The first bronze cannons appeared on European ships around the mid-fifteenth century. While bronze–nine parts copper to one of tin–was more costly than the previously used wrought iron, such guns could be easily replicated, melted down and used again, and most importantly in a maritime environment, they were corrosion resistant. Bronze guns are virtually indestructible.
As an example, a ship carrying a load of fine bronze cannons sailing from Macau to Lisbon was wrecked off the wild coast of South Africa in 1647. The wreck stayed undiscovered until the 1970’s when many of the guns were recovered in good condition. Over 400 years submerged in salty ocean, and yet-with a little work-soon as good as new!
Because of their durability, such cannons can tell stories that are otherwise lost to us. Here is the history of three such cannons from the seventeenth century that illustrate the trade routes, the alliances, the foes and the conflicts of that era.
Seri Rambai
Fort Cornwallis was built by the British East India Company in the late eighteenth century to defend Penang from pirates, Malays and any competing colonial powers that may take a fancy to its strategic position commanding Malacca Strait. There are a number of cannon scattered around the expansive battlements today, mostly iron 32 pounders that were originally mounted on now-disappeared outworks. But on a recent visit there, one beautiful piece caught my attention.
It was a bronze VOC (Dutch East Indies Company) 28-pounder, and though weathered through centuries of tropical exposure, covered in patina and mounted on a battered timber frame that does it no justice, it still looked a sturdy and impressive piece of ordnance.
The barrel has a six-inch bore and is a touch over 3 metres long, making it a 20 calibre. True to the practical ethos of the VOC, it is not a heavily decorated weapon; the lugs are workmanlike heraldic dolphins, in front of the trunnions is a decorative band with serried lions, and another decorative band sits before the swell of the muzzle. The trunnions and cascabel are plain. There is a VOC stamp and the makers name is embossed around the end of the barrel:
IAN BERGERUS ME FECIT 1603
This is a reference to Jan Burgerhuis, the gunfounder, a producer of ordnance for the Zeeland Admiralty in Middleburgh, and the year of manufacture.
Dr Gibson-Hill[1] inspecting the gun in the 1950’s suggests it was a gift from Dutch commander Cornelis Sebastiansz to the Sultan of Johore in late 1605. Unfortunately for the sultan, the cannon did not prevent the attacking Sultan Iskander Muda of Aceh from razing Johore’s capital in 1613, dragging him back to Sumatra to an unpleasant fate, and taking the impressive bronze cannon with him as spoils. Portuguese, Dutch and English artillery was highly prized in the East at the time because they were seen as more reliably cast than locally produced weapons. One European observer in India in 1666 noted “They have cannon also in their towns, but since they melt the metal in diverse furnaces, so that some of it must needs be better than others when they mingle all together, their cannon commonly is good for nothing.”[2]
In 1613 Aceh was at the peak of its power, and it is probably unlikely the VOC cannon was fired in anger defending the port-city (if indeed it had been fired defending Johore), but a new plaque in Arabic Jawi script was added to the barrel describing its capture:
Captive of the Sultan
Taken by us, glorious champion of the World and warrior sovereign,
At the time when we ordered Orang Kaya Seri Maharaja, as our captain,
And Orang Kaya Laksamana and Orang Kaya Raja Lela Wangsa to attack
Johor, in the year 1203 A.H [AD 1613].
And in Aceh the gun stood for nearly two centuries, until it was gifted to an Aceh ally, the peninsula state of Selangor under Sultan Ibrahim, just across the Malacca Strait. By then it was long obsolete; only for show. Malay sultans were famous for collecting and displaying bronze guns as a symbol of power, wealth and supremacy.
And in Selangor the VOC gun stood for another 75 years. Until some pirates operating with the nod of the latest Selangor sultan pillaged a junk and murdered the crew in 1871. The British sent in the gunboats, destroyed the forts, torched the town, spiked the guns, but impressed with the big bronze piece, they took it back to their base, Penang, where today it still stands, with some legends attached and the name Seri Rambai. Zeeland to Johore to Aceh to Selangor and finally to Penang; the life of a fine 420-year-old cannon, crisscrossing the world and the Malacca Strait.
