I speak of Africa and golden joys the joy of wandering through Lonely lands the joy of hunting the mighty and terrible lords of the wilderness the cunning the weary and the Grim the land teams with beasts of the Chase infinite in number and incredible and variety It holds the fiercest beasts of raven and fleetest and most timid of those things that live an undying fear of talon and fang These things can be told, but there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness That's what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about hunting in Africa. Thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons com I'm Ian ] am here today at the James Giulia auction house up in Maine and what I'm taking a look at is Probably a larger assembly of four boar rifles than most people will ever see in any place at one time There are I have four here in front of me, and there's several more that art on camera right now These are all coming up for sale in the Jiulia March of 2016 auction And I was definitely not going to miss out on this chance to Take a look at these guns and share them with you This is something that this is totally alien to today's firearms world Nobody builds guns like this anymore except on a very small custom basis and this used to be a recognized element of hunting So I want to begin with a little bit of terminology, and a little bit of background most of these guns Here on the table were in fact made by Holland and Holland. They are probably the best known of the Bespoke British gun makers Holland and Holland has been around since the early 1800s manufacturing custom very high-end extraordinarily high quality firearms their production and quality really declined probably in the 1970s 80s as this sort of firearm fell out of favor not just the four bore the the massive rifles but the idea of Bespoke custom very elegant high-end rifles in particular fell out of favor with a lot of the European affluent however back in the Day so to speak these were, Holland and Holland was probably the best of the companies that you could have a gun made by and The purpose of a gun like a four-bore so you don't need a four bore to go on Safari everyone well maybe not everyone, but a lot of people have probably heard of one of the famous elephant Hunters who used a 6.5mm Cartridge basically a little small small bore rifle and killed a an extraordinary number of elephants with it for even a proper high-end Dangerous game Safari rifle something like this would be perfectly sufficient. This is A .465"/500 double rifle, this was actually made for the a Maharaja in India by Holland and Holland this was the standard dangerous game rifle of the time, and it looks to anyone like I mean it's a Fantastically made and gorgeously engraved gun, but it is a typical rifle You look at this and you pick it up, and wow you know, .465", That's a pretty big rifle I bet this kicks like a beast, I bet it does but then you get some perspective on A gun like this These guys weigh about 20 pounds. They are double-Barreled four-bore rifled Something like a .465" will do the job. Why do you need a four bore? What was the point? Well two things first off the four bore rifles came up and others like them six bores, eight bores, uh, these came about before the invention of smokeless powder and at that time if you're just using black powder You really have a limit on the velocity of a projectile you you can't just make a small bore projectile go Faster and faster with black powder. It doesn't work you get a maximum pressure and and Diminishing returns now when smokeless powder was invented all of a sudden you could drive Jacketed small bore cartridges or projectiles much much faster And that's where something like that .465" gets it stopping powers, from velocity Before that if you wanted more stopping power you needed more projectile and that led to guns getting bigger and bigger and bigger ultimately to the four bore rifle. There were two bore rifles made Really not practical the four bore was the standard recognized largest game Rifle made and used So a quick note about the word bore or gauge this applies to both What that term is actually telling you when that number is telling you when you see four bore or 12 gauge Is if you take a pound of lead, and you divide it into that many perfect spheres The resulting diameter is your unit of measurement so for example 12 Gauge is about .72" caliber if I remember properly and that's the diameter of a perfect sphere of Lead that's 1/12 of a pound so a 4 bore Uses a perfectly round spherical ball that is one quarter of a pound That's that's what this dimensional measurement means so in practical terms in application a four board is about a one inch in diameter Barrel it is freaking massive Bullet weight for a spherical four bore projectile is about 1700.... Well is exactly 1750 Grains that's four ounces, a quarter pound Loads for these rifles because again you're used that these were intended for the most dangerous and the biggest game They were intended as often you'll