He had a gray-brown felt hat with a gigantic round brim that needed to be pinned up on one or both sides lest it flop down and blind him. More established musketeers had fine feathered brooches for this purpose – Jack made do with a pin. Like all English musketeers, Jack called his weapon Brown Bess. It was of the latest design – the lock contained a small clamp that gripped a shard of flint, and when Jack pulled the trigger, this would be whipped around and skidded hard against a steel plate above the powder-pan, flooding the pan with sparks and igniting it in most cases. Half of the musketeer-formations were impaired by older, flintless weapons called matchlocks. Each of these matchlock-men had to go around with a long fuzzy rope twined through his fingers, one end of which was forever smouldering – as long as it didn't get wet and he remembered to blow on it frequently. Clamped into the same sort of mechanism that held Jack's flint-shard, it would ignite the powder, more often than not, by direct contact.