Today we are back with Val Forgett and another story about the history of Navy Arms. When his father was making reproduction sidelock percussion guns, he wanted to prove that they were still viable hunting arms. So he took a pair of .58 caliber rifles (one single and one side-by-side) to Africa for a series of safaris to hunt the “Big 5”. And, having loaded the guns to the same muzzle energy as a .416 Rigby, he did just that.
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He did what every explorer of the early 1800s did, didn’t he. Hairy experience for sure, but these old guns worked, and work, great.
There’s nothing wrong with using a muzzleloader for hunting. They can be just as deadly as a smokeless cartridge gun. The only real concern is the lack of follow-up shots but a good hunter doesn’t take many follow-up shots.
Just take along a couple of friends, similarly armed, and you got backup.
That was where the custom of the gun-bearer originated. Usually there were two, one carrying the back-up rifle for a second shot if necessary, the second carrying a third rifle plus the reloading supplies.
And yes, “Double” rifles predated metallic-cartridges and breechloading. “Double eight-bore” muzzle-loading rifles were fairly common, often with “Cape” rifling, i.e. two-groove rifling with a “flanged” conical bullet.
While “Brunswick” rifling on that principle was unpopular with the British Army (The Royal Marines wouldn’t touch one with a barge pole- they converted their beloved Baker rifles to percussion instead), on safari it worked well enough to knock over its namesake, the Cape buff, with one or at most two shots into the boiler room.
The study of African game rifles is worthy of a book by itself. And other than John Taylor’s African Rifles and Cartridges (1948) and Peter Hathaway Capstick’s books mainly about the hunting experience in Africa, there have been damned few authors who ever had much intelligent to say on the subject.
clear ether
eon
This bit of the thread got me to thinking…
Thought experiment, here: Presumably, Eurasia once came along with a similar biome, with similar prevalence of apex predators to North America, yes?
The native Amerindians of the Western US were reasonably terrified of the larger brown bears. They avoided them.
The equivalent of those bears were extinct in most of Europe before the Roman Empire came into being, so far as I can tell from my reading, so… What the hell happened to them, and why didn’t what “that” was happen to bears wherever there were people…?
Were the Europeans that much better at hunting out apex predators, or was there another factor involved here?
I can see where Amerindian hunters armed with stone-tipped spears and arrows might not have been too enthused about going up against a full-grown brown bear, but how much better off were the Europeans, presumably armed with metal-tipped versions of the same weapons, than they were?
Ian’s not doing “Forgotten Primitive Weapons” now, but maybe when he runs out of things that went “BANG”, he could do some work on questions like that.
It’s always amused me that every culture we know of in Europe used euphemisms for the animal we call “bear”, and we aren’t even all that sure what the actual ancient Indo-European was for the things, because they were afraid that using their true names would call one up. It’s all “Brown One” or “Honey Eater” when you look into the etymology of it all, something that speaks to how they were seen.
Yet, the furry bastards were mostly extinct by the time of the Romans, and certainly by the time of the Middle Ages. How the hell did that happen, when it didn’t elsewhere until the advent of the Really Big Gun? Were Europeans just better at team hunting, or something?
My SWAG has always been that changes in climate (ice ages, etc.) changed the available food menu. Ursines being limited omnivores and obligate herbivores (no, seriously, look it up), they may simply have died out due to lack of a proper diet.
Note that the same fate probably befell the woolly mammoth in Europe, both in full-sized and compact “models”.
cheers
eon
The power of black powder guns is grossly underestimated by the public, due to how their use is presented in movies. Remember, every Western barroom shootout has somebody hiding behind a table, because that will stop a bullet. Even a pistol using black powder in a metal cartridge would blast through the table.
Samuel Colt’s first commercially successful pistol was the Walker Colt. It used 50 – 60 grains of black powder on a (about) 130 grain .44 ball.
Washington Irving, in his book about his travels in the central plains, noted a Dragoon with a Walker dropping a bison at 150 yards, with one shot. With that much stopping power, with that combination of powder and ball, you can imagine what Forgett’s mega load would do.
