I just recently began watching the 90's history series / movies known collectively as Sharpe. It is a tale about a fictional British riflemen who, leading a unit of other riflemen, participates in some of the most key moments in the Napoleonic Wars and climbs the ranks of the British military in doing so.
The first episode, Sharpe's Rifles, shows Sharpe taking over his unit and training them to fire faster. Specifically, he chastises them for loading their rifles with ramrods. He demonstrates loading his rifle without one, by spitting the musket ball into the rifle, tapping it on the ground, and then firing, stating that tapping the ball on the ground is good enough and the ramrod only slows you down. Here's the clip to see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9RAh1J4NE0
My question is: Isn't the ramrod extremely important for a rifle? The way Sharpe taps his rifle to load it might work with a smoothbore musket, but a rifle doesn't have smoothbore. It's interior barrel is "rifled", with the inside literally cut to spiral the bullet. Because of that rifles in the Napoleonic Era took much longer to load than a smoothbore because the musket needed to be jammed down into the barrel along the rifling. I always thought it was for that fact that Napoleon never adopted rifles into his army, thinking that faster reloading was more important than accuracy.
So how could the makers of Sharpe, a historical show, make such a clear and obvious error. The entire series Sharpe is about British soldiers who love their rifles, but no one on the show did any research into how they're loaded? Am I missing something here? Please comment with your thoughts and speculation.
Right, I posted an answer here about an hour ago, but that was just plain a disgrace, so I've deleted it.
We must note that the Sharpe TV movies are a screen adaptation of a book series of the same name, written by Bernard Cornwell. We are currently examining Sharpe's Eagle (not Rifles, I'm afraid).
The answer is that yes, you are missing something - Sharpe isn't training his orphaned band of Riflemen; instead, he's training men of the fictional South Essex regiment, who are line infantry and are armed with the Brown Bess musket instead of the Baker rifle.
The funny thing is that in the book, this scene is also present. However, Sharpe makes no mention of tap-loading in that scene. He does bite the cartridge and spit it into the barrel, but he still shoves it down with the ramrod (and specifically contrasts how easy it is to load, versus the greater force you had to use with the rifle).
In the books, tap-loading is only rarely seen; I've rooted through some of my Sharpe epubs and a search for 'tap' turns up results in only two books. Sharpe's Battle has a throwaway mention of it being an option for a unit of Portuguese caçadores (light infantry), but still at a disadvantage to their French attackers. Sharpe's Waterloo has Sharpe by himself engaging a unit of French skirmishers, where he tap-loads two rounds to shoot at them - but he never expects the tap-loaded rounds to hit, he's just making fire to make the French think that there's a sentry line instead of just being Sharpe himself.
I'd have a bit more here, but then that turns into the realm of speculation. It's informed speculation and I'm pretty sure it's the reason why the producers chose to add tap-loading to that sequence, but that is a statement I can't source, so off it stays.
I do recommend that you try and get your hands on Cornwell's books. The show had a low budget to work with, and it shows; observe this depiction of Talavera later on in the same episode, where the English and French armies are reduced to about twenty guys versus fifty. (Also note that bit at 1:30, specifically Private Dobbs as he loads - using his ramrod instead of tap-loading as earlier taught to him.) Cornwell, working with text instead of visual medium, has no such restrictions, and portrays the battle to a better scale.
Further, as regards your note of 'historical' - Sharpe, both the book and TV movies, is historical fiction and is meant for entertainment, not sheer accuracy to what actually happened. The events they examine are 'Hollywoodised' to make them more exciting, and for works on the screen, visually appealing. Plus, with Sharpe in the picture, events are changed to fit him in - Eagle has him capturing a French eagle standard, when in reality the first Eagle taken by British forces was at Barrosa, two years after Talavera.
Lots of works of historical fiction and those 'based on' history inevitably get things wrong, either for reasons of drama, or because it wouldn't make a good spectacle on screen, or production reasons. (Look at the FAQ and see how many questions there are on 'did X get it right'.) One notable example is Braveheart's depiction of the Battle of Stirling Bridge, which very notably does not feature the bridge at all.
A lot has been written here, but to add just a bit. The reason for soldiers being drilled over and over on loading their musket or rifle was that, if they didn't follow the steps in the correct order, the gun would be disabled or be damaged. If the paper went down the barrel ahead of the powder, and obstructed the vent, or the ball was dropped in first, the gun might not go off. If the powder wasn't added, or it was left in the paper, the gun might not go off. The recruit would then have to take it to his sergeant to have the load pulled- which took time. If the gun was reloaded anyway, and eventually it did go off with two charges in the barrel, it and the soldier could be destroyed.
Like the drop-and-knock technique, there were other clever ways people found to speed load, like using the ramrod like a piston so that some of the powder could be blown through the vent to prime the pan, for example. These were demonstrated and usually applauded, but the verdict by officers was always the same: it would work only some of the time, and when it didn't work the gun would be disabled and maybe the soldier as well. If riflemen wanted to load for speed instead of accuracy, they used paper cartridges and the musket drill. If they were trying to hit their targets, they used powder horn, measure, a patched ball and took their time.
They way Sharpe teaches the men to load their muskets is incredibly dumb and unlogical. First, there are safety reasons against this. A musket barrel will get hot rather quickly. To properly spit the bullet in the barrel, they touch the barrel with their lips - after a few shots they would get severe burns. A second safety issue is that while using this loading technique the men's heads are placed right over the muzzle. Now, when for some reason the weapon goes off accidently, the soldier's head would be burned by the muzzle flash. Also, why should spitting the bullet in the barrel give you any speed advantage? Normally, you would bite off the paper cartridge (on the opposite side of the bullet) , pour a bit powder into the priming pan and then dumb the rest into the barrel and ramming the bullet, which is still in the paper cartridge, down. Spitting the bullet will also let you lose the advantage of the paper: It works as sort of a patch and, as Sharpe is saying in the clip, the bullet will be prevented from falling out the barrel. (Pt. 1/2)