favorite weapon of the Hebrews. Even the shepherds became experts in the use of it. (50) Ammon seems to have inherited their skill from his ancestors.
The Lamanites of later times are known to have been using the sling in an improved form, with great effect. They had some form of catapult at the beginning of the 11th Century, when the Icelanders explored the coasts of America (Markland and Vinland). It appears that Karlsefni and his companions at one time were attacked by a large number of Lamanites (Skraellinger, they called them, a word meaning weaklings, or poor trash.) They came in boats. On the end of a pole they raised a big ball resembling a sheep's paunch. This ball was swung from a pole over the heads of the supposed enemy, and it fell with a horried noise. It also appears that the Indians in this same manner protected an attacking force by a barrage of stones thrown by this kind of weapon. The Icelanders report their own landing party retreated, bewildered, toward higher ground where they rallied and met the attackers.
Schoolcraft corroborates both the Book of Mormon and the Icelandic saga regarding the sling. He says the Algonquins in New England and other places made use of a big ball, which he calls bilista, but which the Indians, themselves, call the demon's head. It was a large, round boulder, sewed up in a sack of skin which was daubed with grotesque devices in various colors. Plunged upon a boat or canoe it was capable of sinking it. Brought down upon a group of men on a sudden, it produced consternation and death. (Schoolcraft, Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge, Philadelphia 1860, Vol. I, p. 89)