Boarding Weapons

There is a long list of book subjects that I am hopelessly addicted to: Twain, post WW2 science fiction, late 19th century mysteries, and anything written by Lawrence Block, Rex Stout, or John D. MacDonald.   I compulsively read books about the Civil War, art crime, and almost anything written about naval warfare during the Napoleonic years.

Note.  The Doc, looking over my shoulder, just said that I was addicted to any book that had a cover or a page.  This is an obvious gross exaggeration as I own, and regularly use, three Kindles.

Now that finals are over, I am indulging in my usual end of semester reading binge, having recently devoted all of my reading time to the books required by my classes.  Bernard Cornwell just published a new volume in his superb Sharpe series, and it was first on my reading list.  In the novel, one of Cornwell’s characters is armed with a Nock Volley Gun, and that set me off thinking about some of the strange boarding weapons that were once used by navies and pirates.

For centuries before gunpowder, the main tactics used in naval warfare were ramming and boarding, or a combination of the two.  By the time gunpowder began being used at sea, the tactic of ramming began to wane, but navies still frequently engaged in seaborne artillery duels until one ship was damaged enough that its opponent could come alongside and board the ship, killing or subduing the crew and capturing the vessel.

During boarding, both the defenders and the attackers needed specialized weapons, designed to quickly incapacitate as many opponents as possible, but preferably small enough to be portable, while not setting fire to either ship.  Not surprisingly, most of the weapons used were fairly similar to those used on land—swords, muskets, pistols and the occasional boarding axe or pike.  A few of the weapons—and these are the ones I want to talk about today—were unique.

We can start with the Nock Volley Gun that Bernard Cornwell mentions in most of the Sharpe novels.  This was a massive 7-barrel flintlock musket that fired a volley of .46 caliber balls.  You’ll note from the picture that there is a single trigger and there are no sights.  To use, you pointed the monster in the general direction of the enemy and pulled the trigger, simultaneously firing all seven barrels.   The weapon was thunderously loud, produced a prodigious cloud of smoke, and kicked so hard that the unfortunate person using it probably wondered if he had put the wrong end up to his shoulder.

The British weapon was rejected by the Army, primarily because it broke the shoulder of a few of the men who tested it, but the Admiralty office thought it would make a wonderful boarding weapon, even suggesting that it might be used by sailors ‘in the tops’ to clear the decks of enemy ships.  In the tops meant the sailors precariously balanced on platforms on the mast.  The British Navy used them, but only for a short period, eventually rejecting them in favor of more swivel guns.  The Nock was only in use for about 20 years and fewer than 700 of them were manufactured, meaning that the strange musket was used more by Hollywood than by the British Navy (you can even see one in John Wayne’s version of The Alamo).

Since the Nock was replaced in favor of Swivel Gun, I guess I should explain those.  A naval swivel gun was simply a small cannon that was loaded with grapeshot (bags of musket balls) and was mounted on a swiveling stand.  Less than three feet long, the guns were highly portable and could be quickly moved wherever needed.  In boarding operations, they could be used to devastating effect by either attackers or defenders.  Since they are short-range weapons, you could think of them as very large shotguns.

So far, none of these weapons is truly portable.  A sailor boarding an enemy ship could easily find himself confronting several enemies at once, and it is only in the movies that a single man has a sword fight with four enemies at once.  (Well, almost only:  There is a well-documented account of Captain Edward Hamilton of the HMS Surprise.  During his successful recapture of the HMS Hermione, for what must have seemed like an eternity to him, he successfully battled four Spanish sailors on the Hermione’s quarterdeck until the second wave of his crew finally arrived.)

To fill the need, in the 18th and 19th century, several navies experimented with the ‘Duck Foot Pistol’.  These were multi-barreled black powder pistols that sported multiple barrels—usually three or four but up to six were not uncommon.   Like the Nock, you didn’t actually aim the weapon: you just stuck it out in front of you and pulled the trigger while trying to hang on to the thing long enough for it to fire, then, you dropped the pistol on the floor and drew your sword.  I am unable to find a single instance of anyone reloading and firing such a weapon twice in the same battle. 

Surprisingly, these things were actually fairly successful and were used all over the world until being replaced by more modern pistols such as Colt’s revolver.  Besides being used by boarding parties, they were also prized by prison guards and bank guards.  If you happened to be an innocent bank customer when one of these was used…. well, maybe that is why they developed bank by mail.

The chief problem with the duck foot (other than no one ever being able to hit anything he actually aimed at) was that after you fired it, you were left with a rock for defense until you were able to draw a sword.   In 1837, George Elwin successfully patented the first good answer to that age-old recurring problem of someone who’s brought a knife to a gun fight.  The Elgin Cutlass Pistol married a percussion pistol to a knife Elgin claimed was like the one Jim Bowie used at the Alamo.  The Bowie knife—already popular after the infamous Vidalia Sandbar Duel—was such a popular item that knives claiming to be the Bowie were being mass produced as far away as Sheffield, England.  Was the Elgin copy a true representation of what the actual Bowie knife looked like?  Nobody knows for sure—all we can really say for certain was that Bowie's knife was big. 

Elgin made these weapons in a variety of calibers and blade lengths.  When the U.S. Navy was looking to equip an expedition to explore islands in the southern Pacific, it purchased 150 .54 caliber weapons with  11-inch blades—the first time the American military ever purchased a firearm with the newly-invented percussion caps that replaced the earlier flintlock firing system.

The Elgin weapons actually proved fairly effective but they, like the duck foot pistols, were rendered obsolete by the Colt revolvers.  However, there are several reports of the weapons being used in the Civil War.  

Well, that’s enough of weird old weapons.  The concept of weird boarding weapons hasn’t gone away though, as evidenced by the U.S. Coast Guard using the Saiga-12, a Russian shotgun that basically takes the AK-47 and enlarges it to accept a 12-gauge shotgun shell with a twelve shot box magazine that…  But that is a story for another day.