How Gun Lube Brought Down the British Empire

[raykeller]

How Gun Lube Brought Down the British Empire
1/19/13 | by Chris Eger
In 1857 colonial India, the British East India Company was an enormous
publicly traded private corporation that literally controlled the country.
They equipped and had under their control a large army, minted their own
money, and oversaw all imports and exports to the subcontinent. The local
millions of inhabitants of the area we know now as India, Pakistan, Nepal,
and Burma, however, were not really in love with the concept but the spark
that ignited a bloody war and spelled the doom of the company came from the
type of gun lube used at the time.

The Causes
India was, and still is in many ways, a country of many diverse people
carefully separated by caste, religion, language, and custom but the two
largest religious groups in British colonial India were Hindu and Moslem.
While European officers, early private military contractors, led and filled
specialist roles in the East India Company's Army, it was these two groups
that made up the majority of the rank and file. These local soldiers were
called sepoys after a Persian word meaning soldier.

While this army had been formed and serving for over a hundred years under
the Company's direction, by 1857 the morale of the sepoys was at an all-time
low. The year before the sepoys had, under the General Services Enlistment
Act of 1856, been made liable for service not only in other parts of the
colony but overseas instead of restricted to local use. This redefining of
their duties left many enlists suspicious of the intentions of their
employers and their suspicions began to turn to hostility when it first was
introduced that the turban cockades (i.e. military insignia) these units
carried were made of unidentified leather, which Muslims feared was pig and
Hindus feared was cow.

Then they found out the ingredients used in the lube on their bullets.

The Enfield Rifle
Prior to 1856, the East India Company issued the Brown Bess musket to its
troops. The Brown Bess was

3-band Enfield rifle, circa 1850s.

a good design for a flintlock musket but was inaccurate at any range more
than a football field. Just a few years before the British Army had adopted
the thoroughly modern Enfield Pattern 1853 rifled musket. Percussion fired
with a rifled barrel, the Enfield could be loaded faster and a tight-fitting
pointed bullet rather than a loose ball as in the Brown Bess. This allowed
the gun greatly increased range and accuracy.

Unlike the French and American minie ball bullet that had grease grooves
cast into it to carry lubrication down the barrel, the Enfield used a strip
of greased paper to help guide it into place down the length of the barrel.
The 530-grain bullet was issued in the Metford-Pritchitt cartridge that
included a thick paper tube that held the round and the 68-grains of black
powder to propel it. The whole affair was thickly greased with a coating of
animal fat and wax to both seal and waterproof. To load the new rifle with
these cartridges, the standard drill in the British Army was to rip the end
off with the soldier's teeth, pour the powder down the muzzleloader's
barrel, and then push in the grease paper wrapped bullet down on top.

When the sepoys began training with these rounds with their shiny new
Company owned rifles, the grease left a bad aftertaste in their mouth, one
they had not tasted before. The Hindu troops discussed it amongst themselves
and feared that it was beef tallow, fat of the sacred cow. The Muslim troops
came to

Instructions to Sepoys on how to load their Enfield rifles.

the accurate conclusion that the grease was rendered from the forbidden pig.
At a minimum, this was less than ideal, and some of the more strictly
religious in these units felt that ingesting such ideological contraband
could damn their mortal souls for eternity.

When officers were asked and Company officials consulted as to what the lube
was for the record, their fears were confirmed. Some cartridges made both in
Britain and in India were in fact sealed with beef tallow, others were done
with rendered hog fat, and still others with the divinely inoffensive sheep,
but no one could tell which was which.

Hoping to address the problem quickly, the Company sent out an order that
sepoys should tear the cartridge open with their fingers, but instead this
confirmed to the soldiers by default that the bullets issued were coated
with the sacrilegious fat. The order led to a refusal by men in some of
these units to use the new rifle and in turn led the Company to label this
group 'mutineers' and dragging them off to stockade.

The imprisonment of Hindu and Muslim soldiers over their refusal to use the
offending rounds led to rebellions in almost every Hindu and Muslim regiment
in the Company's Army. Known as the War of Independence in India and as the
Sepoy Mutiny in the West, the engagement ran for almost three years and cost
the lives of hundreds of soldiers and civilians on both sides.

The results of the mutiny
Though the rebellion was put down, the engagement ended the East India
Company's tenure as a military

Depiction of the spread of the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

force. The company itself was nationalized and the British government
assumed its operations in India the next year. This spelled the end of the
megacorporation and in 1874, it was dissolved.

A new army, built around special units of the Sikhs, Jats, Pathans and
Gurkhas minority was developed in India and the government led army, just to
be on the safe side, increased the numbers of European soldiers, forbidding
all-Indian artillery units.

Moreover, the gun cartridges issued to non-European were carefully made in
India with vegetable-based lube.