Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the James Julia Auction House
taking a look at some of the guns and cannons they're going
to be selling in their April, or spring, of 2017 firearms auction.
What we have here are a pair of 17th century
wheellock Katzenkopf, cat's head, hand mortars.
They go by a number of names, and they were used for a number of
different activities depending on the exact design of the weapon.
So what this is is a gigantic bore, this is a two inch bore, so 51mm.
And inside that bore it hollows down.
So there's a little area in the base where you would put in a powder charge. You have a flash hole here.
And then you'd pack whatever you want to throw out the muzzle into this big cup-shaped muzzle.
And these ... historically were used for a variety of things, so on the far end of the military spectrum
this type of action could be used for throwing grenades. Although typically not in this specific sort of form.
Then ... coming in a little bit on the military scale, they were also used as signaling devices.
You know, if you have two flanks of the army on different ends of the battlefield and you need to
signal a message from one end to the other, or trigger an action, trigger an order,
you could wave a flag. But you might get people's attention a lot better
by shooting a big exploding firework up into the air, a signal.
And then going into the civilian end of this, they were used as,
I don't want to say quite recreational, but spectacular displays of fire in the sky.
This is the sort of hand launcher that you could use for a really cool 2 inch in diameter exploding firework.
And if you, for example, had a procession with the King or the Queen, or another important nobleman or noblewoman,
and you wanted to make sure that people were duly impressed when this person showed up,
what better way to do it in 1620 than to launch a couple of nice big firecrackers in the air when this person walks into or out of the building.
And that is what a lot of these sorts of hand mortars were actually made for.
Now the ones that were used for actual grenades, (you know, shrapnel, exploding, metal fragmenting,
made for warfare grenades), those were typically designed with much more infrastructure in the gun for handling recoil.
Something like this has a decorative metal butt plate, but
you're not really going to handle recoil much from this thing. And there's no particularly good way to aim it.
So the really far end military spectrum hand mortars were more often things like
cup mortars on the end of a rifle, Tinker's mortars, that sort of thing. And they serve a bit of a different purpose.
These are more for throwing something that's going to look spectacular,
but doesn't have to have a lot of weight behind it, so a firecracker basically.
Which could be a military signal, or it could be a civilian demonstration, or a performance.
We don't really think about it today, but fireworks were actually really quite popular in the 16th and 17th century.
Elizabeth the 1st, for example, is said to have very much enjoyed fireworks displays.
Especially huge, lavish fireworks displays, not done with little stuff like this, but
huge, you know, 1 and 2 foot in diameter launchers mounted on the ground.
She in fact liked them so much that she had a specific position on her court for the Master of Fire.
The man whose job was to co-ordinate the suitably spectacular displays of fireworks.
And fireworks in these early days weren't coloured yet, that wasn't discovered until after the 1600s.
Or not so much discovered, but methods devised for making coloured explosions.
These would have been probably primarily white sparks, because white is an easy colour to make in a firecracker.
So these things are super cool. They're massively heavy, the barrel here
is this big cast, it's either brass or gunmetal or bronze, I don't know the exact composition, but smooth bore.
Why don't we go ahead and just take a closer look at these, because they're just really cool.
Alright, we can start with a look straight down the bore there.
You can see that there is a large diameter section for the payload, and then there's a much smaller
section at the base for the powder charge. And on these two that base ends in just wood.
So it goes down and it's hollow and open to the stock.
Which suggests that these in particular were not made for high pressure loadings, of course.
While most of these hand mortars date to the wheellock era, what's interesting is you will
apparently virtually never find them built as matchlocks.
And I think that makes good sense given that you're loading ... explosives into the barrel,
much ... more significantly than you would do with a standard musket.
You don't really want to do that with a lit match dangling around.
So instead they're made with a wheellock action. The idea here is this clamp would actually hold an iron pyrite.
Clamp it in there.
And then you have this serrated steel wheel here, you wind that up, and when you pull the trigger this is going to spin
you know, about three-quarters or a full revolution, but not as much as some people might think.
And the serrated steel grinding against the pyrite is going to create sparks.
Those sparks ignite the powder in this pan, the fire goes through that hole into the main charge,
fires that off and throws whatever you have stuffed down the muzzle of this thing way out.
Hand mortars like this are actually really quite rare to find, especially outside of European museums.
Because of the scarcity and the cost of manufacturing something like this, especially the [wheellock] actions,
you will often find these really quite ornately embellished.
These are by comparison, I don't want to say plain, but they're simple and practical.
And not more expensive than they really need to be.
I rather kind of like the looks of them, often some of the older ornately embellish guns just don't really do it for me.
This is functional, that's what it was meant to be.
As far as I can tell, there are no maker's marks on these.
... I don't know that that's necessarily unusual, but it does make it a bit more difficult to identify
exactly where and when they came from.
Best information I have is either German or Dutch origin, and that's just based on the styling from some folks that I talked to.
Well if you want to celebrate the next 4th of July truly in classic style,
you know what, I bet these things still work just fine today. Get some pyrite for the wheel lock ignition system,
get yourself some powder. I bet you could load one of these up and shoot it just fine, because
fireworks don't really develop any substantial pressure. There's not really any danger of anything going wrong with these,
not that I can formally endorse, you know, blowing your hand off with a hand mortar.
But this would be a pretty awesome 4th of July fireworks tool right here.
If you'd like to own it yourself, whether for some ridiculous purpose like 4th of July or some
slightly more historically respectable purpose, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to the Julia catalogue page, where these are both
being sold as a single lot together because they are a nicely matched pair.
And you can take a look at Julia's pictures and description.
And if you decide you'd like to place a bid on them you can do that right through the website.
Thanks for watching.