Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Musée d’Armes,
part of the Grand Curtius Museum complex in Liège, Belgium.
And we are taking a look at what is possibly one of the coolest guns in their entire collection.
This is not a single-barrel flintlock, not a double-barrel flintlock (although it does have two actions),
it's not a 7 barrel flintlock like a Nock volley gun.
This is in fact a 14 barrel, double Nock volley gun style of, well, rifle actually.
14 septagonally, heptagonally, rifled barrels in two clusters of seven each.
Each cluster fired by a single trigger and a single flintlock mechanism.
So this is ye olde firepower. Let me show you up close.
So this is a very impressive gun. Both for its technical features, the fact that it is a 14 barrelled flintlock,
which is just ludicrous to even say.
And for the workmanship that went into it, because everything on this gun is just beautifully made.
So let's start with the lock plate.
We have a bunch of gold damascene on the gun, including a little bit here on the lock plate.
And if you can read that, it's pretty tiny, it says Dupe & Company.
This was a London gun maker, who manufactured this piece sometime around 1800.
Now the story gets really interesting when we look at the top of the gun.
Because at the back end here we have some beautiful gold damascene inlay.
... A little hunting scene there, but then we have some ... marking.
This is also gold damascened in, but it says,
"With this alone I'll defend Robro Camp 1795."
Well, we know who owned this gun, because he wrote a book in the early 1800s in which he described this gun.
It was a Colonel Thomas Thornton, and he was in charge of a regiment of militia.
And in 1795 they mutinied at a place called Roborough, which was actually spelled R-O-B-O-R-O-U-G-H,
Roborough Camp. And apparently this affected him quite deeply.
And later on, a few years later, he would have this gun made.
Theoretically, presumably, as a sporting arm, but he's also got down here, "Perdition to conspirators."
Which tells me he wasn't over that mutiny,
and harboured some harsh feelings perhaps for the people who had revolted ... against his command.
But all of this is just really beautifully inlaid there.
I do not know what the significance of Glenmore Forest is, or the date of 1793.
But we have yet more gold damascene down here on the muzzle end, along with three sights.
Now the middle sight is the one you would actually use. We'll get to these other two in a moment.
We have a front middle sight there,
and then you have a ... middle rear sight back on the central partition.
This is really actually a lighter gun than you might expect.
... I think it can't be much heavier than a standard Nock volley gun despite having twice as many barrels.
In part because the barrels are much smaller. These are 7.5mm in diameter barrels,
or approximately .30 calibre. And they are all rifled.
And specifically, this is like a Whitworth style of rifling,
where the ... inside of the barrel is actually seven sided, so not hexagonal, not octagonal,
but heptagonal or septagonal, I'm honestly not sure exactly what the term is.
This is the first time I've run into something that is that way.
So the nice thing about this is you don't have to actually engrave lands and grooves into the bullet when you load,
but you do conform the bullet, or you in fact would probably cast a seven-sided geometric shaped bullet.
Kind of like a Whitworth hexagonal bullet.
In order to better handle the weight of all 14 of those barrels. This has a vertical front grip on it,
which is reasonably comfortable to use. It's at the right point, this ... nicely balances the gun.
The trigger guard is also nicely engraved. And you have two triggers, one for the left action and one for the right action.
There's our other lock plate.
And then the stock is quite thick and heavy, what you would want
for the amount of recoil that this thing is going to generate.
With a nice, somewhat engraved butt plate, and really nice checkering.
You might wonder just how much of a pain it would be to load 14 barrels like that.
Well, they had a solution for you.
Thornton had a loading tool made. So this is kind of like a typical powder throw,
except it has seven powder chambers side by side. So you would fill this whole thing up.
You can then use this cover plate to seal them up and scrape off any excess powder
And then you slide this side over and that aligns these loading tubes with your powder charges there.
... Well, what you do is close it, put it over your seven barrels and then slide it like that to open it,
and that allows you to charge all seven barrels at the same time.
Which would be really important, that means you're not going to lose ... track of which one
you have put powder in, and which one you haven't.
Of course then you have to seat all seven projectiles.
And then you do the whole procedure again for the second set of barrels.
Unless you only want one set of barrels.
The other accessory that the Liège museum has for this gun is a second stock.
And the second stock only holds one set of barrels.
Now this was made separately, and it was probably made in France.
It's obviously of a different style. It has some really elaborate wood engraving in it.
We have this eagle on the bottom of the grip with a pigeon or other small prey bird in its talons, that's kind of cool.
And then we have an engraved lion's head on the top of the stock,
Along with a motto in French,
which is "La Vérité Gagnér",
which means something to the effect of "Truth in victory."
Gagnér is to win ... and vérité is truth.
So, but it's a French language motto up there, which suggests, of course, that this was made in France.
Colonel Thornton was apparently quite a Francophile, he actually moved to France later in life.
... The book that he published in which he described this gun was about a sporting trip through France.
So the way this would work is you have your spare stock,
you would take off one of the lock plates (actually it would be this lock plate) from the double gun.
And then you can actually separate the two sets of barrels here.
You can take off this central divider and remove one set of barrels
Here's the cross pin that holds the whole assembly together.
And you would mount one set of barrels in here, screw the lock plate onto the side,
and presto, you have now cut the weight in half.
And you have a seven barrelled volley gun at your disposal.
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed the video. This is a pretty phenomenal sort of firearm to take a look at.
I've never seen anything quite like this.
Between the sheer ludicrous number of barrels,
and the gold engraving and the workmanship that went into this.
Not even to mention the fact that it was reconfigurable into a single (only) seven barrel carbine.
So, an extremely interesting and cool piece of firearms history. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
A big thanks to the Liège Arms Museum for giving me access to this to show to you guys, hopefully you enjoyed it.
If you have a chance in Liège, definitely make a point to stop by and visit the museum.
Thanks for watching.
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