find them referred to as stopping rifles You would carry one of these For when you got charged by something really huge and really angry a charging Rhinoceros, a charging elephant Tiger, lion, these are the animals and the situations that the four bore rifles were intended for Because at that range. You've got one shot and it had better work and work very very fast and With black powder you do that by getting a really big projectile a quarter pound freaking bullet? so the the loadings of these Ranged from 12 Dram up to 16 gram now. That's in shotgun terminology a light load for one of these would be about 325 Grains of Black Powder, and it would go up from there in fact It's interesting these are rifles everyone's familiar with the concept of rifling it was actually the rifles were actually less popular than Smoothbore guns So a little terminology note here for this type of firearm the the very fine British style double guns a rifle is rifled a gun is Smoothbore So you do not have Four bore guns you have four gauge guns so interestingly Smoothbore 4 gauge shotguns, we're not shotguns, but guns you'd call them We're actually more popular than the four board rifles And there's there's good reason for this these were intended to be used at close range you're talking often fifty feet or less maybe as much as 50 yards a Smoothbore 50 yards is going to be totally sufficiently accurate for the game hunting that these were used for and Then a Smoothbore has a couple of advantages to it particularly in the days of black powder When you were dealing with muzzle loaders because of course this concept predates the cartridge these were made as muzzle loaders in fact this is A muzzle loader here if you have a smoothbore, it's a lot easier and faster to load it because you're not trying to Press a soft lead projectile on to rifling you're just stuffing it down a smoothbore Smoothbores will tend to foul less because you don't have the rifling to catch and hold Black-Powder fouling and The Smoothbore guns actually recoil less as well because there's less resistance to that projectile leaving the bore So for these reasons the smoothbore guns actually tended to be more popular than the four [ball] rifles although They don't have the gravitas of the four pour rifles Now you might be wondering if you've got this Monstrous of a cartridge why would you need to why not? Just one Well the answer again goes back to the fact that these were intended for the most dangerous of game And if you've got a, even a repeating rifle Has a chance of malfunctioning with a double barreled rifle a double rifle You've got two completely independent guns in one device in one stock You've got two triggers two hammers two firing pins two cartridges if you have a misfire You immediately have a second round at your disposal to use And if you've got an angry bull elephant charging at you, that's a very reassuring thing to have There are a number of professional hunters who use these after having incidents with repeating rifles not working? Now they did make four bore cartridges using nitro smokeless powder during the later days of their use I'm going to ignore that for the time being most of these classic guns are intended for black powder with black powder you would have as I said about a 1750 Grain round ball you can also fire shaped projectiles which can be typically a little bit heavier You'd be firing that over a charge of probably not less than 300 or 325 Grains of black Powder That's going to give you a muzzle velocity of about thirteen hundred and thirty thirteen hundred and forty feet per second which equates to about Seven thousand pounds of muzzle energy to put that in perspective a 12-gauge slug has about 2600 foot-pounds of Muzzle Energy So you're talking close to three times the recoil of a 12-gauge slug. Now now to balance that out too to accommodate that [a] bit you have these are obviously quite, heavy guns The lightest you'll find these would probably be about 18 pounds And they're going to go up from there a single barreled gun would be well Maybe 16 to 18 pounds the double barrel guns are typically going to be around 20 Potentially as much as 24 pounds a lot of this depends on barrel length a lot of these guns typically have fairly short barrels Because well frankly because if you made them long they would just be too heavy to be practical to carry and use Now there are a couple of these guns that I want to mention Specifically and give you a little bit of detail on first one up is this guy this is probably the nicest one here this is actually one of a pair of guns that came out of the Holland and Holland reference collection [a] Couple Decades ago when the company was in financial trouble they started selling some of their very nice collection guns simply to meet payroll and operating expenses because Their guns weren't, you know, people weren't buying very high-end bespoke firearms, so they had to do this to stay liquid as a company the number-one of this pair is still in the Holland & Holland collection the number