Keep Your Powder Dry

In the age of muskets, gunpowder that got wet was useless, so soldiers had to protect their powder supply to be ready to fight at short notice. The advice "trust in God and keep your powder dry" is almost always attributed to Oliver Cromwell, supposedly addressing his troops before a river crossing during the conquest of Ireland. The trouble is timing: the phrase's first appearance in print is 1834, in William Blacker's poem "Oliver's Advice," nearly two centuries after Cromwell's death, with no contemporary 17th-century source recording him saying anything like it. The military logic behind the advice is real and sound. The specific Cromwell attribution is not verifiable.