mgmorden wrote:
My archery history is lacking, but IIRC the Huns used a recurve bow while mounted that was pretty darned efficient. If the Native Americans had that rather than their own bows that could have yielded the same type of improvements from horseback.
Good point about the Huns, but the eastern woodlands Indians in the early 1600's were unmounted. The early English settlers didn't have to confront mounted Indians -- the famous Indian ponies derived from horses that escaped or were stolen from Spanish herds in Mexico and the Southwest, and that's why they later became the hallmark of the Plains Indians. Once a toehold was established by the English on the east coast, the die was cast for the Indians. Just about the last realistic chance the Indians had to throw the English back into the sea was the Virginia Indian uprising of 1622. After that, it was all over for them, although they didn't realize it yet.
Realistically though, that particular process wasn't strictly a military one, and while its certainly superior in certain circumstances, there was a reason why the English had already mostly abandoned their own bows in favor of those matchlock rifles.
In Europe, the prevailing military tactics of the day (the early 1600's) revolved around "pike and shot" armies, in which the "shot" (the musketeers) played a definitely supporting role. Battles were decided by "push of pike," and the muskets were there mainly to prevent cavalry from wreaking havoc with the tightly-packed pike blocks. In fact, the guys that would dirty themselves with black powder were from a lower social class, and were looked down upon by the esteemed pikemen. (Of course the cavalry had the highest status of all.) As late as the 1630's, the fad among the well-to-do militia units of London was the "double-armed man," who was armed with the pike in combination with the traditional longbow. No lowly firearms for them!
(The pike wasn't really supplanted until the era of the flintlock and the rise of the bayonet, in the late 1600's.)
A similar thing was happening in Japan at around the same time. Firearms had been introduced to Japan by Portugese traders in the 1500's, and they had been copied by the industrious Japanese. But anybody, even a lowly peasant, could become a matchlock musketeer, and this reduced the premium placed on the training of the exalted samurai. Ieyasu Tokugawa made use of peasant soldiers armed with firearms to consolidate his power under the shogunate, but after his death the samurai class reasserted itself, and the peasants were disarmed and people were prevented from having firearms on pain of death. That was the situation that Commodore Perry found when he opened Japan to the West in 1854.
