go to the New World, but rather a person who traveled freely and was not an official,” Sánchez says, in statements to ABC. Galley.
The reality is that the soldiers preferred to stay in Europe, where the Spanish kings did not mind opening the purse frequently to remunerate their services. «In those years, and for being a relatively small nation, Spain had two large military fronts in which it was necessary to bring qualified soldiers. In one the European wars were taking place and in another they were fighting against the advance of the Muslims. Professional soldiers fought in these two contests and received good money for it. Since they were well paid, they had no need to go to America. Furthermore, all the soldiers that could be gathered were always few,” adds the expert.
The usual thing for them was to acquire swords and halberds, and not harquebuses, whose price was more than prohibitive because they required very specific machinery to be built. The large number of elements that were needed to keep this firearm in perfect condition and the enormous amount of accessories that had to be obtained in order to shoot did not help either: ramrod, studs, ammunition… Something different were the armed expeditions – such as, for example, those of Pizarro or Hernán Cortés –, which sought conquest at any price and did not have so many problems when it came to releasing the coins.
The secrets of the harquebus
The harquebuses that reached America during the first years of the conquest were, to say the least, primitive. «These first firearms basically consisted of a long steel tube, supported on a plank, with a lower diameter or caliber of about fifteen millimeters. This tube was closed at the end that faced the part of the plank that served as the butt, and, almost at the end of the tube, on the side where it was closed, there was a small hole that went through the wall of the tube. (ear) and on which the end of the travel of a lever that held a cotton wick at its ends coincided. No matter how simple the description of the weapon may seem, it contains everything that can be said about an arquebus,” explain Juan Sánchez Galera and José María Sánchez Galera in their work.
Although its operation was relatively simple, recharging required some time. First of all, the harquebusier had to put the weapon in a vertical position. Next, he introduced a certain amount of gunpowder through the mouth of the cannon which, in the end, would be the one that would explode, causing the ejection of the lead ball that served as ammunition. Next, the soldier put a ‘wad’ of paper into the barrel. Its purpose was to prevent the gases that ignited the bullet from escaping and making the shot more effective. All of this was then compressed by several blows from a large wooden stick called ‘drumstick‘.
To do this, each conquistador had a lit fuse hooked to the ‘coil‘ – a metal piece in the shape of an ‘S’ located behind the ear – that, when pressed, caused the fire to fall on the gunpowder, igniting it. The fire was then moved to the interior of the barrel, where the explosive detonated, generating gases that, when compressed, pushed the bullet to the outside. All that was left was to start over. This firing system made the weapon known as a matchlock harquebus.
a thousand problems
Despite its effectiveness in expert hands, the harquebus lost power if handled by a novice marksman. The first cause of this lack of effectiveness was the reload time. And the fact is that, while a skilled harquebusier needed about sixty seconds from the beginning of the loading process of the weapon until the bullet was ejected from the tube, a man who lacked skills could take several minutes. This problem could make the difference between life and death when facing hundreds of Indians who launched an incessant rain of arrows ready to finish off the white and bearded invader.
In the words of the experts, the skirmishes lasted a few minutes and there was usually no time to use the musket. In turn, Juan Galera points out that its low rate of fire – the poor capacity of the weapon to fire a multitude of projectiles in a short period of time – made it useless in the most common type of combat in America: small skirmishes between a group of Indians and a group of Spaniards. In this type of battle, it seems, the native bows were much more useful, as they could be built at lower costs and fired a much greater number of arrows for each shot fired with a Hispanic harquebus.
«To corroborate this theory I compared the two weapons: the harquebus and the Indian bow. To do this, I made a replica of a matchlock musket faithful to the weapons of this type that are in the Army Museum and I saw how many discharges could be made per minute. I did the same with a bow. The conclusion is that, at the time when an Indian shot 20 arrows, the Spaniard loaded and shot one. Both weapons had more or less the same accuracy (about 50 meters). Obviously the impact of the musket was much stronger than that of an arrow, but the rate of fire was much greater. Furthermore, the natives’ armor was made of cotton and a musket was not needed to pierce them,” explains the expert in statements to ABC.
ABC flintlock musket
However, these numbers were only reached when the gun had already been fired once. And before the first shot, a minimum of five minutes was lost to prepare the weapon. This was because, in order to make a fire, the fuse had to be set on fire that would make the gunpowder explode. This process, which today would be done in a matter of seconds thanks to a lighter, was very difficult at the time. And, in addition to the problems posed by the typical humidity of the area, the only way to make a fire was with a flint; a stone that, when rubbed, generated a spark that created a flame.
“You couldn’t have the fuse lit because, in 15 or 20 minutes, the fire would consume it and you had to change it, so you had to keep it unlit and light it when you saw the enemy,” adds Galera. Thus, if a party of conquistadors was attacked by surprise by a group of natives, those who carried firearms were totally defenseless during the first minutes until they prepared the harquebus and, in many cases, they only had time to carry out a shot with his weapon before falling pierced by an enemy arrow. This meant that, in the expert’s words, this device ended up being used as a truncheon against the assailants after carrying out the occasional harquebus blow.
In addition to the effectiveness and rate of fire, it has also been stated over the centuries that the muskets had a strong psychological effect on the indigenous people. But… Is this real? For Sánchez Galera it is nothing more than a hoax. «At first they could have been effective on a psychological level, but, as the conflict between the Spaniards and the natives progressed, that fear disappeared. The Indians ended up knowing the effects that the harquebuses had and understood how they worked. It is documented that Atahualpa, for example, sent spies who befriended the Spaniards to learn about the technology they had behind them,” explains the co-author of ‘Let’s tell lies’.
The classical archaeologist born in Denmark does not have the same opinion as Galera Ada Bruhn de Hoffmeyer who, in his work ‘The Weapons of the Conquerors’, talks about how effective gunpowder was against the Indians on a psychological level: «Firearms did not have great military importance. But these weapons, in the early times, produced an enormous, almost divine surprise in the indigenous people. They also caused injuries that were unknown to them until then. They sought death instantly or quickly. Montezuma’s ambassadors, in their stories to the Aztec chief, tell him of the horrors they witnessed.
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