.577/450 Martini-Henry

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(From Left to Right): A .577 Snider cartridge, a Zulu War-era rolled brass foil .577/450 Martini-Henry Catridge, a later drawn brass .577/450 Martini-Henry cartridge, and a .303 British Mk VII SAA Ball cartridge.

The .577/450 Martini-Henry was a black powder, centre fire round used by the British and British Empire militaries prior to the adoption of the .303 calibre cartridge used in the Lee-Metford, Martini-Enfield, and Lee-Enfield series of rifles.

The .577/450 was based upon the same separate steel head used for the .577 Snider cartridge, with a wrapped foil body firing a nominally .45 calibre bullet, giving the cartridge a "bottle-necked" appearance. Initially, .577/450 cartridges were manufactured of rolled brass foil, but later on- shortly after the Anglo-Zulu War- it was discovered that the rolled foil cartridges were prone to jamming as the barrel heated up, and production was switched to the drawn brass style now commonly used for the manufacture of small arms ammunition.

The Martini-Henry single-shot lever action rifle had a Martini designed action married with the unique rifling designed by Alexander Henry. The first three patterns or "Marks" where equipped with a shorter lever, which was extended in the Mark IV pattern to address extraction problems in some climates. The Mark IV was the final and most refined form of the rifle in 577/450, but was already obsolete owing to the pending adoption of a smokeless powder small bore cartridge, which became the .303.

Most famously employed by British Forces during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879- which included the Battle of Isandlwana and the Battle of Rorke's Drift- as well as during the Sudanese Campaign of 1884-1898, and in various other colonial conflicts in Africa and India, the .577/450 Martini-Henry cartridge is now considered obsolete, but was still in military production as late as World War I (for use by Royal Flying Corps observers and Zeppelin-buster aircrews), and in commercial production by Kynoch until the late 1950s.

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