[ 1776 Ferguson Trials Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Morphy
Auction House where we have a
really cool rifle to take a look at.
This is one of the first two prototype Ferguson rifles
manufactured for British military consideration
by one of the best British gunsmiths of the time.
A guy oddly named Durs Egg.
So Captain Patrick Ferguson was an officer in the British Army in the 70th Regiment.
And he came up, ... well, I shouldn't say he came up with this idea
because this style of rifle existed back into the early 1700s.
... But what's interesting is Ferguson got a patent for it in 1776.
Apparently whoever was issuing the British patents
wasn't fully aware of the scope of prior development.
Because Ferguson didn't invent this, but he was the first guy
to really take it to the British military and get some limited success in it.
This is potentially one of the very first breech-loading guns
actually used by a military force in combat, which is really cool.
We'll take a look at the mechanism in a minute when we look up close at this rifle.
But basically you have a screw breech that allows you to
open the back end of the barrel, load powder and ball in there, close the breech, and fire.
And this has a couple of notable improvements,
notable advantages, over a muzzle loader.
One of them is rapidity of fire, you don't have to
... force the bullet all the way down the bore,
you can just stick it in the back where it's really easy to put it in
because you don't have to engrave the rifling onto it.
It is very accurate because it is a rifled barrel, as opposed to a smoothbore barrel,
which was much more common, especially in military service in the 1700s.
And it also, interestingly, allowed troops to be a little more tactically wise.
And this is something that Ferguson was particularly good at, and interested in.
So you could reload this gun from pretty much any position,
including say on your back, or on your belly.
You could shoot prone and reload this rifle and fire again
without having to go through the contortions of putting powder down the barrel,
and then using a ramrod down the barrel to seat a new bullet.
This is a major problem if you're trying to like use cover
and shoot from prone with a muzzle loader.
You have to slide the rifle back and it's awkward and slow,
or you stand up and you make a really good target while you're reloading.
So Ferguson ... he had this idea to ... basically have an elite unit of troops in the British military
who could make best use of a technologically advanced gun like the Ferguson breech loader.
So, he presented two of these guns to the British military for trials and testing,
and ... what's particularly impressive about it is that
... this trial was conducted on a particularly rainy, windy day.
Which normally is kind of the death knell for a muzzleloader,
like your powder is going to get wet, and it ain't going to work, trial's over.
Well, because ... this system is a breech loader,
it's really feasible to shield the breech from rain
when you open the breech, put in powder,
keep it dry, close the breech, and be able to fire repeatedly.
And it's something he was able to do, he was able to show
a rate of fire up to 6 rounds per minute on targets at 200 yards.
Where he almost shot the entire trial without a single miss,
I think they said he had like three misses in the course of the whole trial.
It was very successful.
In fact it was so successful that the British military actually decided to adopt it.
Now they adopted it on a very limited basis.
There were two guns initially presented,
one of them went through the trial and was handed over.
It was actually kept after the trial in the Tower of London as a pattern for the gun.
The other one is this one.
They took that ... pattern gun and they ... ordered 100 more of them to be made.
And they detached Ferguson from his regiment, and put him in command
of a company of 100 riflemen that were going to be sent out to the United States.
Which wasn't the United States yet, it was the British colonies in North America
who are currently in the process of attempting to revolt against the British crown.
So what the British did is they accepted this rifle for a company-level field-trials experiment.
Ferguson actually had his men all equipped with green uniforms,
so they kind of had proto-camouflage, they had breech-loading rifles,
they were well-trained - which is an important point to make.
Most of the British Army at this point had minimal [live fire] training,
if they got to fire a couple ... of shots per year, that's pretty good training.
Powder and ball were expensive, they didn't do a lot of actual shooting.
And most of the line infantry was equipped with muzzle loaders, and they fired in volleys.
Aiming wasn't really a thing, you didn't really need to do it,
they didn't get to practice it.
Aiming was absolutely a thing for the Ferguson rifles,
because these were rifled accurate guns.
And Ferguson trained his troops well to be able to make best use of that.
So, they get 100 rifles, they set off to the colonies, they arrived, ...
they are in the field by June of 1777.
And in September they're going to have their ...
real major combat inauguration, which was the Battle of Brandywine.
Now unfortunately for Ferguson,
... his troops don't really play an important role in Brandywine.
