Giant Pinfires of the Market-Gunning Era

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.

Creeping into range

The period plate below gives a good sense of the boats and methods used by English wildfowlers. At the top, a gunner fires a long shoulder gun from a Poole canoe. Below, a man lies almost flat in a Keyhaven, or Hawker, punt, with a much larger gun running forward along the boat. His low position keeps the profile of both gunner and craft close to the water, while the small hand paddle allows him to make the final approach with little disturbance.

A punt gunner aimed largely by steering the boat. With the gun fixed or braced along the punt, a small change in direction moved the muzzle across a distant flock. The approach demanded a detailed knowledge of the water and the birds: how a breeze would turn the punt, how far sound carried over a calm surface, where the mud would take a pole, and how closely the birds would tolerate an approaching shape before rising.

American histories have made the punt gun an emblem of 19th-century market hunting, although related forms of commercial wildfowling flourished in Britain, France, and elsewhere. The exact guns and methods varied, but the underlying purpose remained familiar: place a very heavy charge where many birds had gathered and make the opportunity count.

The percussion gunner’s load

The earlier generations of these great guns were muzzleloaders, first with flint ignition and later with percussion locks. Percussion offered a more dependable means of firing in damp country, although the gunner still had to measure black powder into the muzzle, seat the wadding, ram down a large charge of shot, secure it in the bore, and place a cap on the nipple. Every component had to remain dry and within reach inside a low, cramped boat.

Prepared shot charges helped make that process more orderly. The large yellow cylinders among my cartridges are Eley Universal Shot Cartridges, muzzleloading shot concentrators made on a scale appropriate for these great bores. After the powder had been loaded, the prepared shot package was inserted and rammed into place. The gunner still handled the powder and percussion cap separately, but the shot charge arrived as one measured unit.

Eley’s family of Patent Wire Cartridges descended from Joshua Jenour’s 1827 patent, the rights to which Eley acquired in 1828. The name covered several forms of prepared shot cartridge. Some enclosed the shot in a wire basket, while the Universal variety used a simpler construction without wire. Their purpose was to preserve the shape of the pellets and delay the opening of the charge, giving a denser pattern at greater distance during the decades before choke boring became common.

The giant Eley example provides a useful link between the percussion gun and the large pinfire case. Both packaged a carefully measured shot charge, although the pinfire cartridge carried the process much further. Powder, wadding, shot, and ignition could be assembled in a case before the gunner left home. In the field, he opened the breech, inserted the cartridge with its projecting pin correctly aligned, closed the gun, and cocked the hammer.

Large cases were frequently sold empty as douilles, leaving the gunner or ammunition dealer to tailor the loading. The catalogs still offered wads, primers, loading rods, mandrels, and resizing tools, so the arrival of the breechloader did not eliminate the loading bench. It moved much of the awkward work away from the wet bank or narrow punt and allowed the complete charge to travel with the gun.

The French canardière

French makers gathered a surprisingly broad range of large wildfowling arms under the name canardière, a word derived from canard, or duck. Depending on the catalog and period, a canardière could resemble an unusually long shoulder gun, a heavy arm intended for a rest, a gun fixed to a boat, or a piece approaching a small breechloading cannon.

One Manufacture Française d’Armes catalog begins its section on breechloading canardières with pinfire guns in 12, 10, and 8 gauge. The customer could order the same general guns in centerfire for an additional charge, placing the two ignition systems beside one another at the moment when centerfire was overtaking pinfire in the sporting trade.

The page then introduces a 40mm Canardière-Canon designed specifically for mounting in a boat. Its advertising copy pokes fun at earlier solutions, describing some as enormous shoulder guns and others as throwbacks to medieval culverins. The firm’s answer was a cast-steel breechloader on a pivoting support, weighing about 70 kilograms and using a normal load of 900 grams, nearly two pounds, of shot. The claimed range was 200 meters. Whether every buyer achieved the advertised performance is another question, but the page shows how far makers were prepared to carry the market gunner’s pursuit of a larger and denser charge.

Four gauge at the edge of the shoulder gun

Four gauge occupied a flexible place within this family. Some 4-gauge guns retained a conventional stock and could be fired from the shoulder by a sufficiently strong and determined gunner. Others were used from rests, mounted on pivots, or carried in boats. Bore size alone did not determine the manner of use; the weight, barrel length, stock, mounting arrangement, and local habits mattered just as much. Pinfire was only one part of this large-bore ammunition trade, which also included centerfire and other specialized cases for punt and bank guns. The examples here focus on pinfire because that is the system represented by the surviving 4-gauge and 32mm cartridges in my collection.

A surviving 4-bore pinfire gun signed Lefaucheux illustrates how close a canardière could remain to the form of an ordinary shotgun. Made on the Lefaucheux patent system of 1849, it measures 149 centimeters overall, weighs 8.1 kilograms, and has a 106-centimeter smoothbore barrel. A photograph of it beside a 16-gauge gun makes its scale immediately apparent, yet it still has a full shoulder stock and the familiar outline of a sporting arm.

