Lead Shot

La Salle carried a lot of shot with him. And because of the recovery of Belle, we've got a lot of shot here at the museum.

How much?

Well, we don't quite know yet...

These are two of our many trays of shot.  Off to the right, there are shelves full of more shot. We've been working to get these counted, weighed, and rebagged.

...But it's a lot. We have about 1700 "lots" of shot, ranging from a single ball weighing 0.1 grams (that's about 1/25th of a penny's weight) up to a lot weighing over 50 kilograms (110 pounds) and with thousands of balls.

A big (perhaps the biggest) portion of the 2010 La Belle inventory is a complete count and weighing of the ship's lead shot collection.

The shot was used for the ship's cannons, muskets, and pistols, and comes in all shapes and sizes. There's more small bird shot than you can shake a stick at.

This is only one of the lots of birdshot.  There are several thousand pieces here.

We suspect there's about two and a half tons in this part of the collection, but we won't know for a few more days. First, the shot was put in order. Then, it was counted by hand. Once it was counted, it was all weighed. If the lot was too big to count by hand, we took a small sample, counted it, and weighed it. This gave us an average per-shot weight for that bag. Then the weight of the whole bag could be divided by the average, and that gave us a good count of the entire bag.

After all that is done, we can print out labels, one for each bag in the collection. Then the labels can be put with their artifacts, and the artifacts can be put in new bags.

This is a pretty time-consuming process, as it requires going through the entire collection several times, and lots of moving artifacts in and out of their bags. When it's done, however, the project will have a good idea how much shot La Belle was carrying, and where it was within the ship, possibly illuminating details of life on board and storage philosophies.

One big question involves the differing quality of shot on the ship. Some is well-made and very round. Other specimens would be hard-pressed to even fit in a musket, much less shoot well. One possibility is that the irregular shot was meant for larger ship's guns as anti-personnel ammunition. Another is that La Salle was defrauded by shot manufacturers, who mixed in garbage with their shot to save money.

If La Salle was headed to America peacefully, why did he need so much shot?  If he was headed for war, why did he bring families and so many trade objects? Post your answers in the comments!