Si Jagur
Another wandering piece of ordnance I came across earlier this year in Indonesia had a different story and a different name, Si Jagur. This too was bronze, but attributed to the best artillery foundry in Asia; Manuel Tavares Boccaro’s foundry, at Macau, in the early seventeenth century.
Bocarro was heir to two generations of gunfounders at Portuguese Goa. One of his father’s beautiful bronze guns from 1594 is in the Royal Armouries, and another can be found in the Lisbon Military Museum[3]. Following a Dutch attack on Macau that came within an ace of victory in 1622, the young Bocarro was dispatched to Macau to manage the new foundry there. Over the following decades, he produced an array of church bells, religious statues and an astonishing supply of cast iron and bronze cannons that were issued to arm the Portuguese fortresses across the East, including Goa itself. In fact, there was soon such a surplus of guns that in the 1640s a shipload was dispatched to Lisbon. The galleon carrying them went down in a storm off Port Elizabeth, and when it was discovered in the 1970’s around 40 bronze 18-24 pounders were recovered; a further quantity of iron guns being left underwater at the wrecksite[4].
Bocarro’s guns were respected and prized throughout Asia. Many locations were manufacturing cannon at this time in the region: they were made in the Philippines and Borneo, at Macassar, Aceh and in Siam. But as many gun crews no doubt found out the hard way, one needed to have a lot of confidence in the expertise of a weapon’s maker to touch fire to vent. In many cases, potentates were simply interested in displaying the cannon just for prestige, with no intention of actually firing them. Nor did they have the specialists to fire them. They just had to look impressive.
One ruler that did recognise the limitations of his own gunfounders was the Sultan of Macassar, who in 1638 asked the Viceroy in Goa if he could pay for his own guns to be made by Bocarro in Macau, though he had a foundry himself in Macassar[5]. Tragically, none of Bocarro’s impressive bronze cannons are left at Macau, and if I have this right, there are only two left in Asia; one recovered from the sea at Tidore in the Spice Islands in 2005, and the second, Si Jagur, now in Jakarta.
Once this gun armed a fortress at Macau, the fort of St Jago (giving it the name, Si Jagur) but was later shipped south to augment the firepower at Malacca, which was always under pressure from the Dutch, Aceh or Johore, and often from all three. At Malacca it was seized when the Dutch captured the ruined fortress in 1641, and sent back to bolster the defences of the port of Batavia. Today, it can be seen in Fatahilla Square in the old quarter of Jakarta.
Si Jagur is considerably larger than the Dutch piece in Penang, though probably lighter in weight. It has a length of 3.85 metres and a bore of 9.8 inches, giving a calibre of just 15, and it has less overall taper than the Penang gun. Its large bore and small calibre mark out Si Jagur as a perrier, a class of stone-throwing cannon favoured by the Portuguese at the time for firing a less dense stone ball. This allowed the same velocity to be achieved as an iron ball, though with lower pressure within the barrel, and hence a greater margin of safety. This increased safety then allowed such cannon to be made much lighter with thinner barrel walls, therefore saving on expensive bronze, but, as JF Guilmarten notes, “…they made a bigger hole.” It was a ship-killer or wall smasher definitely built to impress.
It is not a highly decorated barrel unlike many of Bocarro’s other weapons. It even lacks the crest of Macau and his own stamp like most of his other pieces, though perhaps these were removed by the Dutch after capture. What does remain is an embossed cryptic Latin inscription, translated as:
FOR MYSELF I AM BORN AGAIN
Perhaps this alludes to the practicality of bronze artillery, in that old or damaged guns could be melted down and re-used.[6] But the most notable feature of Si Jagur is the ornate cascabel and distinctive button. It is a huge clenched fist with the thumb protruding from between the middle and index fingers. Certainly, one of Bocarro’s more unusual pieces, if indeed it was his.