two here is obviously coming up for sale this is what's called a Jones under lever so that refers to the fact that to open the gun you take this lever here and pivot it open I'll demonstrate that on a different gun in a minute hammered forbore rifled Gorgeous gorgeous gun we also have here these two these are pair They are they were made specifically for the Nizam of Hyderabad. How's that for a formal sounding title? He was the ruler of the state of Hyderabad in India This is a pretty large state pretty much right in the middle of of India right in the [centre] Hyderabad was in particular a few things a lot of the Indian States were basically self-contained principalities for a long time Hyderabad in particular was a staunch supporter of the British during the Indian mutiny or the first Indian war of independence Which gained them a lot of favor with British Royalty. The Nizam, the Ruler was at this point in Avid Sportsman or Hunter and had quite a large number of firearms including some absolutely gorgeous pieces like these - they are They're actually being sold as a pair. Which is a bit unusual. They both have cases all of these guns come with Original cases and accoutrements and extra stuff. I'll show you some of that as well Just you know really impressive set of gear with these guns These two are also of course both for boards their boards are slightly smaller I believe they are 0.96 inch on the lands and the shorter one is 20 pounds 8 ounces the longer one is 20 pounds 14 ounces, so Close in weight there as well Both also Jones under-lever guns now Ronda was a reseller a commercial Sales agent you might say they sold a lot of things including extremely high-end guns, but they didn't make the guns themselves these guns based on serial numbers are most likely made by W.C. Scott and probably in 1875 that's what the serial numbers would would mesh with so that gives you some vintage and some provenance on these two So this one the the last of the guns I have up on the table right now is Substantially different this is actually a muzzleloading form or which is what you would have used before the cartridges were readily available or after if you preferred that sort of thing also four bore, however instead of typical what we would recognize as normal rifling It's actually designed for a wing'ed bullet so picture a bullet that has a lobe two lobes 180 degrees apart the idea there was you would actually cast those lobes into the projectile and then when you go to load it you are trying to get the best of both worlds you get You're not forcing the bullet into a lot of sharp lands and grooves like you would on a rifle so it makes this easier to Load a little bit lighter recoil, less friction working on the Bullet when it fires however Those lobes are turning and so you are getting a rifling effect and the increase in accuracy now That was the goal of wing'ed Bullets, and this is a winged Bullet rifle It's also interestingly one that has a double set trigger to it right now there is one other rifle that I want to show you because it's Kind of the opposite at the other end of the spectrum of four bores, then these these are investment guns I mean there's there's no reason you can't shoot them. They're proofed They're fantastically made guns, but I suspect most of the people who own this sort of thing Probably aren't going to go out and shoot it regularly maybe once or twice, but not every day They're very valuable you don't want to damage them that sort of thing however there is also here a four bore rifle That is built on an original English action But something I don't know what happened to the stock and barrel and they've been replaced with modern replacements that Is eminently a shootable gun. It comes with a number of brass cases. You'll notice I mentioned that the bore diameters are different on these guns all four bore rifles are going to be different They're all going to require custom-made brass cases to use because they're not going to be interchangeable well this rifle that I want to show you next has a bunch of cases with it and And it is a shooters gun rather than in great gun all right we need to truly appreciate the size and monstrosity of the forbore, so We'll start with a .22 long-rifle typical cartridge everyone's seen those Nine millimetre parabellum again pretty typical let's move up to something considered significant that is A .45"/70, .45"/70 is a pretty stompy cartridge a lot of energy and you want to know how to shoot a gun well to shoot a .45"/70 effectively especially a light one and Actually about the same length a 12-gauge Also, 12-gauge slugs that's got recoil no doubt about that There's a four bore around these things are just huge It's a four to four and a half inch long case and as I mentioned a quarter pound bullet that Hopefully this puts things in proper perspective here's a box of ten which by the way is also up for sale in this auction damn All right, hopefully this this gets across that just the concept of how big this gun is this is truly the biggest