Cobh in County Cork, Ireland, is best known from the days when it was named Queenstown and the RMS Titanic made her last stop here before meeting her sad end in the North Atlantic in 1912.
In those days the vast deep water harbor was home to the Royal Navy and Queenstown had a British garrison. When the British left Ireland for good they left behind a cannon, a relic of an earlier war fought far from these shores.
Irish regiments fought with great gallantry during the Crimean War of 1854-56, a conflict that saw many of the devices and weapons used later in the War Between the States introduced for the first time in a struggle fought in southern Russian between the tsar’s imperial armies and the British, French and Italian invaders.
The cannon was emplaced at the mighty fortress of Sevastopol and was one of thousands of heavy guns captured when the Russians fled. As trophies of war, the tsar’s guns were distributed in towns and cities across the victors’ countries, and many are still to be found where they were set up as war memorials in 1856.
The Cobh cannon is a shore based gun, according to General Shuvalov’s system of ordnance brought in during the 1750s. The gun carries its history on its trunnions. The barrel is immaculate and carries the double-headed Romanov eagle emblem of the tsar.
At the rear behind the vent is written “No. 93,” which I suggest may have been added as a battery marker by a Russian officer or even as a capture mark by a captor to indicate which gun was intended to go where.
We don’t know the names of the soldiers who captured it, or the gun’s place in the great defensive batteries around the fortress, but she certainly had seen a lot of service, since the story tells us this gun was over 60 years old by the time the Crimean War broke out.
On the left trunnion 3659 is its serial number in the Russian list. Below that is written in the Cyrillic alphabet ALKSMA. The tsars were as secretive as the Soviets, and this is the military name for a city we now know as Sverdlov in the Urals about 500 miles east of Moscow. Huge numbers of muzzleloaders were cast there. The last three letters are an abbreviation for “factory.”
The bottom line is the name of the gun’s maker, which gives us a slight headache since this reads in translation as GASCON. This could well be a French name obviously, and indeed the tsars employed many Swedish, English, Danish and other foreign engineers and artisans; they put their names on their creations because the tsar held every man responsible for his workmanship and if the gun failed, then Master Gascon would suffer loss, possibly of life or liberty.
Besides knowing who made the gun and where, the right trunnion completes the picture. The top line tells us this is a 36 pdr., the middle line gives us the bore, and the bottom number, 1794, tells us the year in which this Irish trophy was manufactured.
Straightforward enough — an iron 36 pdr. fortress gun cast by a Master Gascon at Sverdlov in the Urals in the year 1794, not for just for any tsar of Russia.
No, the cannon was cast for Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, who died only two years later, the most powerful woman in the world.
This was an old gun by the time it came to the shores of Ireland and its value is immense.
I heartily recommend that any Artilleryman reader visiting Ireland head for County Cork and see this excellent gun. It’s only an hour or so drive away from the John F. Kennedy Woodland and homestead site.
Catherine the Great’s gun sits on the promenade overlooking the harbor a stone’s throw from the Titanic memorial.
(About the Author: Military and maritime historian Robert Morgan is secretary of the Welsh Maritime Association and a member of the Ordnance Society who writes frequently about artillery and fortifications.)