I guess the movie shootouts would be a lot shorter if they went for realism. And a lot bloodier.
Realism would make for bad cinema: a couple shots in a crowded barroom and you’re filming in a self-generated fog bank, thanks to black powder’s loads of smoke. I doubt the result would be particularly bloody. Guys wouldn’t hide behind chairs is all. They would use real cover or cut and run.
The funny thing is that the eponymous revolvers and some single-shot pistols of the American Civil War may have given rise to the myth of the “low-powered” black-powder pistol.
For instance, the U.S. Model 1855 Pistol Carbine (basically a knockoff of the British Pattern 1853 “pistol” issued to sergeants and standard bearers in the Crimea, right to the stock attachment), .58 caliber, with a 450-grain Minie’ ball and 40 grains of musket powder had a muzzle velocity of 600 F/S and a muzzle energy of 360 FPE. IOW, about equal to modern commercial 9x 19mm 124-grain FMJ at roughly 1,050 F/S.
Most revolvers of the era, either .36 “Navy” or .44 “Army” types, had average 25 to 30-garin charges (again, generally musket powder) behind 90-grain .36 bullets or 140-grain .44 bullets. Either way, MV was in the 800 to 850 F/S range and muzzle energy averaged 130 FPE for the .36s and 170 FPE for the .44s.
So, yes, the cavalry (and early post-Appomattox pistoleers) were conducting affairs with the equivalent of .32 ACP pocket automatics or .32 S&W revolvers.
This probably explains the enthusiasm post-1873 for first rifles and then by 1875 revolvers in .44-40 Winchester Center Fire. With energies up around 400 to 450 FPE even from a revolver barrel. Make no mistake, the .44-40 was the first metallic-cartridge “Magnum”.
And of course .the .45 Colt with 405 FPE was equally preferred.
Or as one old lawdog is reputed to have told a young one around 1910 why he didn’t change from the .45 to one the new .38s,
“Son, when I shoot some son of a (b) I don’t want to have to walk around behind him afterward to see what’s still holding him up.”
cheers
eon
The Walker was the most powerful handgun on Earth until the .357 Magnum showed up in 1935. The 60-grain maximum charge (musket powder, rather than rifle fine-grain) yielded roughly 1,300 F/S and 540 FPE with a 130-grain round ball. To put this in perspective, this was a typical load for a Hawken-style .45 caliber “plains rifle” of the era with a 28″ barrel.
Later revolvers such as the Dragoon had smaller capacity chambers. 45 grains was about the limit for a Dragoon, 40 was maximum for an 1860 Army or a Remington New Model 1863 .44. even today, the .45 Ruger Old Army’s maximum rated load is 40 grains FFg.
(All data take from the Lyman Black Powder Handbook, 1978.)
When the Colt Model 1873 Single Action Army revolver was adopted, the original load for it was 40 grains behind the 255-grain bullet. This was quickly reduced to 36 grains because in the lighter “Peacemaker”, the 40-grain load simply had too much recoil for accurate shooting according to “user feedback”.
Considering that the 36-grain load yielded 850 F/S and 405 FPE from the 7.5 inch “cavalry issue” barrel, it’s unlikely that the targets ever noticed the difference.
clear ether
eon
“(…)Walker was the most powerful handgun on Earth until the .357 Magnum showed up in 1935. The 60-grain maximum charge (musket powder, rather than rifle fine-grain) yielded roughly 1,300 F/S and 540 FPE with a 130-grain round ball.(…)”
No. 1890s .45 caliber GABBETT-FAIRFAX MARS https://www.forgottenweapons.com/early-automatic-pistols/gabbett-fairfax-mars/ launched 220 grain bullet at 1250 fps, which result in bigger number, for both formulae commonly used, that is mass * velocity and 0.5 * mass * velocity * velocity.