So, well, I'll tell you what, let's talk about the final implications of this gun
after we take a look at how it actually works.
If this rifle sounds familiar to you, it's because I actually had the chance to do some shooting
with a ... gorgeous modern reproduction of a Ferguson several years ago.
And if you're interested in that, you should definitely check out that shooting video
because it's a really cool opportunity to get some hands-on experience with one of these guns.
There will be a link to that ... at the end of this video.
But if you haven't seen it, the way this works is with a very rapid ... pitch screw breech.
So if we take one revolution of the trigger guard here,
and it opens this screw breech. You have access to the chamber, right there.
And what you would do is drop in a round lead ball,
drop in a powder charge behind it,
and then you rotate this
(make sure I get it in the right direction), you rotate this back into position.
It snaps in place over that detent, and that seals the breech ready to fire.
Now these guns were all meticulously handcrafted.
Ferguson oversaw the manufacture, he approved every individual gun.
And the lapping on the threads on these breech plugs were good enough
that this was a completely effective obturator.
These didn't suffer ... particularly badly from fouling.
Although fouling in the ... barrel would impact the accuracy of them
and they had to be cleaned to be reliably accurate, as with all black-powder firearms.
But this screw breech works, it's really quite remarkable.
Take a look at this from the bottom, so open this up like so.
... You'll notice there are a couple of cuts here
in the side of this breech plug.
And ... so the one place that does foul is the front face of this screw when the breech is closed.
And these cuts are there to give that fouling a place to basically be
pushed into when you operate the breech.
Rate of fire of this was, ... according to Ferguson, up to 6 rounds per minute.
More typical for troops equipped with these was like 3 rounds per minute.
But even Ferguson himself never really tried to focus on the rate of fire.
For him the advantage of this ... breech loading [was] the ability to reload from awkward positions,
and to ... be a little more tactically sound, as well as to have a very accurate rifle.
Now looking at this one in particular, we have a couple of very important marks here.
This is worn, but it says D. Egg, serial number 2.
This is the King's proof. There are no military proofs on this rifle
because it was not a military service rifle.
This was manufactured for testing, it was not formally a military gun.
We have another D. Egg, Durs Egg, marking down here.
Durs Egg, despite his funny-sounding name today,
was one of the best British gunsmiths working at this time.
He was actually a Swiss immigrant, he moved to London in the very late 1760s.
He actually started his career working for Henry Nock.
Whose name you might recognise from the Nock volley gun,
as well as many other guns that were much more successful than the volley gun.
And really made a tremendous name and reputation for himself making really nice guns.
So these two first Fergusons, number 1, that's ... I believe still
in the Royal Armouries today, and number 2 here.
He was paid just over 31 pounds by the ... government in 1776
when these were presented for trials.
Also here on the top of the barrel we have a couple of Ferguson marks.
This is a Ferguson family crest, or family symbol, that was stamped on these guns.
And then this would originally have said "Fergus".
And you can see the "F", the "R", a little bit of the "G" and the "S"
curved around there, as in son of Fergus, or Ferguson.
This has a rather delicate rear sight on it that would not be copied on the military guns,
the 100 guns made for the Army.
You can see we have two additional rear sight notches here,
as well as that one for different ranges.
"London", and I believe that would have had Egg's address which has worn down.
This rifle has a really good, fine front sight blade to go with that rear sight,
and that's a very important aspect of it.
This was a rifled gun, it was very accurate,
and in order to actually exploit that accuracy you had to have decent sights.
Which is kind of a rarity on guns of this period.
And you can see the rifling there, it's actually really impressively intact and distinctive rifling.
There were a number of flaws in these guns from a military perspective.
So one of them was the cost. Building a very finely fitted screw breech gun like this
was far more expensive than a typical muzzle loader.
Just having a rifled barrel was a lot more expensive than a typical muzzle loader.
So that's one strike against them.
In addition, the material removed from the stock for this screw breech and for the lock plate
left the stocks actually really thin and fragile in this area,
right around the trigger and the breech area.
And in fact the known surviving examples almost all have repaired damage in this area.
When these guns were eventually collected up by the British military
most of them were unserviceable, probably because of damage to the stock here.
There are people who would bring up this hypothetical question,
"What if the whole British Army had been armed with Fergusons?
