Crossbar-shot

Tim Postlethwaite with a cross-bar shot from the site

A single piece of concreted cross-bar shot was recovered during the 2006 season. Howard Blackmore, former Keeper of Firearms at the Tower Armouries described cross-bar shot as an incendiary projectile made up of 'a solid iron ball from which issue two long quadrangular spikes. These shot were wrapped with incendiary material, the spikes being intended to stick fast in a ship's woodwork'.

The first mention of 'crosbarred shott of Iron' is in an inventory of the Royal Armouries for 1589 (seven years after the wreck) where it was stockpiled for use in cannon, demi-cannon, culverins, demi-culverins, sakers, minions and falcons. The first literary mention is in John Smith's Sea Grammer of 1627:

'Crosbar-shot is also a round shot, but it hath a long spike of Iron cast with it as if it did goe thorow the middest of it, the ends whereof are commonly armed for feare of bursting the Peece, which is to binde a little Okum in a little Canvasse at the end of each pike.'

In Skinner's History of London, 1795, this type of shot is called 'spike' or 'star shot'.

^{The same piece of shot featured in the picure above, as it was found on the seabed}