Drams or Drachms? > 18th Century Texts > 19th Century Texts > Measuring Devices > Tables
The trouble seems to have started with the appearance in English of An Essay on Shooting published anonymously in both London and Dublin in 1789. The author is believed to have been William Cleator although some time after 1860 the name John Acton erroneously appears and has been perpetuated (1). Much of this work has been translated from G. F. Magne de Marolles whose book Essai sur la Chasse au Fusil was published in Paris in 1781. Riling is incorrect in describing this as having been taken from Marolles’ later, and better known, enlarged edition entitled La Chasse au Fusil of 1788 (Riling 310).
When dealing with loads Marolles recommends ‘un gros, ou tout au plus un gros ¼ de bonne poudre … et une once ou une once ¼ de plomb, suffisent pour les fusil de calibre ordinaire, c’est-a-dire, depuis 24 jusqu’a 30.’ We discovered that the gros was equal to one eighth of an ounce, French measure (60.285 grains avoirdupois) and that this in turn is approximately equal to one drachm (Apothecary’s weight) (2). One drachm is equal to 54.69 grains, or nearly two drams (55 grains if we accept 27½ grains to the dram). Therefore, Marolles recommended from 2¼ to 2¾ drams and an ounce or 1¼ ounces of shot for guns of 24 to 30 gauge. Few would argue with this given a flintlock gun and the soft and insubstantial wadding of the period.
However, when we come to the Essay translation, Cleator merely substitutes ‘drams’ for ‘gros’ while retaining the amounts used by Marolles, so that one or 1¼ drams are recommended for this size of gun. We then consulted several large dictionaries including the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary to discover whether there was any contemporary interchangeability of meaning between the spelling of dram and drachm, but this was not indicated. The O.E.D., however, seems to regard the terms as currently interchangeable with the emphasis on drachms as apothecary’s weight and drams as avoirdupois.
A wide range of authors has been studied and it is obvious to us that the problem of the mistranslation of foreign weights and measures had been recognised for a very long time. Writing in 1628, Robert Norton states in his THE GUNNER SHEWING THE WHOLE PRACTISE OF ARTILLERIE that ‘each man should judge how much confusion would have growne to the Reader, that should have read a French, Italian, Germane, or Spanish Author, and had no means to understand that there were any difference in length of the Measures of one same name. And the like may be said of the waights used of severall Nations, which with the former of Measures, would not onely have a double error, dangerous for practise, but also confounded the Readers that suspect no such thing.’
Before the appearance of Marolles’ book Essai sur la Chasse au Fusil in 1781, we have the father of modern ballistics, Benjamin Robins, writing New Principles of Gunnery in 1742 where the term ‘dram’ is used and clearly identified as one sixteenth of an ounce or ‘about 27 grains Troy’. In the 1770, 4th Edition, of The Art of Shooting Flying, Thomas Page used ‘grains’ when giving precise measurements, but otherwise quotes extensively from Robins. The large treatise by D’Antoni first published in the 1750s and translated by Captain Thomson from the Italian in 1775 with a new Edition in 1789, in the English version used both spellings but appears to mean the 27½ grain version each time. At one point he refers to Piedmont measure and gives this in drachms with a note that the amount is not converted to English measure.
Following the appearance of the Essay in 1789 the number of books on shooting increased considerably and there was very heavy lifting of material from this work. In 1792 William Augustus Osbaldiston in The British Sportsman quotes the Essay but changes back to the correct meaning and spelling of drachm. Also in 1792 George Montagu in The Sportsman’s Directory or Tractate on Gunpowder, a work owing nothing to Cleator, uses on page 94 the expression ‘a dram and a half or ninety grains of Battel powder, and encreasing the quantity five grains at a time, till the purpose is answered‘ (3). Elsewhere he commonly used grains weight except when referring to the duelling pistol where one sixth to one seventh of the weight of the ball is given.
Footnotes
(1) Cleator is named as the author of the Ingenious Essay on Shooting by the Rev’d W. B. Daniel in Rural Sports – 1801.
(2) Lieutenant Colonel Burn – A Naval and Military Technical Dictionary of the French Language – London – 1852
(3) Battel Powder was so called after the place where it was manufactured at Battle near Hastings in Sussex.