carcass

A carcass is a hollow iron sphere, typically 12 to 32 pounds in weight, designed to spread flame across an enemy vessel. Unlike solid cannonballs, the carcass is loaded with combustible compounds and features three or four small vents drilled through its shell. When fired from a cannon, it follows a ballistic arc and bursts on impact or shortly after, ejecting burning material across the target's deck and rigging.

The filling mixture was standardized across European navies by the 17th century: saltpetre and sulphur form the oxidizing base, while resin, turpentine, and tallow provide fuel and binding. Antimony acts as an anti-caking agent in storage. This composition burns intensely once the shell ruptures, making it far more dangerous than ordinary incendiary arrows or combustibles thrown by hand. The small vent holes allow pressure to build slowly during flight, then release combusting gas once the projectile strikes.

Carcasses saw heavy use from the 1600s through the early 1800s, particularly in ship-to-ship combat where wooden hulls and canvas rigging made targets vulnerable to flame. They were also employed in sieges against fortifications and coastal bombardment. Larger versions, sometimes called shells, were cast thicker to survive longer flights. Smaller variants of 6 to 8 pounds were used as hand grenades or fired from howitzers.

The carcass suffered from two critical limitations: the iron shell itself was weak and prone to fracture under the stress of firing, scattering shards unpredictably. Second, the burning composition was difficult to ignite reliably once the projectile came to rest; poor fuzes or incomplete rupture meant many carcasses failed to spread flame. By the 1850s, improvements in explosive shells and the shift to iron hulls rendered the carcass obsolete, though the term persisted in naval gunnery texts long after the weapon fell from use.

The name derives from the resemblance of the perforated iron ball to a hollow skeleton or carcass, emphasizing its emptiness and the way it was hollowed out and filled. In older texts it appears also as carcasse or karcass, reflecting continental European origins of the design. Navies distinguished it carefully from bomb, which denoted a heavier mortar projectile with a single large fuze hole, and from grenade, which was smaller and often hand-thrown.