This gun is blunderbuss with a wooden (probably walnut) stock, brass barrel and steel lock. It is English and is thought to date to the late 17th century.

The lock-plate bears the name ‘SPENCER’, thought to be James Spencer, a London gunmaker who was active from around 1687 until his death in 1699. During that time he was gunmaker to the Ordnance supplying military muskets and pistols. This is confirmed by Spencer’s mark on the left side of the barrel of the letters ‘IS’ within a diamond, topped by a fleur de lis (the letters ‘I’ and ‘J’ were largely interchangeable in older forms of English). There are also View and Proof marks to indicate the place of production.

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Of note is the eng engraving of a hook-nosed gentleman on the escutcheon plate. At first staff at the Museum thought this might have been a portrait of Mr Spencer himself, or the gun’s owner perhaps, but research revealed that this caricature (and other versions of it) were common on civilian guns of the period. Sometimes the face was replaced by a geometric design.

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Detail of caricature on the escutcheon plate

The blunderbuss is the ancestor of the shotgun, developed as a smoothbore, muzzle-loading firearm in Germany or Holland in the 16th century and remaining popular until the 1840s. Its name derives from donderbus (Dutch) meaning ‘thunder gun’. Designed to shoot 10-15 small balls or ‘buckshot’ at once, it is characterised by a trumpet-shaped barrel. This is traditionally said to increase the spread of the shot but, in reality, it simply made loading easier and the weapon more intimidating. This example has a fairly modest flaring muzzle – the muzzle diameter in some blunderbusses is known to exceed three times that of the breech diameter (calibre).

Blunderbusses were primarily privately commissioned for civilian self-defence rather than military-issue weapons, so it is rare to find two that are identical. By the mid-late 18th century they had grown popular among coachmen for defending against highwaymen as they was more compact and portable than a musket but more intimidating than a pistol. History has also romanticised the blunderbuss as the choice weapon of swashbuckling pirates and of the Pilgrims who set out for the New World in 1620. There was a military version of the blunderbuss known as a musketoon, which took a standard ball as well as shot. Its bore was in fact entirely cylindrical, the flare simulated by thickened mouldings at the muzzle. Sailors favoured it due its manoeuvrability and effectiveness at close-quarters during boarding raids.

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In an emergency, the blunderbuss’s large muzzle allowed for the loading of alternatives to shot such as scrap metal, nails, stones, or even broken glass. Regardless of the chosen projectile however, as one distinguished 18th-century soldier and author found out, it was important to be aware of the size of the charge, as too much gunpowder could cause excessive recoil:

“I met with a small accident, by firing myself one of the blunderbusses, which I placed like a musquet against my shoulder; when I received such a stroke by its rebounding, as threw me backward over a large hogshead of beef, and had nearly dislocated my right arm. This however it seems was owing to my ignorance of the manner of using the blunderbuss, as I have since been informed that all such weapons ought to be fired under the hand, especially when heavily charged; and then by swinging round the body suddenly, the force of the rebound is broken, and the effect scarcely sensible.”

John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a five years’ expedition against the revolted negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the wild coast of South America, from the year 1772 to 1777 (London, 1796), Vol. 1, p.150

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