This, and early fire arms were wildly inaccurate, because the actual bullet was not invented for some time. All early projectiles were round, semi-soft balls of iron or lead, mostly lead, and caromed around in the barrel, offering only a small chance to hit from short range, and almost no chance of hitting from long range.
Bows, for quite some time, outranked early fire arms. The only effective early ones were used in short range situations, like blunderbusses by the pirates for crowd control, or pistols when a man was close enough. Long range rifles were iffy at best and often malfunctioned.