In the past couple decades the ‘new received wisdom’ holds that ‘handgun stopping power’ is a ‘myth.’ The FBI among others propoundsthe New Gospel of penetration plus accuracy in hitting vital centers. So weigh in: was the Walker or the Dragoon model too much gun for the job? Could a shooter circa 1860 get the same results with a Colt Navy or Model 1860 .44? Looking at tabular data for modern shootings there is less difference between a .380 ACP and the .45 ACP than one might wish. (Though like usual there is disagrerment as to what such data really shows.)
The issue is, as usual, framed entirely improperly by the various “authorities” pronouncing on the subject.
It isn’t the “stopping power” of the pistol (or, anything else, really…) so much as it is the “stopability” of the target. Some people require very little in the way of killing; others, a hell of a lot more.
Comes down to a whole lot of other factors, other than what you’re shooting them with. You might be able to put Man Mountain Clark with a .22 Short put in behind the ear while he’s sleeping, but should you take him on when he’s drunk, drugged, and adrenaline-fueled?
That same .22 Short will probably just annoy him, because you’re sure as hell not going to get your perfect shot placement whilst he plays “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not” with your limbs.
Hell, there are a couple of people out there who’ve survived .50 Caliber BMG shots. Some even managed a bit of fighting afterwards.
Flip side of that? There are people who’ve gone down to very little in the way of projectile and energy transfer.
It’s all highly subjective and entirely subject to conditions. My take? Keep shooting until they’re down and not moving, or you’ve run out of ammo. If you manage that last one, run.
Regarding handguns, let us not overlook the ability to hit the taaget.
1912 Olympics at Stockholm saw a young U.S. Cavalry officer named George S. Patton competing in the new “Modern Pentathlon”.
Out of 20 shots (3 seconds time for each), he missed the man sized target 3 times. Many other competitors missed even more often. Patton ended up 5th place because of his outstanding results in the other four competitions.
I think we often overlook that handgun proficiency of the modern typical shooter is much better than a century or more ago.
Thanks for not recycling that hoary old tale where ‘Patton wuz robbed! Two of his shots went through the same hole!’ That is one of those plaints where one comes off sounding like a whinger, absent the most exacting evidence.
After about two or three decades of target scoring at the gun club level, it is obvious to me that claiming “two of my shots went through the same hole” is standard procedure for a certain type of “marksman”. I am sure Patton was not of this type.
The complete results of all competitors of the 1912 Stockholm Modern Pentathlon event are available on the internet.
I’ve only ever seen a single case of “Though the same hole” shooting that I could confirm, and that’s just because I was observing the target through a spotting scope when the rounds were fired. Every other case, there’s been overlap of the projectile holes.
The one I observed, there was a lot of rain going on, the first round produced a ton of spray, and the third round that went through the same hole produced very minimal amounts of visible spray, quite different from the other shots fired.
Still had to argue with the guy doing the scoring, and my guy didn’t get his points for that shot.
It is possible, just unlikely and very hard to verify.
Why some competitions use target backers that move after each shot. Benchrest comes to mind, same hole is fairly common.
I maybe wasn’t clear. A number of accounts make this claim for Patton. Mostly amateur hagiographers on various online accounts. I have never read any that quote Patton as having said so himself. Patton was vain, but he had enough sense of rhetoric not to say anything that would detract from his gravitas like that.
Anecdotal ‘stopping power’ for small caliber hits of .22 or .25 acp tend to involve a severe beating of the shooter if things don’t go as planned.
The one small town dive bar I used to frequent had a shooting in the parking lot. The victim after being shot 1x with a .25 dropped, the shooter went back into the bar to get his keys/whatever and stepped out of the bar right into the arms of the local PD. As they were cuffing him the victim returned with a baseball bat and the disarmed & cuffed shooter was given a choice to stop resistance or they would let the victim have a go at him. Relatively thick jacket and a rib stopped the slug, it hurt but he apparently wasn’t going to bleed out.
Definitely entertaining at a minimum.
I recall seeing a demo of some sort of .25 ACP pen gun on a ballistic dummy. One bullet failed to mske it through the sternum at a range of about four yards. I suppose the lesson is use enough gun to at least reach the vitals. With all the pint-sized autos out there, one can pretty near always lay hands on a 9mm in a packable package.