Commodore Hornblower and his pistols

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DaleA

New member
I’ve recently been reminded of C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books. They were books about a British naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). I read them all as a kid. He routinely described in detail the operation of the black powder muzzle loading cannon aboard ships. He even described the procedure used by a shore battery they captured as to using heated shot, red hot cannon balls, to set the target ships on fire.

I was really struck by one book where Hornblower is setting off to war and his wife, unbeknownst to him, includes a pair of pistols in his luggage. They are, of course, muzzle loading, black powder guns but Hornblower is pleasantly taken aback that they are double barreled, rifled, percussion pistols. Apparently gun makers back then didn’t include instruction manuals or stamp stuff on the barrel of the guns. Hornblower has to figure out on his own how they work and is delighted with them. With flintlocks he figured he’d have one or two misfires out of his four shots. With the percussion guns he thought even in rain or salt water spray, which would probably totally disable the flintlocks, his new percussion pistols would almost always fire.

I liked the firearms detail C. S. Forester provided in the book.
 
Were bullet molds included in that cased set? I'd imagine they would need to be for rifled pistols. Most unusual in those days.
 
Interesting, I saw a show on a British wooden warship on display in the UK. In the armory, there was a circular stand with quite a few Colt percussion revolvers held in place by dowels in their barrels.
 
C. S. Forester's description of the pistols was pretty detailed. He didn't mention bullet molds although he mentioned most everything else.

They were beautiful weapons, of bright steel inlaid with silver, double-barrelled, the butts of ebony, giving them a perfect balance in the hand. There were two copper tubes in the case to open next; they merely contained pistol bullets, each one cast flawlessly, a perfect sphere. The fact that the makers had gone to the trouble of casting special bullets and including them in the case recalled Hornblower’s attention to the pistols. Inside the barrels were bright spiral lands; they were rifled pistols, then. The next copper box in the case contained a number of discs of thin leather impregnated with oil; these would be for wrapping up the bullet before inserting it into the barrel, so as to ensure a perfect fit. The brass rod and the little brass mallet would be for hammering the bullets home. The little brass cup must be a measure of the powder charge. It was small, but that was the way to ensure accuracy-a small powder charge, a heavy ball, and a true barrel. With these pistols he could rely on himself to hit a small bull’s-eye at fifty yards, as long as he held true.

But there was one more copper box to open. It was full of little square bits of copper sheet, [we later find out, 500 of them] very thin indeed. He was puzzled at the sight of them; each bit of copper had a bulge in the centre, where the metal was especially thin, making the black contents just visible through it. It dawned slowly upon Hornblower that these must be the percussion caps he had heard vaguely about recently. To prove it he laid one on his desk and tapped it sharply with the brass mallet. There was a sharp crack, a puff of smoke from under the mallet, and when he lifted up the latter he could see that the cap was rent open, and the desk was marked with the stain of the explosion.

He looked at the pistol again. He must have been blind, not to have noticed the absence of flint and priming pan.
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I wondered about the bullet molds too. Hornblower was being deployed to the Baltic Sea. It wasn’t as if he had Amazon two-day delivery back in the early 1800’s. That said, there was commerce around the world back then, he might be able to reorder the bullets but maybe they figured a guy that could afford the guns, undoubtedly a gentleman, would not be in that many scrapes.

I also think these were “fighting pistols” as I remember reading somewhere that rifled pistols were not allowed for dueling.
 
If in England, go to Portsmouth and visit:

RN Museum
HMS Alliant (WW II sub modernized)
HMS Warrior (Royal Navy's first iron clad warship - see the revolvers and Enfield rifles and cutlasses displayed aboard her)
HMS Victory (Nelson's flagship - the bad part of the visit is it is a tour and you get rushed through).
 
I remember that book.

I was a Hornblower fan many years ago. As I recall in that tale he discovers that one of the pistols has been stolen and he foils it's use as an assassin's weapon with his saber. Good tales one and all.

Life is good.

Prof Young
 
According to the infallible Wikipedia, the first patent for a percussion ignition was 1807, but percussion systems didn't begin to be widespread until the 1820s. So its possible for an early system to have been obtained during the Napoleonic wars later years, and would almost certainly have been a "custom job" as mass production of firearms (with standardized parts) was also not yet a common practice.


