Lead covered stone??

[CRUSADER]

http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php/topic,138315.0/topicseen.html

Recently I found this round stone covered in lead (4th picture). Its the size of a Musket Ball. It has a mould mark. The stone was probably very round & has cooled the metal so fast that it has left 2 patches where the stone is showing (1 patch pictured).

Anyone see this before?

I have hundreds of musket balls none like this, did they run short of lead, was it an experiment or just for fun

 

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[jeff of pa]

No Idea; just a Guess.

Could somone have been running Low on lead &
coated stones to shoot.

 

[CRUSADER]

No Idea; just a Guess.

Could somone have been running Low on lead &
coated stones to shoot.

It was one of my thoughts above but I have no idea how that may affect the flight of the ball through the air & never heard of this happening through other sources

 

[jeff of pa]

I have heard of melting down Silverware & Jewelry in the
Forts here in PA during shortages (the frontier Forts of PA History
mentions melting Pewter Ware) when the french & Indian war was going on.

A Hurried Idea in the heat of the moment
may have caused someone to say
better then Surrender, Let's try.

 

[PBK]

The musketball possibility is intriguing. The Chinese reportedly used stone ones in some of their early guns. Larger, lead-coated stones are also mentioned among the types of projectiles fired from early cannons, and there are a few references to such usage even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example...

Baden-Powell wrote in The Matabele Campaign (1896):

A scattered shot here and there, and then a rattling volley; the boom of the elephant gun roaring dully from inside a cave is answered by the sharp crack of a Martini-Henry; the firing gradually wakes up on every side of us, the weird whisk of a bullet overhead is varied by the hum of a leaden coated stone or the shriek of a pot-leg fired from a Matabele big bore gun.

A suspiciously similar passage appears in H. Rider Haggard's Finished (1917):

"Off you go," I said, "we are ambushed by Kaffirs."

We were indeed, for as we tailed down that kloof, from the top of both cliffs above us came a continuous but luckily ill-directed fire. Lead-coated stones, pot legs and bullets whirred and whistled all round us.