Small iron balls fired from a cannon

Usage examples of grapeshot.

Grapes made him think of grapeshot and he wondered if the bastards up ahead were equipped with canister.

Only when men came into the firelight, towards the breaches, did the muzzles spout flame and the grapeshot crease the ditch floor.

Revolutionary Council but then slunk away to Chemnitz as soon as they got the first whiff of grapeshot.

In the streets of New York, hundreds of antidraft rioters were mown down with grapeshot, and the cobbled street before the little magic shop was strewn with reeking dead.

The barrels had to be shifted on the carriages from their travelling position into the fighting stance, then trunnions must be clamped with iron capsquares as powder and grapeshot were rammed into cold muzzles.

With even the few western Crusaders in understandable confusion amid the turmoil of their fleeing countrymen, the opposing ranks of English foot suddenly turned to left and right and trotted aside to reveal the grinning mouths of two dozen minions and sakersfour-pounder and six-pounder cannonand the grapeshot, caseshot, and shovelfuls of coarse gravel that they spewed into the close-packed ranks of gunmen and pikemen and halberdiers and swordsmen turned a partial rout into a general one.

His mouth curled down at the corners as he remembered the sharp thudding of the Turkish guns and the hiss of grapeshot whipping across the plain to rip into the Christian ranks, the whirling scimitars of the weirdly wailing Janissaries blocking any advance, and the despairing cry that went up from the defenders of the west when it became evident that the Turks had outflanked them.

The brass elevating screws were turned and the portfires touched vent tubes and the fire slipped down to the coarse powder that hammered more grapeshot to slice into the undergrowth across the clearing.

So one broadside, not including the carronades, would see 160 grapeshot being hurled at the Frenchman by sixteen guns.

A voice with such lovely ringing tones could have turned every male head down both sides of the Champs-Elyskes, but in the billiard saloon of the Grand Hotel of woman-starved Bulawayo, it had the effect of a close-range broadside of grapeshot.

He had mounted all of his guns forward so they could spray any attack with canister shot, tin canisters of grapeshot that burst in the air over the enemy.

Charge every gun, six with chain and grapeshot to clear the decks, nine with heavy shot.

The French had switched to grapeshot that left the cannon barrels like duck shot from a fowling piece.

I've got high hopes we can manage to avoid the guillotine and whiff of grapeshot side of the business.

The grapeshot, after smashing in the cabins, had swept forward to pepper the mizenmast and rip at the carriages of the aftermost guns.