or partridge shot. Rounds recovered from Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose (sunk 1545) were wooden cylinders filled with broken flint flakes. When filled with rubbish or scrap (rather than round bullets) the round could be known as scrapshot or langrage. In 1718 Blackbeard aka Edward Teach armed his guns with a range of makeshift weaponry including langrage. Several of his cannons, still loaded with spikes and shot, have been recovered from the wreck site of his flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge. Archaeologists have also retrieved conglomerations of lead shot, nails, spikes and glass from the site. Langrage was also found among the artifact assemblage of the Mardi Gras shipwreck, 4000 ft (1219 m) deep in the Gulf of Mexico. The defenders of The Alamo (1836) used old horseshoe nails and chopped up iron horseshoes to make their scrapshot. Effectiveness When fired, the canister disintegrates and its shards and projectiles spread out in a conical formation, causing a wide swath of destruction. It was particularly effective during the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War, where massed troops at close range (usually less than 400 yards) could be broken up by artillery batteries firing canister. At times, particularly at very close range, artillery crews would fire extremely lethal "double canister," where two rounds were loaded into the gun tube and fired simultaneously using a single charge. At the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, Mercer's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, fired a roundshot and a canister from each gun as a double-shot. The roundshot was loaded first with the canister on top. Canister played a key role for Union forces during their defeat of Confederate troops assigned to support Pickett's Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. At times, trained artillerists would fire the canister shot towards the ground in front of advancing enemy troops, causing the conical pattern to flatten out as the balls ricocheted and skipped off the terrain. This in effect widened the killing zone. An example of this tactic was on the first day of Gettysburg, where Lt. James Stewart's Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery on Seminary Ridge skipped canister shot at Alfred M. Scales's approaching Confederate infantry, breaking up their attack and forcing them to take cover in a depression. Canister shot was also used to good effect by U.S. Marine 37mm anti-tank guns in World War II to break up Japanese banzai charges. During the