A later French catalog treats 4 gauge as an established part of the canardière trade. Its “Élite” line for pyroxylated powders included a single-shot 4-gauge model, while the “Correct” line for black powder included both single- and double-barreled versions. For boat service, the catalog offered a 4-gauge gun that could be fired from the shoulder or fixed quickly to a pivot, as well as another supplied with a pivot mount ready to bolt onto the boat.

The firm boasted that its canardières had earned a strong reputation while costing about half as much as comparable English guns, and it backed that claim with a satisfaction guarantee. The following accessories page makes the trade feel even more complete. A buyer could order the gun, its mount, copper or paper cases, the appropriate wads, and the equipment needed to load and maintain the ammunition.

The SFM box in my collection belongs directly to this commercial world. Its blue-green label identifies twenty-five green Gévelot pinfire cases made by the Société Française des Munitions. The cases were components for loading, much like the douilles listed in the catalogs, and the box held the style of long green 4-gauge case shown with it.

British and French headstamps appear together among the surviving 4-gauge cartridges. Eley and Reilly represented the London trade, while Gévelot, SFM, Chaudun, and other French names served a market in which the canardière remained a recognizable category. The cartridges differ in length, tube construction, base material, and the way their enormous side pins were fitted, suggesting that large-bore ammunition remained far less standardized than ordinary sporting cartridges.

A 32mm bank gun on wheels

The bank gun brought the same concentration of firepower onto land. Some were rested on a wall or embankment, while heavier examples required a permanent stand or a movable carriage. They could cover marsh edges and tidal flats, although the surviving 32mm gun discussed here had a rather different quarry.

In September 2018, HOLTS Auctioneers sold a 32mm pinfire single-shot bank gun with an external lock signed W.R. Pape. HOLTS considered the gun probably French or Belgian. Its 76-inch barrel sat on an iron pintle fixed to a hardwood trolley, with large wheels, trailing legs, and a geared elevation mechanism. The trigger could be operated by a lanyard, allowing the gunner to stand clear when the charge fired.

The gun had remained in one family for three generations and, according to its history, had originally been purchased for harvesting larks. That detail places the gun beside a field or feeding ground, where the wheeled carriage could be positioned and the barrel elevated toward a place the birds regularly gathered. HOLTS sold the gun for £3,000 as Lot 615 in its September 2018 sale.

Once that gun is placed beside the ammunition, the proportions of a 32mm pinfire case begin to seem reasonable. Its head is substantially larger than a 4-gauge case and dwarfs an ordinary 12g Gévelot shot shell. The long pin remains the same recognizable feature, enlarged to suit a cartridge intended for a gun carried on its own wheeled platform.

The 32mm Gévelot case in my collection is marked FABRIQUE GÉVELOT, 32 MILLIM, and PARIS. It survives with a Société Française des Munitions catalog page devoted to pinfire hunting cases, where Calibre 32 m/m appears as a regular entry. The illustration on that page shows the same general construction, with a large paper tube seated into a reinforced metal base and a pin rising from the side.

The SFM catalog lists 32mm alongside its other pinfire hunting cases, confirming it as an established commercial size. Together with the surviving Gévelot cartridge and the W.R. Pape bank gun, it shows how large-bore pinfire ammunition was made for a distinct class of heavy wildfowling and market-gunning arms.

The photograph also captures two stages in the development of the shotshell. The large yellow Eley Universal shot cartridge was made to be rammed down the muzzle of a percussion gun, carrying the shot as a prepared charge while the powder and ignition remained separate. Beside it, the 32mm Gévelot pinfire cartridge gathers those elements into a single breechloading package. Their enormous size reflects the same market-gunning purpose, but the two cartridges show just how much the ammunition system had changed within a generation.

What survived after the market changed

By the turn of the 20th century, the world that had supported market gunning was beginning to disappear. In the United States, the Lacey Act of 1900 restricted interstate trade in illegally taken wildlife, followed by the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Together with changing food distribution, farming, transportation, and public attitudes toward wildlife, these laws steadily removed the economic place once occupied by the professional market gunner.

The great wildfowling guns gradually left the banks, punts, and feeding grounds for which they had been built. Some stayed in families, as the 32mm W.R. Pape bank gun did. Others entered museums and collections, while much of the specialized ammunition simply disappeared through use, damage, or neglect.

What survives today is a remarkably physical record of that trade. A 4-gauge pinfire cartridge still looks close enough to a sporting shell to suggest the heavy shoulder gun or boat-mounted canardière that used it. A 32mm case points toward something much more specialized: an eleven-foot bank gun on wheels, aimed with gearing and fired by a lanyard.

Their paper bodies, broad brass heads, and projecting pins once belonged among punts, loading tools, powder measures, market baskets, and muddy boots. They are reminders of a kind of shooting in which hours of quiet preparation could end in a single discharge, and where the success of that one shot could help determine the value of a morning’s work.