Identifying some British artillery from 1864

[EnclavedMicrostate]

Following on from something I mentioned here: https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=142372.15

Felice Beato's 1864 photo of the Yokohama garrison continues to stump me as regards the artillery depicted. I've included zoomed-in segments of the photo here:





Any ideas as to which guns are shown here?

[fred]

Images not showing for me - lets see if this works any better

[EnclavedMicrostate]

Hm, very odd – I'll see if I can edit the original post.

[Cubs]

The top image looks like old Napoleonic vintage 9pdr guns. Could the bottom ones be naval guns on wheeled carriages?

[EnclavedMicrostate]

Old Napoleonic (or at least Napoleonic-styled) guns seem like a viable candidate; I've read of old 6- and 9-pounder bronze guns being rolled out alongside the Armstrongs for the Second Opium War. You could well be onto something with the small ones being naval guns – failing that they could be mountain guns of some sort?

[carlos marighela]

Top photo, gun on the right is an Armstrong RBL, most likely the 8cwt 12 pounder. The stepped barrel is a giveaway.  There's a preserved example about 40 kms from here. Armstrong guns were taken to Japan.

The other two in that photo appear to be 9 pounder smooth bores, the gun the Armstrong 12 pounder replaced.

Bottom photo is a bit more tricky. They might be the Armstrong 6 pounder 3cwt mountain gun of 1858 but the carriages look a bit too chunky and the bore a bit large.  More likely a naval gun on a field carriage for the RM. Best guess anyway.

[EnclavedMicrostate]

You're probably right about the 12lb Armstrong mixed in with the bronze guns. As for the smaller pieces, I'm similarly unsure about their being 6lb Armstrongs – there's no 'stepping' on the barrels, nor the boxes above the axle that usually characterise these. I suspect some sort of mountain gun, if not the 7-pounder RML (as depicted here https://www.northstarfigures.com/prod.php?prod=6272) then its predecessor?

[FifteensAway]

If the bottom photo are naval guns, carronades?

Or are they short barreled howitzers?

I'm no expert by any means, just those were my thoughts looking at them.

[carlos marighela]

You're probably right about the 12lb Armstrong mixed in with the bronze guns. As for the smaller pieces, I'm similarly unsure about their being 6lb Armstrongs – there's no 'stepping' on the barrels, nor the boxes above the axle that usually characterise these. I suspect some sort of mountain gun, if not the 7-pounder RML (as depicted here https://www.northstarfigures.com/prod.php?prod=6272) then its predecessor?

The 6pdr 3cwt RBL was the immediate predecessor (1858/59) to the 7 pdr RML and it's not one of those (see pic below).

The axles, wheels and carriage look pretty chunky for a mountain gun, so maybe an extemporised lash-up or just possibly captured ordnance?

[EnclavedMicrostate]

You're definitely right that the carriage looks rather chunky, but at the same time, the fact that each gun is only being hauled by 3 horses makes me suspect that it is indeed some sort of mountain gun, as I'd have thought carronades would be pretty hefty despite their short length?

[carlos marighela]

Yep. IIRC the last carronade in RN service was the 32pdr.

There's an outside chance that it's something more exotic (at least for the 1860s). The axle trees and the way the wheels are angled is suggestive of the ancient 18th C 3pdr 'Grasshopper' gun. They remained in service during the Napoleonic wars, being used as mountain guns at the end of the Pensinsula campaign. Muzzle looks a bit big for such a diminutive gun but the carriage looks pretty much right from the front. Maybe soldiered on as landing pieces in the way that the later screw guns served aboard RN warships into the 1920s? I dunno, pure speculation but at least there are 28mm models you could use.

See what you think. http://johnsmilitaryhistory.com/threepdr.html

[carlos marighela]

Oh, forgot.

https://www.brigadegames.com/BG-NBRA05_Napoleonic_British_3_lb_MountainGun_Artillery

[EnclavedMicrostate]

Definitely possible, but the barrels seem too smooth on the outside, and seem to have a prominent front sight post, which is why I'm inclined towards their being a later gun. One possibility is that these are very early marks of the RML 7-pounder, if there were any in service at this point, but from what I can tell (doing some relatively superficial diving) there were some earlier SBML bronze pieces that were rebored as rifles in 1865; perhaps these are the original smoothbore tubes? I'm having a hard time finding image references for those guns though.

https://www.geocities.ws/rbaal/hotg/Guns/rifled9.htm

[FifteensAway]

Knew nothing about Shimonoseki so did a little googling.  Maybe the photos are of captured guns taken from the Japanese?  My very brief perusal of the battle suggests that any force in place was a scratch force and probably the artillery was too.  Thus artillery could have been sourced from India to Australia to China to who knows where.  Or that captured speculation.

A very short conflict that might be thought of as a tiny and early (and Japanese variation) of the Boxer rebellion. 

[EnclavedMicrostate]

It's within the realm of plausibility, but it seems odd that there'd be horse teams for them and that they wouldn't be front and centre as trophies. It was mainly heavy coastal defence guns – 20 to 40 pound bronze pieces, and a few Dahlgrens – at Shimonoseki. I did a bit of reading around Shimonoseki for a game I put on at Overlord back in March, and while the Marines did face a small battery I didn't read of them managing to capture it.