Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at a pair of Belgian,
well, these were manufactured by Henri Pieper, (or we'll just say "Piper").
And these are a pair of Pieper’s 7 shot Mitrailleuse, or
volley guns. So each of them is a single cluster of 7 barrels.
All 7 barrels are rifled, which is relevant. You load 7 cartridges all at once in a loading plate, pull the trigger,
well, cock the hammer, pull the trigger and boom you fire all 7 rounds simultaneously.
I think a lot of people will probably conflate this with Henry Nock's volley gun.
While Nock's gun (also, of course, is significantly older, these are both rimfire metallic cartridge guns),
Nock's gun ... is primarily known for its use by the British Royal Navy for military purposes, where these are actually sporting guns.
This was intended to be a long range equivalent to a shotgun, or a long range replacement for a shotgun.
You see the problem with a shotgun is if you see some birds like 100, 150 yards over that away,
and of course in the late 1800s there were no bag limits on game,
there were plenty of professional hunters out there who shot as much as they possibly could
and took it all to market to sell. That's how the food industry worked.
However, if you see some birds like across the other side of the lake over there, a long distance away,
well shotgun pellets run out of energy fairly quickly and they're not particularly accurate.
They spread quite a lot especially at extreme distances. And that's because they are round balls that are all
... crushed together in a shell and when they fire ... the pattern is a bit unpredictable.
That's why it's a pattern more so than like a grouping you would have with a rifle.
If you want to get accuracy at long range with multiple projectiles,
that is what this gun is for because all 7 barrels are rifled, and so you'll get a much tighter group.
You'll get something like 20 inches at 100 yards. Try finding a shotgun that will pull that off.
So let's take a closer look because we have both a .32 and a .22 calibre version.
Alright, this is the .22 version and you'll notice a few things just up front.
This has really nice checkering, it has really nice grain to the wood.
We have this sort of decorative treatment to the metalwork, and the whole gun looks really nice.
It's unfortunate that a lot of the bluing is gone, but you can certainly see that coming out of the factory
this would have been a particularly gorgeous gun.
On the top of the barrel this has a little patch in the matting that is marked H. Pieper, "Bte" or Brevete for patented, Liège.
It also has rifle style express notch sights rather than a shotgun bead,
because these were rifled barrels. And they were also regulated barrels, which is to say
that the factory arranged to make sure that they all fired to the same point of aim.
Which for a 7 barrelled gun is a tremendous amount of work, and almost certainly contributed to why these things were very expensive guns.
The heart of this system is a rolling block action, which makes sense because Pieper manufactured
rolling blocks under contract for Remington. So they had access to all of that information.
And if (oh, it's got a really heavy hammer because it has to detonate 7 cartridges at once),
if we cock the hammer the difference we'll see from the traditional Remington rolling block
is that it doesn't have a ... lever here to drop the breech.
Instead it is controlled by the trigger guard, so you can see how this cams our breech block
open, and then that thing falls out.
This is a cartridge plate. So you would load all 7 of your cartridges into this and then set that
into the action like so, and then when you close the action it's going to chamber all seven rounds nicely.
When you open the action it's going to eject them all as a single unit.
So you don't have to try and prise 7 individual cartridges out.
I think it's kind of neat to look at. What looks like sort of a clock dial there is actually the firing pin.
So it's a single big ol' unit that gets hit by the hammer.
And it's going to ... go forward and hit the rims of all 7 cartridges at once.
So those little tabs in there are the, well, the firing pin portion. If I push this in a bit,
here's the back of the firing pin and I can push that forward,
and you can sort of see that it comes out a little bit.
This is a little hard to show you, because it's not normally intended to move unless it's all locked up.
Here are the muzzles. This is the .22 calibre version, this is the .32 calibre version.
They were both rimfire and they were both made side by side simultaneously.
The .22 calibre gun is substantially lighter and handier, but of course the .32 calibre is going to pack a lot more punch to it.
So 7 rounds of .32 calibre rimfire is pretty darn close to a single round of double-aught buckshot,
with the exception that every one of those pellets is actually a rifled and accurate bullet. So really kind of an interesting idea.
Looking at them both side by side you can see the difference in scale here between the big .32 and the small .22.
This .32 calibre one is equally nicely made, and it actually also has sling swivels on it.
You can see just a faint remnant of colour case- hardening, which would have looked really nice on this.
This one is actually not marked by Pieper,
it is instead marked "Manufacture Francaise D'Armes St. Etienne", which is not surprising.
That is the full name of a company typically called Manufrance, that was
a catalogue mail order company operating in France back into the 1800s, and they resold a lot of firearms.
So just like we would see retailers, say in the 1950s in the US, buying versions of shotguns
and .22s and such, that were marked with their own retail company brand names,
Manufrance had guns marked with its name when it was going to resell them.
So this was ... an alternative to the punt gun. If you wanted to stick with a relatively light and portable gun,
but you still wanted to be able to get effective hitting power at extended ranges on large fowl,
well, here you go, 7 rifled barrels at once.
It appears that Pieper made something like 500 of these, which is kind of
impressive given that they were really expensive guns.
This was listed in their catalogue as like a $70 gun back in the 1880s and 1890s. That's a tremendous amount of money.
But of course, they are also really quite well made guns and they're just really darn cool.
So it's neat that we have examples of both the small calibre and the large calibre to take a look at.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If you'd like to see more on either of these
Rock Island has both of them in separate catalogue pages, they are separate lots in their upcoming auction.
And you can also find out more about Rock Island as a company. If you check out the description text below,
you'll find links to their Instagram page and also their YouTube channel. Plenty of cool stuff there for you.
Thanks for watching.