They could have just obliterated the American colonists
and prevented the United States from achieving independence."
Well, probably not.
In reality, issues like this, they're not sexy and exciting and cool, but they're extremely practical.
So if a gun's stock is this fragile, the chances are an entire army armed with these rifles
would have massive problems with the guns breaking.
And massive amounts of combat ineffective men with broken rifle stocks.
And that's more substantial, more important, that has a bigger negative effect
than the positive that you get from having an accurate and rapid firing breech-loader.
Now I'll just point out here, if you would like to know more about this sort of rifle
I would recommend De Witt Bailey's book, "British Military Flintlock Rifles".
This discusses the Ferguson in some detail,
with a lot of the original correspondence reproduced.
And it does actually show this particular rifle specifically, so.
So on September 11, 1777, the Battle of Brandywine takes place.
Ferguson's unit is deployed, is active at the battle.
They don't really do anything substantive as a part of the battle.
Which is really unfortunate, the idea here was to have this
field combat experiment with a company of elite riflemen.
They have camouflage, they are operating in small groups.
They're doing everything tactically sound, and they're being led
by an officer who is a huge proponent of these tactics.
He understands them, he helped develop them,
he developed the rifle that they're using for goodness sake.
... Too often when military units try out these new tactics,
they'll end up giving command of the unit to some officer who ... isn't interested,
or doesn't understand the new equipment that he's been given.
And Ferguson's men really had every benefit that they could have
to prove that this concept was tactically sound.
And unfortunately they weren't able to.
Not really for any reason of their own, and not for any fault of their own.
They simply didn't end up in a position to be tactically relevant to the battle.
And Ferguson gets wounded during the battle, and that puts him out of action.
And ... Ferguson's involvement was essential to the company.
So once he's wounded and taken out of the fight,
in the aftermath of the battle his 100 man company is split up.
These men ... all had been taken from other regiments,
and when Ferguson is wounded they're all sent back to their individual regiments.
And the experiment pretty much ends after Brandywine inconclusively.
Unfortunately for Ferguson, he would go on to take part in the Battle of Kings Mountain
where he would be killed. He didn't survive the war.
So that pretty much ended the Ferguson rifle experiment on the part of the British.
The guns that were left were eventually collected up.
Almost all of them by that point were considered unserviceable in the British Army records.
Probably because the stocks broke, as we mentioned earlier.
And ... unfortunately this would have a significant effect in cooling interest in
breech-loading rifles in the British military for some time to come.
Alright, I have to mention one last anecdote with the Ferguson rifles here,
because if I don't, I'll never hear the end of it.
And that is actually Captain Ferguson himself, with one of his rifles [quite possibly this exact rifle],
before the Battle of Brandywine was in a position over-watching a road.
And happened to see two unaccompanied officers ride past, and he didn't shoot them.
He didn't attempt to shoot them, he almost certainly could have hit them had he tried,
he was really a very good shot, and he was equipped
with a very accurate rifle at the time.
These guys stood out, he mentioned this in a letter
that one of them was in a really distinctive odd uniform, one of them had a very large hat.
And it was only later that he was told that in the area where he had been,
he was ... watching for ... American rebel troop movement,
apparently General ... George Washington had been in that area with a French officer
on that day inspecting troops.
And it is virtually certain that the two men that Ferguson watched ride by
were this French officer and General Washington.
And he did not make any attempt to shoot them,
because, well, it wouldn't have been polite, it wouldn't been proper.
These men weren't at the head of troops, they weren't aggressive in any way.
They never even knew that he was there, they ... never noticed him.
And for him, his recounting was it just wouldn't have been proper
to shoot them in the back as they rode past, and so he let them go.
Really interesting that General Washington could have had his military career ended right there,
and who knows what implications that might have had
for the American Independence movement at that time.
Anyway, a couple of really cool pieces of history tied to the Ferguson rifle,
of course, both with our own independence and revolution,
and just the technological aspects of a breech-loading gun in the 1770s.
So this particular one, unfortunately by the time you see this video this has already sold.
But it is one of the things that was on consignment
here at the Morphy Auction House for sale. An exquisitely cool piece of history.
So thank you all for watching.
Stay tuned tomorrow, and we'll have another cool Forgotten Weapon.