How Wooden Armour Held Off Russian Muskets in Alaska
A Russian captain who fought the Tlingit in 1804 wrote that a musket ball fired at moderate range could hardly get through their helmets. The helmets were carved from spruce burl, the gnarled, knotted wood that does not split when it is hit. Under the helmet a bent-wood collar covered the face, with a slit to see through and a spruce-root loop inside that the warrior gripped in his teeth. On the body went wooden slats over two layers of thick hide. 📖 Source: Elizabeth von Aderkas, American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, Osprey Men-at-Arms 418 This kit was made for clan wars fought with arrows, clubs and daggers. When the Russians came hunting sea otters, hide alone did not stop their musket balls, and some warriors are said to have sewn hundreds of Chinese coins onto it, coins that came back from China in the otter trade. The Spanish artist Tomás de Suria tried a helmet on in 1791 and wrote that it weighed as much as if it were iron. In June 1802 the Tlingit took the Russian fort at Sitka and burned it. In 1804 the Russians returned with the warship Neva, and for four days its guns could not break the new fort of green saplings. What ran out was gunpowder, after a canoe carrying the reserve blew up. Their war leader K'alyaan fought in a carved raven helmet with a blacksmith's hammer taken from the Russian fort, and that helmet still survives. This channel is made on musayko.com, a platform I built for creating and managing content, and it is open to other creators too. Which warrior should we reconstruct next?
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