Bunker Hill

halfhearted one, to oppose the enemy’s landing—and the way to do that was with cannons. So far, however, the provincial artillery had proven to be shockingly ineffectual.
    Firing a cannon was an admittedly complex operation. It took at least seven trained men to fire one of these carriage-mounted fieldpieces. You had to jam the cartridge (a flannel bag full of powder) down the bore with a long-handled rammer and compress it with a clump of cotton rags known as the wad; then came the iron cannonball, which had to be free of any dust or dirt; otherwise it might jam in the barrel and blow the fieldpiece to smithereens. But that was only the beginning. Powder had to be poured in the vent at the rear of the gun, known as the touchhole, before another man shoved a pick down the vent and pierced the cartridge to ensure that it would ignite. Only then did the artillery officer introduce a burning match to the touchhole with a long stick known as a linstock, firing off the cannon.
    The provincial army’s lack of gunpowder meant that there had been precious few opportunities for rehearsing this complicated procedure. As a consequence, the rudiments of actually firing a cannon remained a challenge for the provincial artillerymen, especially since the cartridges contained in the cannons’ side boxes proved to be too large to fit down the bore. The gunners had to tear open the cartridges and transfer the powder from the bag to the cannon barrel with an elongated ladle. And then there was the just as tricky matter of aiming the fieldpiece with any accuracy. The few balls successfully fired had buried themselves inoffensively in the side of Copp’s Hill. Peter Brown recounted how after this pitiful display of marksmanship, during which the cannon was “fired but a few times,” the artillery officer “swang his hat round three times to the enemy, then ceased fire.”
    Prescott undoubtedly felt that he had little use for the fieldpieces at the redoubt and even less for the artillery officers and their men. For as had also become clear, being able to fire a cannon did not necessarily mean that you had any familiarity with being fired
at
by a cannon. After several hours of enduring the British artillery onslaught, Prescott’s men had become relatively inured to the cannonballs that kept raining down on them, even the ones that skipped menacingly along the hillside, sometimes veering in unexpected directions (one man lost a leg to one of these erratically bouncing balls of iron) before they buried themselves in the dirt or simply rolled to a gradual stop. Since the earthen walls of the redoubt and breastwork were able to absorb the impact of the cannonballs, the structures provided surprisingly good protection from the onslaught, and by the early afternoon, the men had developed a routine whenever they knew another cannonball was headed in their direction. “We could plainly see them fall down,” a spectator in Boston wrote, “and mount again as soon as the shot was passed, without appearing to be the least disconcerted.” This did not apply, apparently, to the artillery officers and their men, most of whom had already fled for the relative safety of Bunker Hill.
    One artillery officer, however, was eager for action. Unlike the others—whose chief qualification, in at least two instances, was that they were related to the artillery regiment’s commander Colonel Gridley—Captain Samuel Trevett appears to have known what he was about. Prescott ordered Trevett to move two of his fieldpieces in the direction of Morton’s Hill and fire on the British soldiers as they disembarked from the boats. He also ordered Captain Thomas Knowlton and his two hundred soldiers from Connecticut to provide Trevett with whatever protection he might need as he opened up on the regulars.
    Once they had left the redoubt, Prescott never saw Trevett and Knowlton again and assumed that, like the men who had accompanied Putnam with the entrenching tools, they had abandoned him for the high ground to the north. This, however, was anything but the case. Instead of deserting his commander, Knowlton hit upon a way to fix, at least in part, the mess Prescott had created by building his redoubt on Breed’s Hill.
    —
    About two hundred yards behind the fort, Knowlton came across a ditch. Just ahead of the ditch was a fence made of stone at the bottom and rails of wood at the top that ran parallel to the ditch as it extended across the width of the