My first jezail

[RDGAC]

Hello again fellas, been quiet for the past month owing to cash shortages and work taking up rather a lot of time. My unblocking device is coming on apace, and although rough it seems it might do the trick. Currently the plan is to stick some boiling water down to help loosen anything in there, pour some of it out, get the rod (galvanised steel with some rather crude teeth) and get cracking. The only possibility that worries me is that it might not be hard enough to cut either hard, glazed fouling or a large mass of corroded steel, but we shall have to see. If the worst comes to the worst, there's a firm not far from where I live that can probably make me a rod with a hardened steel crown saw on its end.

While reading Elgood's excellent Firearms of the Islamic World, I've had some thoughts about jezails in general. Specifically, what made them so effective in irregular combat?

The old tale is simply that jezails had long, long barrels, giving improved muzzle velocity and accuracy compared to European service muskets (most famously the Brown Bess, especially the 39-inch Pattern III). Yet both of the weapons I've had personal acquaintance with are scarcely any different; my jezail's barrel is exactly 39in, although the Museum's weapon is rifled (which obviously would allow much improved accuracy at range), albeit with a 43.25in barrel. LPCA's page on IDing weapons from the area shows a jezail with a abrrel of 117cm (or 46.8in, in old money), while Bluelake's jezail has a barrel of 58in, much more what I had expected for these weapons.

Without wishing to teach my grandmother(s) to suck eggs, I'll go on further. Elgood discusses the muskets of Sind, and shows three examples; he adds that:

The evidence of travellers like Burnes, Pottinger and Elphinstone makes it clear than Sindi culture is essentially Afghan, as might be expected from their geographical position and trade pattern. The jezail used in Sind, with its distinctive butt, is in fact the chosen form of firearm used over a large area of Afghanistan... The question arises as to how to distinguish between the firearms of Sind and Afghanistan and whether the shape of the butt varied on a tribal or regional basis... A French officer who travelled through kandahar in 1826 described the local infantry as being with 'sword and matchlock, long but of small bore', a description which matches the Sindi barrels.

His illustration of three Sindi pieces in the Tareq Rajab collection is, happily, accompanied by dimensions, indicating that one (rifled) is of 42in, one of 49in, and one of 42.8in, the latter pair being smoothbores. This is curious; my first acquaintance with the jezail was as a sort of semi-legendary weapon, a giant musket of six feet or more in the barrel that could kill at three or four hundred yards, and against which European service weapons were profoundly inadequate, mostly due to their short barrels. Yet my own jezail is of 39in; there seem moreover to be many Sindi and Afghan guns that are scarcely any longer and, indeed, in the same place from which I acquired my jezail there was .a weapon which looked, even by Western standards, almost carbine-sized. This was also, quite clearly, a jezail-type weapon of some kind; perhaps made for a boy?

At any rate, I find all this very interesting and it leads me to a couple of questions. Firstly, just what are the average proportions for these weapons? Were they really that much longer in the barrel than their European counterparts? If not, what gave them the edge they have long been reputed to possess? Were they loaded differently, for example - using a tight-fitting ball and leather patch, a measured power charge and so forth? It's all very puzzling indeed.

As an aside, can anyone recommend some more books on the subject of firearms in the Afghanistan-Northern Indian region?