[ Ferguson Rifled Flintlock Breechloader ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm joined here today by Mike Carrick, who is the Q&A Editor for Arms Heritage Magazine.
A very impressive guy, a very cool gun collection he has.
And he has very generously brought out a reproduction Ferguson rifle for us to take a look at.
So for those of you who aren't familiar,
the Ferguson has the distinction of being the first breechloading rifle
actually used by a military force, right? - Yes.
These were invented by a fellow named Patrick Ferguson, a Scot,
who had them tested by the British military, he was in fact an officer in the British ... army.
And the results of this testing was extremely positive.
He had ... about 200 of them made in total, and 100 of those were shipped over to the US,
because, well, it happened that we were kind of making a bit of a ruckus at the time.
His patent on this rifle dates to 1776.
And what he got permission to do was form ... an experimental unit
of 100 riflemen armed with these Fergusons
to come over here and participate in fighting the American Revolution.
And this unit actually saw action at the Battle of Brandywine.
They were all armed with Fergusons.
How effective they are is kind of in question,
... 100 men out of something like 30,000 British troops at the battle.
So you can't really say they had a definite impact on the outcome either way.
But what we did see was actual use of a breechloader.
So why don't you tell us how this works, ... how did one go about using this rifle?
- Well, the key to this is the ... eleven thread breech that will open
and give access to the breech end for loading.
To drop the breech down an inch you just have to make one revolution.
And there's a cavity here.
- So there were ... threaded breech actions before. - Yes.
- The big thing that Ferguson came up with was this idea of having
not one thread that you had to unscrew eleven rotations. - Exactly.
- But having eleven symmetrical threads
so that with one rotation it dropped the breech all the way down.
- And since it's a breechloader, you put the ball in first,
and with your finger or a small tool push it forward.
Pour the powder in, close the breech.
Prime it, close it, cock it, and it's ready to go.
This can be shot from the prone position, which the Brown Bess couldn't.
- Right. Yeah, no muzzleloader can really be reloaded prone.
But this, you could hide yourself behind a rock or a log, and ... have nice cover the whole time.
So do you know what the standard was for firing these on the clock at the time?
Or was there a standard?
- I don't think there was a standard, because it was the starting of something.
But they were very, very much faster than the steps of loading from the muzzle.
- OK, I know I've seen some video of a re-enactor on YouTube,
who was able to do 6, and almost 7, shots in 60 seconds.
... That's fantastic speed compared to a Brown Bess.
- For those days, yes. And this is a rifle. - Right, that's true.
So yeah, they had far better accuracy than the standard smoothbore muskets at the time.
Unfortunately, well unfortunately for Ferguson, maybe good for us here,
Major Ferguson was pretty severely wounded at the Battle of Brandywine.
And then a follow-up, he was accidentally bayonetted by a sentry as well.
And while he was convalescing they took his unit and disbanded it,
sent all the guys back to their former units,
and they put all 100 of the Ferguson rifles in storage in New York.
And they never saw cohesive action again as a unit with the rifles, unfortunately.
Ferguson's next major encounter was the Battle of Kings Mountain.
He was certainly not using one of his rifles.
There's kind of some debatable evidence that maybe some of his rifles were at the battle,
but ... it's hard to say for sure.
But of course, he was still recuperating from his wounds,
and he did not survive the Battle of Kings Mountain.
He was not a popular fellow there, and was killed by the Americans.
- Yeah, obviously he couldn't have used this with only one operating arm. - Right.
- Yeah, and it sounds like his condition was such that he probably wasn't
doing much holding up of a rifle at all. - No.
- The story is he was using a sword in his left arm, and holding his horse's reins in his teeth.
That's some impressive dedication.
Well, why don't we do a little bit of shooting?
I'm really curious to see this in action. - Let's do that. - Alright.
Alright, so loading process for the Ferguson.
I've got the breech already open.
I'm going to take my lead ball, this is .65 calibre. No, this is .61? - No, it's .65.
- This is a .65 calibre ball, which is what you would use for the most accurate shooting.
Once the bore gets fouled, you could drop it down to a .61 calibre.
Anyway, we're going to drop that in there, it rolls into the bore.
And then just to be sure, I have this little tool,
which I'm going to push in there, just make sure that the ball is properly seated.
So powder charge here, I have 75 grains of 3F Swiss powder.
We're going to angle this down a little bit.
Pour that in.
So our powder is kind of floating around in the chamber there.
What I want to do ...
is wiggle the rifle around to get as much of that powder as possible into the chamber.
That's pretty good.
Then I rotate my locking lever up.
It's locked in place, and you can see I have a bunch of powder that is pushed up.
That's the equivalent of cutting the end off a paper cartridge.
So I'm going to do the potentially maybe historical thing
and wipe that powder off into the priming pan.
- Have you got enough in there? - Probably not, and it's awfully greasy.
- OK. - So we will take our priming powder,
just top that off.
Close the frizzen, cock the hammer, and we're ready to fire.
- Oh. You got it!
And there we have a shot from a Ferguson rifle.
So this brass breech plug is actually tapered, it's wider at the bottom than it is at the top.
And that enables it to work better once it's fouled.
It's sticky at the very beginning,
but once we crack it open, now the threading becomes much looser as we open it up.
So as we're shooting, what we'll do is clean out the top of the threads
to make sure that it doesn't get too sticky.
You can see down here we got a bunch of black-powder gunk on the threads there.
[ Testing ... in ballistic soap, 60gr. powder charge, .65 cal ball, approx 410gr. ]
- Nice shot!
Well, it went into the second block of soap.
And it is in the second block somewhere.
- And if we hold it up to the light.
It's about 5 or 6 inches in.
- Right there. - So the first block is 14 inches,
that's easily the thickness of a human being in the abdominal area, plus 4 more.
- Good thing you didn't shoot George Washington, that's all I can say.
- And anyone standing behind George.
I didn't bring my knife, we'll section that back in the laboratory.
- Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed it.
Tune in again every week to Forgotten Weapons for some more cool antique firearms.