While the fouling of dry, well-incorporated powder is comparatively trifling, a damp or slow-burning powder, such as serpentine, leaves a much larger residue. The consequence was that, after a few rounds, it was exceedingly difficult to reload small arms, a considerable part of the loose, floury charge sticking to the fouling.[418] The remedy for this evil was the use of cartridges. Whitehorne mentions “bagges of linnen or paper” for the charges of cannon in 1560,[419] and in 1590 Sir John Smythe speaks not only of cartridges, but of composite cartridges for small arms—“cartages with which (musketeers) charge their peeces both with powder and ball at one time.”[420] There are payments for talwood (faggots) “for drying powder” in the English store accounts 1372-74,[421] and in 1459 the Scotch Government were endeavouring to keep their powder dry by storing it in waxed canvas bags.[422] An official recommends the English Privy Council in 1589 to sell certain “bad powder” at Dorchester, adding, “the longer it is kept the worse yt wilbe.”[423] The Navy were of course, then and always, the chief sufferers from damp powder. Serpentine powder, Sir Henry Manwayring tells us in 1664, was never taken to sea (after big guns had become strong enough to stand corned powder) “both because it is of small force, and also for that it will, with the aire of the sea, quickly drie and lose its force.”[424] But corned powder was by no means proof against damp. In the action fought off Grenada in July 1779, Bishop Watson says “the English shot would not reach” the French. The powder, it was found, “had concreted into large lumps, in the middle of which the saltpetre was visible to the naked eye.”[425] Between the years 1790 and 1811, 189,000 whole barrels of powder, “which had formed into lumps from the damp of H.M.’s ships of war,” and had consequently been returned into store as useless, were rendered serviceable in the Government powder factory.[426]