shoulder-Fired Rifle ever made Certainly the biggest let me put it this way the biggest shoulder file rifle shoulder fired rifle actually used by people on a regular basis for serious purposes other than simply trying to one-up a Nominal record for biggest rifle ever people use this stuff for real and regularly All right, so here's our shooter for one This is again Jones under lever. I'll show you in a moment. We do not know who exactly made it it is marked It's difficult to make out in the case hardening its marked Army-Navy Supply right here. Which was a Significant there were a retailer of many things including both military and sporting firearms it's not uncommon to find British Webley Revolver's marked Army-Navy Supply, British officers were responsible for providing their own sidearms and Army, Navy supply was one common source for them and of course if you're stationed in India And you like to get yourself an elephant rifle Army-Navy Supply can supply you with one like this Now the barrel you can obviously tell here this is Not the same as the highly-decorated sorts of original barrels that you'll often find on these guns this is modern This was made by J.J. Peridot out of Enid, Oklahoma and Well, let's get right to it here. We've got in on your lever that pulls out to the sign this Pitch point the action breaks open have an extractor here, but these do not have objectors here. You are not speed shooting this thing an extractor there and Rather large Locking under lug when you close the gun there are a couple little catches here Trigger guard Lever snaps on like that Cock the hammer, and you're ready to fire This is a spring-loaded firing pin right there Trigger on this is actually rather light and nice. It's not particularly heavy This gun is set up with again a modern manufactured stock the stock also came from Peridot This gun has a modern stock and a modern rubber recoil pad on it as well The recoil pads you will find on some of the original traditional guns as well Because there is no shame in having a recoil pad on a rifle like this. That's for sure So still a gorgeous gun nice to crest on the side, but this is not the antiquarian Put in the cabinet and admire it [from] afar sort of rifle. This is for someone who actually wants to go out and shoot four bore and Speaking of that I know someone who wants to go Shoot a four bore, I want to go shoot a for bore since this came with Some cases specifically for it and with the very generous permission of the consignor. We're going to take this thing out and put a round Maybe two will see through it and see what is it really like to shoot a four bore We have a seventeen hundred and fifty grain projectile in here over three hundred and twenty-five Grains of black powder that is approximately a 12 gram load which is approximately? the light Factory load for one of these So drop that in there right Crank it shut This is going to be an experience Whoo! That was some pretty good smoke an' fire empty round So I'll be honest guys that was not nearly as bad as I was afraid it might [be] That moves you pretty good Use you're pretty darn good kick, but with black powder. I can see someone having a lot of fun with something like that This thing was so much fun that we're going to do a second shot with it so Have a second hand loaded projectile. We will very gently Load that in chamber it up Block that nice and tight, and we'll fire it left-handed this time I shot it right hand to the first time because I figured if it actually physically injured me I wanted it to be my right shoulder. Not my good left shoulder, so Here we go ready haha! That one was a little stouter, I think or I wasn't holding it quite as tight Whoo! that is a Sport! I Hope you guys enjoyed the video. I would like to conclude by pointing out that my shoulder is in fact intact and okay Not dislocated not not broken In fact not really even bruised. I don't think we'll see if anything develops over the next day or two but been a fantastic opportunity to take a look at A Selection of guns all in one place that you'll almost certainly never see together again so so this is of course an auction house and all of these guns are coming up for sale in March and If you would like to have any one of them or several of them for yourself Go ahead and take a look in the links in the description Text below those will take you to the catalog pages for all these guns where you can see the Julia Company photographs and their descriptions and their provenances everything from the muzzle loaders like this one which there are several more of in the catalog to a absolutely exemplary idea of the Holland and Holland high-end forbore possibly the best probably the best one anyone will be able to buy for several decades to Something that has a modern barrel on it that you can actually go out and shoot without Concern about destroying an antique or damaging an antique Whatever your taste in four boards is there's probably something here to satisfy it, so take a look best of luck to you And thanks for watching!
