The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c10.39

c10.39

‘The guns’ of the Maratha armies, we learn from Tone, were ‘tolerably well cast, but the carriages’, says he, ‘are in general very clumsily and badly constructed. A march of a few days shakes the carriages to pieces’. ‘The cannon’, the same writer informs us, ‘are never made of any precise calibre, but are cast indifferently by all diameters and the ball afterwards adapted to the bore. They never use cast shot, but those of wrought iron, hammered to any dimensions; the many angles, consequently on the surface of the shot in a very small course of service, destroy the smoothness of the bore and they can never be fired with that precision that a cast ball can.’²