Not a Seal, Lead Shot Casting
Not a Seal, Lead Shot Casting, Image & Found by John GM.
"I presume this river [Thames] find of Stephanie's was someone's attempt at casting pistol balls!? They're mostly 5.7mm - 5.8mm diameter (o/all length of strip is 78mm)."
Supplied by G.Clooney, "Here is a reply from David F Harding, 5.7mm to 5.8mm is about .225 inches. This is quite a small size of buck-shot, roughly equivalent to civilian "goose shot". If it dated from c1800 I would say it is civilian shot for sporting use, as British army buck-shot was quite a lot larger than this c1800. However, the arrangement with balls both sides of a central channel is not one that was used as late as that. It looks far more like a 17th century (maybe even earlier) mould to me, especially as the quality is rather crude. It looks as though the two halves of the mould were not tightly held together when the molten lead was poured in, hence the bits of thin lead film around some of the balls. (They might have been thrown overboard because of this?) It might well have been a mould made of a suitable kind of stone, such as soapstone.
To to summarise I would say it is buckshot probably from the Civil War period or even earlier, and could be either civilian or military/naval.
I should also like to say , that it is the best specimen of lead shot still attached to their "sprue" that I have yet seen."
However not all experts agree:-
"An interesting object, but not, I think, shot for a firearm. The balls are sub-spherical, variable in diameter, and are connected to the main sprue by some rather too substantial sprues. The main sprue itself is overly substantial. We have seen multi-ball moulds and castings before, and they are somewhat different. I think you have something decorative rather than functional - an impression of vegetation, berries perhaps." From Jonathan Ferguson Curator of Firearms Royal Armouries Museum.
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