“Both poisoned and chewed the musket balls”

Lt. John Waller of the British Marines wrote to his brother soon after the Battle of Bunker Hill:

We had of our corps one major, 2 captains, and 3 lieutenants killed; 4 captains, and 3 lieutenants wounded: 2 serjeants, and 21 rank and file killed; and 3 serjeants and 79 privates wounded: and I suppose, upon the whole, we lost, killed and wounded, from 800 to 1000 men. We killed a number of the rebels, but the cover they fought under made their loss less considerable than it would otherwise have been. The army is in great spirits, and full of rage and ferocity at the rebellious rascals, who both poisoned and chewed the musket balls, in order to make them the more fatal. Many officers have died of their wounds, and others very ill: ’tis astonishing what a number of officers were hit on this occasion; but the officers were particularly aimed at.

Poisoning a musket ball was thought to stop a wound from healing. Chewing a ball supposedly roughed up its surface so that it produced a rough wound that also wouldn’t heal easily. Poisoning and chewing a ball—well, that seems like a way to poison yourself.

This wasn’t an isolated complaint. Throughout the eighteenth century British officers complained about their enemies poisoning and/or masticating musket balls. Indeed, back in the 1670s the English poet Samuel Butler had launched such an accusation against Oliver Cromwell’s English army in Hudibras:

’Twas ill for us we had to do
With so dishon’rable a foe:
For though the law of arms doth bar
The use of venom’d shot in war,
Yet by the nauseous smell and noisom
Their case-shot savour strong of poison,
And doubtless have been chew’d with teeth
Of some that had a stinking breath…

Since the discovery of germs as the real factor in those deadly wounds, I don’t know if anyone’s bothered to test musket balls to see if poison could survive being fired across a battlefield.

There does appear to be evidence of British soldiers chewing or roughing up musket balls. The photo above shows a set dated to the English Civil War in the 1640s, on sale through TimeLine Originals. Another bunch is on display at Fort Ticonderoga. But I wonder if British officers ever ordered that tactic or acknowledged that their own men used it.