Word: muskets
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Daniel Defoe conjured his sketch of a man at the edge of the unknown out of little but an island, a parrot, a goat, a musket and a Man Friday. The "science-fiction" writer, busy working the unknown nowadays, requires planets, galaxies, universes and all the latest portents of physics. He sets out, as Defoe did, to make the reader's imagination whirl with mingled curiosity and alarm; but where Defoe found novelty in a human footstep, the science-fictioneer stakes everything on such inhuman images as "a six-foot egg made of greenish gelatin" or "nine feet...
Cervantes' heroic determination helped Christendom to win one of history's decisive battles; it also got him three musket wounds, and one of them made his left arm useless for life. Later, on his way back to Spain, Moorish pirates captured him and held him for ransom in Algiers...
...cutting a narrow trench 80 feet from the mill, Godfrey hopes to find traces of the "ambulatory walk" of the Norse church. Uncovered thus far: a 1696 King William III penny, a lead musket ball, an old brass button, a clay pipe...
...during the U.S. Revolutionary War, a British soldier named Duncan McColl was sent on a mission that took him in plain view of sharpshooting Yan kees. Their musket balls shredded his clothing, tore off his cap and the heel of one shoe. At last their officer, awed by the sight, gave the order to cease firing...
Each man kept his musket, powder horn, wooden canteen, knapsack and uniform. In his pocket were four months' wages in promissory notes, marketable at only two shillings to the pound. Veterans who thought this a meager reward (as most did) had the option of staying in camp until their enlistments were up. But, as Washington had shrewdly guessed, what every one wanted most was to get home...