I do love the old pistols, though they aren't my area of expertise the cased sets of matching pistols and accessories (which almost always included a mold, even if the author left it out in the description).

I do recall one set of dueling pistols being reported on ages ago, which showed that some duelists might have been a bit less than honorable...

A fellow obtained a set of Jeffersonian era dueling pistols, all fully authentic, full historical documentation, etc. Just out of curiosity, he decided to actually shoot them, to see what kind of accuracy was common in the dueling era.

Interestingly, BOTH pistols shot a couple feet to the left of point of aim at classic dueling range (20 paces) :eek:

Now before someone comments on the "horrible accuracy" or he did something wrong loading them, etc, consider this...

If you KNOW your gun shoots two feet to the left, and your opponent doesn't know his does, it kind of gives you an ...um...edge...:rolleyes:
 
Around 1984 or so a friend of mine at college was reading the Hornblower books, and he gave me that one and asked me to read the section describing the handguns and asked me if it was correct.

Given the time frame of the Hornblower books my assessment that that time was, and remains, that Forester got this part of his book wrong. He had Hornblower armed with percussion pistols about a decade before they were available.
 
Hornblower --I read them over and over and the TV series was excellent too. Always getting into trouble but always some little bit of luck and he pulls through !! :D
 
Hornblower's pistols may have been a bit anachronistic, but at least the "patchlock" percussion design was an early form. Along with tube locks, pellet locks and probably others devised to avoid the occasional kaBoom of the Forsyth scent bottle.

Surely a gunmaker with an order from a titled Lady for her naval officer husband would make the pistols to take the regular Sea Service pistol ball should he exhaust his supply of hand cast balls.

I recall that Rifleman Dodd carried a mallet to get a tight ball started in his Baker rifle during the Peninsular Wars. Not seen in Sharpe, though.

I haven't reread Hornblower in a good while but do follow the career of Alan Lewrie. A bit of a gun collector, he scrounged a Ferguson and a Pennsylvania while dealing with those grubby Colonials (and also acquired a taste for corn whiskey.)
 
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If you enjoyed the Hornblower books, you might like a series by Patrick O'Brian. It starts with a book titled Master and Commander and is also set in the Napoleonic era, although the action often involves events other than those wars. Captain Aubrey believes in fast, accurate cannon fire, and there are detailed descriptions of that. There is also some space given to small arms. If you're not a sailor, you have to just scan past all the details about the rigging and sails. But the author spent a lot of time researching for detail, and the battle scenes are usually based on some real battle, with names and locations changed to suit the story. There was a movie a few years back called Master and Commander. They used the title from one book and plot elements from one or two other books. It wasn't bad, and it's an OK introduction to the series.
 
I saw and liked the movie and kind of wrassled with one of the books. It did not grab me the way Hornblower did or as Lewrie does. Maybe I ought to give it another look.

set in the Napoleonic era, although the action often involves events other than those wars
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They pretty well have to be. Major actions in those days were pretty well documented and it is tough to slip in a whole extra ship. Q.V. Hornblower off dealing with Latin American dictator El Supremo.

I went through Sharpe, book and TV. I thought it was very conscientious the way Cornwell wrote an afterword describing how he squeezed Sharpe into historical events.
Sharpe's company was in on one campaign replacing the 101st which didn't do much anyhow. And when he tracked down the Deserters' Army to rescue the milord's wife, there really was a group of deserters from all sides led by a French cook and living by brigandage on the natives and small detachments. Only thing was, it was a French operation that shut it down, not British.
 
I've read Dewey Lambdin since a friend guided me to it with the first book

Lewrie uses a Gill's hanger as his sword, and a pair of double barreled Manton pistols for boarding, or other close ranged action.

I couldn't get into Forresters, Hornblower.
Or O'Brian's Jack Aubrey series.
Try Dewey Lambdin, it's a very good read.
 
I am trying to start O'Brien again, but it is tough going. The writing style is almost too precious to bear. Trying to capture the feel of the era no doubt.
 
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