The market gunner’s shot began hours before he pulled the trigger. It might begin in darkness, with a narrow punt eased away from a muddy shore and a heavy gun lying along its centerline. On land, it could begin with a gun too cumbersome to carry being rolled into position near a field where birds regularly gathered. Wind, tide, distance, cover, and the behavior of the flock all had to come together before those hours of preparation ended in one enormous discharge.

Throughout the 19th century, professional and semi-professional gunners supplied birds to game dealers, hotels, restaurants, and city markets. Ducks and geese were taken from marshes and estuaries, while other large guns were trained on waders, rails, and even flocks of larks feeding in open country. A carefully placed shot into a dense flock could provide a quantity of birds that would have required many shots with an ordinary sporting gun.

The guns developed around that commercial calculation. Their barrels grew longer, their bores larger, and their recoil increasingly became the responsibility of a boat, a fixed rest, or a carriage. Ammunition followed the same course, eventually producing the immense 4-gauge and 32mm pinfire cartridges in my collection. They come from a period when an old form of market hunting was meeting the new convenience of the breechloading cartridge.