A Blast of Gunpowder, With a Whiff of Toast

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Rangers from the National Park Service fired a replica cannon on Thursday at the Governors Island National Monument.

Sarah Melo listened as Michael Shaver, the supervisory park ranger at the Governors Island National Monument, explained what to expect when he gave the order to fire a replica of an 1841 cannon.

“If you don’t like loud noises or if you have a hearing aid and don’t want it messed up,” he said, “the word you need to know is ‘ready.’” The “ready” would come before the “fire,” he said, and there would be no “aim.”

“You will be tested,” he added. “If you fail, you will not hear for a while.”

Sarah, who is 12 and will attend Hunter College High School next month, passed.

For a few moments at a cannon-firing demonstration on Governors Island on Thursday, fingers were jammed into ears the moment Mr. Shaver said “ready.” There were some fingers that were not jammed into ears, mainly because they were holding cellphone cameras and waiting for the puff of white smoke. And, of course, the noise.

When it thundered across the green lawn, it brought to mind a line from the 1987 Woody Allen movie “Radio Days.” Sally White, the Broadway starlet played by Mia Farrow, struggled to lose her Noo Yawk accent by saying this tongue-twister: “Hark! I hear the cannons roar. Is it the king approaching?”

People have heard the cannons roar since Mr. Shaver began the weekly demonstrations in June. “I thought, I’m going to mess up half of Lower Manhattan,” he said. “I know good and well that people are hearing it somewhere.”

Sure enough, a couple of weeks ago, a man attending a demonstration told Mr. Shaver: “I had heard it. I had wondered what it was.”

But the cannon’s roar was not all that people heard. “I set off my boss’s car alarm the other day,” Mr. Shaver said. “Twice.”

He said the cannon had a range of 1,500 yards. “In New York-speak, the distance between two Starbucks,” Mr. Shaver said.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times A Civil War demonstrator held up a six-pound cannonball. Governors Island served as a Union arsenal during that conflict.

In the days when the Army rode on horseback, the ammunition was made of iron. For the demonstrations, Mr. Shaver said, “the only things coming out of that gun are smoke, fire and a slice and a half of whole wheat bread.”

Sarah, who said the smoke smelled like toast, asked why.

A round of ammunition is slightly smaller than the inside of the barrel, Mr. Shaver said, so a filler is necessary to keep the round from rolling over as it is being shot out. He said that some re-enactors tamp peat moss on the ammunition, but he had discovered that bread served the same purpose.

Sarah’s father, Raul, a tenor who has toured with the Metropolitan Opera and has appeared on “A Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor, asked why Mr. Shaver did not not use Twinkies or Ho Hos.

“My staff eats healthy,” Mr. Shaver said. “That’s the stale bread that was left.”

Governors Island was an Army post from 1755 to 1966. It was home to Fort Jay and Castle Williams, built to prevent enemies from seizing control of New York Harbor, as the British had during the American Revolution. And it was a crucial Union arsenal during the Civil War where shipments of cannons arrived from weapons manufacturers and were sent off to battle. Leslie Koch, the president of the Trust for Governors Island, the group set up by the Bloomberg administration to oversee the island after the city took control of it, said that Governors Island had housed Confederate prisoners â€" officers at Fort Jay, enlisted men at Castle Williams â€" and Union recruits lodged there before they were sent to the front lines.

Apparently, dozens of cannonballs were left behind after the arsenal closed and the military shipped out. A 450-pounder surfaced in February 2012 by the sea wall at the dock where ferries from Manhattan come in. Construction workers were digging in the water, and soon the bomb squad was on the scene. The verdict was that it was not explosive.

“The theory is in World War II, a cannonball rolled down the hill and landed behind the sea wall,” Ms. Koch said. “Or maybe some of the military’s children were playing with it.”

There were three firings on Thursday, and after the smoke had cleared and the crowd had gone on to see Fort Jay and Castle Williams, the cannon was hitched to a pickup truck and driven into Fort Jay. A National Park Service employee, Noah Lumsden, was at the wheel.

“It’s a lot easier than doing it by hand,” Mr. Lumsden said.