This afternoon I was reading a description of the murder of Jean-Etienne Waddens, a Canadian fur trader, who supposedly died at the hands of explorer Peter Pond at a remote Athabascan outpost in 1782.
The description is a deposition put down in 1785 by Waddens’s clerk, who was on the scene though not a witness to the actual shooting. In the deposition he says that after Waddens died, he (the clerk) went into Peter Pond’s cabin and found two guns, one of them “broken.”
Now. When I hear a gun is broken, I think of a breech-loader broken open for loading. But this was 1785. Breech-loaders existed, but I would have thought they were rare.
So: are there any gun experts who can shed a different interpretation on the words?
My first thought was that it’s a different meaning of “broken”, either broken as in damaged, or broken down for cleaning.
There were a few cartridge weapons and breech loaders in the 1700s, but they were very rare. The only ones I am aware of were owned by kings and nobles, not fur traders. Most of them also had opening breeches (like the Furgusen rifle) or falling block style breeches and weren’t break-action weapons.
Break-action weapons became more popular with the invention of pinfire cartridges, but those didn’t come along until the 1820s or so and wouldn’t have been around in 1785.
I’ve read large amounts of 18th century writing over the years, and it definitely means that the gun was damaged and not working. ‘Broken’ wouldn’t have been used in any other way at this time, and in this context.
A musket consisted of three parts, a lock, a stock, and a barrel. I would say that it’s likely that the lock - the trigger mechanism - was broken and not working.
Breechloading guns didn’t “break open” until the advent of metallic cartridges in the mid-19th century. Early breechloading small arms tended to have a sort of manually operated screw-plug system, much like the one in the Ferguson Riflefrom the US War of Independence era.
If I read an account from that period of a rifle being “broken”, I would take it to mean non-functional - lockwork broken, stock cracked, barrel bent, somethat that would clearly put the gun out of service.
It’s not all that weird. Spare parts were pretty hard to come by, and a flintlock can be fired with a match (of the slow-burning cord variety) if the spring mechanism stops working.
Just clamp a slowmatch in the cock, and open the frizzen before firing. Heck, it might even work with the frizzen closed, though you do risk knocking the cherry off the slowmatch.
Or open the frizzen and touch it off by hand if the cock is busted.