Dumb Duels #3: Cannon Duel November 12, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Beach recently revived one of his favourite tags, the duel and the dumb duel. Here is a doubtful sounding example reported in a British newspaper in 1890. The date of the duel itself should be about 1875, which means that an argument between provincial army officers had a lot of time to be exaggerated into a paperback dime novel. Reader, Beach welcomes you to the cannon duel.
A strange duel was that which was fought in a sparsely settled part of Sonora, Mexico, about 15 years ago. Capt. Villenueva and a lieutenant of light artillery belonging to one of the posts had some trouble about who was the best shot with the mountain howitzer. They quarreled, and agreed to settle with the howitzer at 500 yards. They took neither seconds [!] nor assistant gunners, but from the top of small hillocks they fired explosive shells at one another. The captain was wounded by a fragment of a shell, but they fired ten shots before either was disabled, though each was covered with dust. Finally the captain landed a shell under his adversary’s gun, and the explosion so mangled the lieutenant that he died before they could remove him to the post.
The idea about there being no seconds is lovely: and where could the witnesses have stood… Beach takes howitzer here to mean a nineteenth-century cannon as in the image above: hence the cannon duel of the title. He has found no other examples of cannon or howitzer fights, but to be fair to readers in North Korea (and he has a record of not being) he should note that one citizen of that country was recently executed by an anti aircraft gun…
