The Sea Gunner’s Practice by B Blastem, Master Gunner

Thanks to Wikipedia 

Title: The Sea Gunner’s Practice With a Description of Captain Shotgun’s Murdering Piece with the improved Breech Action for use Upon Savage Coasts. Together with Tables and Proportions for all Pieces usual to that Service 

Author: B Blastem, Master Gunner 

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Midnight Folk by John Masefield 

Kay Harker has taken a few drops of a magic potion that makes you invisible. He goes out into the woods in the middle of the night and finds the local gamekeeper, Roper Bilges, up to no good and throwing out a pile of scruffy pamphlets and a book. 

I first read The Midnight Folk when I was about 8. It was absolutely years before I noticed that Roper Bilges was a naval/seafaring joke not just a strange name. Obviously, now I come to think about it, B Blastem is a joke name too. I was a very serious child and took things very much at face value, probably still do.

Kay leaves Mother Shipton’s Prophecies Explained, Zimmerman on Solitude (definitely a real pamphlet), The Execrable Life and Death of Scarlet Blackbones, The Barbados Pirate, A Book to Reckon Tides, Tom Maggot’s Fifty Merry Jests, and The Sea Gunner’s Reckoner in the woods. But he takes the book The Sea Gunner’s Practice. 

He is surprised to see that the book once belonged to his great grandfather. The name and address are written on the flyleaf in neat handwriting: Aston Harker, Seekings House, 1804.

Kay has some difficulty reading The Sea Gunner’s Practice; it’s not really intended for little boys. But one page is labelled To Make Fine-grained Gunpowder for Priming, another To Make Coarse-grained Gunpowder, and a third, excitingly, To Make Coloured Flares and Other Artificial Fire Works. He naturally plans to make his own gunpowder one day. And fireworks too. Well, of course!

Also from The Midnight Folk: Why I Am a Witch by Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.

Thanks to Britannica