3-034-767 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Siege Operations at Chatham: destruction of the stockade by gun-cotton and powder, 1871. British Army training. Illustration of '...the blowing down of a stockade, by firing bags of gunpowder and cakes of gun-cotton against it... Lieutenant Sykes fired the gunpowder, while Lieutenant E. H. Cameron fired the gun-cotton. The object was to see which would make the better breach. The effect has been thus described: "Of the two breaches in the stockade, that made by the cotton was by far the cleanest. The cotton ignites so quickly that, as it were, it strikes, while the powder only pushes. It had cut off the timbers against which it was laid close to the ground; they could not have been felled more squarely by an axe-man. The powder had made the wider breach, but in it the logs lay over one another, and would require clearing away before men could pass. The cotton had flung the beams out of the road, so that the stormers might rush in three abreast. The railway-bridge timbers were broken short off, and lay across one another like the splinters in a game at spellikins. The lesser charges in the augur-holes had broken the balks off short, and the necklaces had ripped them up".' From "Illustrated London News", 1871.