St Lawrence cannon
One more cast bronze perrier that is clearly a Bocarro from Macau now stands in the Royal Armouries at Fort Nelson, and it had a roundabout way of getting there. Inscriptions on the barrel tell us that it was made in Macau in 1627; it was named after St Lawrence; it was produced for ‘the City of the name of God in China’ (ie; Macau), and the gunfounder was Manuel Tavares Bocarro. Also evident are the arms of Portugal in relief on the chase.
The barrel is 3.7 metres long and the bore 10.5 inches, giving a calibre of around 14. A weapon able to fire a stone ball of 10 inches was a reasonably large barrel for the time, and around twice the bore size of the quantity of Bocarro’s bronze guns found off Port Elizabeth from a decade or so later. So, this was a special piece.
It is thought to have armed the Fort of St Tiago de Barra which guarded the inner harbour at Macau along with a smaller gun, a 30-pounder named St Ildefonso. In 1717, records indicate that two guns were gifted by the Macau Senate to the Chinese emperor, and subsequent events suggest they were the two ‘Saints’. The Chinese had a high regard for Portuguese artillery, and such gifts occasionally needed to be made by Macau to ensure continuation of its lucrative operations in China.
They were mounted by the Chinese in the Boca Tigris complex of forts at the ‘Bogue’ or the mouth, of the Pearl River that led upstream to Canton. In 1841, when the St Lawrence gun was over 200 years old, British forces stormed the forts in a furious battle during the First Opium War, capturing over 300 guns. The most impressive of the captured pieces were taken as spoils to England the next year, and both ‘Saints’ were among these, though it is unclear if they themselves fired on the attackers. Given the intervening centuries of artillery technology and the difficulties of procuring the correct size stone balls, probably not.
Unlike Seri Rambai and Si Jagur sitting outside in the weather for centuries–and the former is also reputed to have spent a decade underwater off Penang–the St Lawrence gun rests indoors at the Royal Armouries at Fort Nelson, and St Ildefonso is in the Tower of London. Both look magnificent; finely crafted examples showing the peak of the craft of gunfounding. Glorious looking ship-killers.
Bocarro went from gunfounder to governor in 1654, and his son took over the foundry. By then, it seems Portugal’s ramparts were full of cannon and the last gun cast there was in 1679[7]. Unfortunately, Macau has retained not one of the hundreds of Bocarro cannon made there. The excellent Macau Museum in Monte Fort has a full-size replica of the St Lawrence piece, but the only other bronze made by Bocarro remaining in Macau is a church bell.
Together, these three magnificent pieces of ordnance illustrate the longevity of corrosion-resistant bronze artillery and its ability to tell stories otherwise long forgotten. Macau where two of these guns were made was once described as the wealthiest city in the world, and Batavia–where Si Jagur now stands–was the capital of an empire. Si Jagur also witnessed the fall of Portuguese Malacca, and Seri Rambai served dozens of rulers from six different realms. And the St Lawrence gun witnessed a conflict–which highlighted what the Chinese regard as their period of humiliation–whose repercussions remain with us today.
1] Notes on the old Cannon found in Malaya, and known to be of Dutch origin, C.A. Gibson-Hill, MBRAS 1965
[2] A footnote to Gibson-Hill, CR Boxer, MBRAS 1965, p.162
[3] The Defences of Macau, Richard J. Garrett, HKUP, 2010, p. 146
[4] The Defences of Macau, Richard J. Garrett, HKUP, 2010, p. 148
[5] The Guns of the Sacramento, Geoffrey & Allen, Garton, 1978, p. 65, 79
[6] A footnote to Gibson-Hill, CR Boxer, MBRAS 1965, p.164
[7] Galleons and Galleys, JF Guilmarten, Cassell 2002, p. 62