Armor and Arms: An elementary handbook and guide to the collection in the City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.Hoopes, Thomas T.
History
Armor and Arms: An elementary handbook and guide to the collection in the City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.
Hoopes, Thomas T.
Armor -- Catalogs; Weapons -- Catalogs
Fig. 50 illustrates a very complete outfit of pistols and accessories
made at Lisbon, Portugal, by Jacinto Xavier in 1799. There are a pair of
double barreled holster pistols for rides abroad, and a pair of small
but deadly pocket pistols for self defense or card table arguments. With
these are the accessories and tools appropriate to them: powder flask,
powder measure, bullet molds, oil can, hammer, screw driver, awl, (for
cleaning the touch holes), and box for spare flints and bullets. All are
enclosed in a handsome mahogany case.
The outfit is definitely that of a dandy, for every piece is beautifully
made and exquisitely decorated. The steel parts of the pistols are
brilliantly polished or deeply blued. The stocks are delicately inlaid
with rococo scrolls of silver wire. The oil can is a dainty hexagonal
urn. Even the hammer and screw driver deserve in their own right places
in a museum display.
[Illustration: _Fig. 49. Not a weapon, but a device to test the
strength of gunpowder. Yet just as beautiful as though it were
deadly._]
Students of the history of arms will delight in the holster pistols, for
these have each two barrels side by side, while a single flintlock fires
each in turn. The powder pan which catches the sparks from the flint is
divided into two parts: that on the right transmits the ignition
directly to the right hand barrel; that on the left is covered by a
slide operated by a thumb piece on the left side of the pistol. When
this slide is pulled back, a second priming charge is exposed, so that
the lock may be snapped again to fire the left hand barrel. Both barrels
may be unscrewed by means of a wrench attached to the bullet mold; they
are loaded from the breach with a slightly oversized bullet which will
not move through the barrel until the pistols are fired.
[Illustration: _Fig. 50. A gadgeteer’s dream. The big pistols are
double barreled, and each of the little ones has three bayonets and
a corkscrew!_]
The little pocket pistols are a gadgeteer’s dream. They have invisible
triggers, which are only exposed when the lock is cocked. Each has on
the right side a tiny triangular bayonet which springs into position at
a touch on a catch. On the left side is a strong, light, knife blade
similarly operated. Above each barrel is a second smaller knife blade
(just right for trimming a quill pen), which may be pushed forward from
a housing which conceals and protects it. And in the butt of each pistol
is hidden a small but, effective corkscrew. What more could Beau Brummel
himself desire?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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