A Demonstration

segolden · Moderator

There's been quite a lot of discussion about the power of the longbow recently, on TV, in books and on this site. I myself participated in one such demonstration a few years back, which I'll refrain from repeating here as it really wasn't very conclusive. Neither have been most of the demos on the little screen, despite their pretenses at being "historically accurate". Anybody who has drawn an English warbow or seen it done can testify of this.

Having said that, I was interested to be reading up on the history of early English colonies in America, and running across an incident in Jamestown that is illustrative of just how "inferior" archery was (NOT) compared to firearms of the era.

The colonials had a running spat with the local Indians going for most of the life of the settlement, the only things really allowing them to survive being that a severe drought and epidemics had severely reduced the native population in the area. There were times when the colonists were confined to their homes within the palisade, either by hunger, illness or harassment by the tribes.

During one of these stints, a dummy on a pole was put up over the outer wall, dressed in chest plate armor and stuffed with rags, as a taunt against the Indian archers who generally stayed just out of musket range. The settlers were stunned when one Indian stood up to the challenge and drove his arrow a foot through the dummy, despite its being pistol-ball proof. Figuring that this might lead to an all-out attack, the locals having been shown that English armor wasn't up to a battle, the colonials rebuilt the dummy with scrap steel and put it up on the wall once more. The jeering Indians went silent for a moment as another arrow, instead of penetrating, shattered against the plate. The archer himself cursed the settlers mightily, both for wrecking one of his arrows and for cheating in a fair contest. Not that it made any difference in the on-again/off-again warfare, as the tribes weren't about to attack the settlement anyway, their style of combat being raid and snipe, and their numbers would never allow such wholesale battle by that time. Things continued as before.

This kind of equality between armaments was to go on through the mid-nineteenth century, when the first repeating firearms (ala Sam Colt) hit the frontier, and finally rendered the bow obsolete as a means of warfare for the Indian tribes. It was actually disease that enabled Europeans to establish themselves in the Americas, and their growing numbers fell upon the devastated natives like a slow tidal wave. The Indians fought on and survived as independent cultures only as long as industry took to provide Europeans with the final technological nail in their coffins.

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"For I have drawn Judah taut and applied [My hand] to Ephraim as to a bow." Zech. 9:13
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