We all love to watch movies in one way or another. Some are "war movies", some are science fiction or fantasy, some are watching everything, for some, serials are the nicest of all. And again, everyone finds their own in them. Someone suffers, looking at the torment of the slave Izaura, someone worries about the "radio operator Kat", someone loves the American "Little Women". The last films, by the way, were shot several, and one, namely 1949, was shot especially well. In the cinema and in the same series, I am most interested in the entourage and directorial work. Knowledge of time and life, the degree of how the actors get used to a particular role. For example, whether the ship's guns roll back when firing in the TV series Hornblower is much more important to me than all his heroic adventures, as well as the triggering of flintlocks on guns and pistols. For example, Downton Abbey and the mini-series The Story of Tom Jones, Foundling, convey the atmosphere of their time very well. Aristocratic lunches and dinners, table setting with the help of a special ruler, serving dishes are very well shown. A lot of people, a lot of servants, a lot of food … And here an interesting question arises: where, for example, and how the same English landlords got the same game in such huge quantities. Downton Abbey shows pheasant hunting. But … no matter how many of them were killed there - a pheasant is a pheasant! And if, for example, a wild duck is preparing for serving - a roast of wild duck with lingonberries, and even for 100 guests, then … where can I get so many wild ducks? Send hunters to the lakes? But this is how much it is necessary to keep the gamekeepers in the estate and how many of these ducks will they need to get? There is no doubt that, due to our rational thinking, the process of catching waterfowl was already solved in a much more efficient way. But which one exactly? Well - to tell about it, the right word, it is necessary, since this moment, unfortunately, is not shown in any of the series. But in vain. The "picture" could have turned out to be very, very specific and instructive. So…
The problem of all aristocrats is the need to occupy themselves with at least something. And hunting, of course, was and is in the circle of aristocratic occupations, even when some modern British aristocrat serves in the Foreign Office or flies on a Tornado fighter. But hunting can be fun and work. Getting 100 ducks for a dinner party in your private castle is no longer fun, but hard work. To make things easier and, moreover, to put it on a "stream" in the 18-19 centuries. helped by the creation of the so-called pantgans - special large-caliber guns for duck hunting … from a boat.
We called such shotguns a duck, but the Anglo-American name punt gun (punt - "flat-bottomed boat") and gun (gun) meant a gun with a very long, up to 4 m barrel of a very large caliber - from 12 to 1 and higher. It is clear that it was simply not possible to hold such a "gun" in the hands and it was installed on boats. And sometimes on the boat several pangans were fixed in a fan, so that when fired in one gulp, they covered the whole lake at once and destroyed literally everything living on it!
Here he is … pantgan!
Note that this weapon, although it was intended exclusively for duck hunting, was very difficult. For example, if its barrel had a caliber of 50 mm, then the barrel length was 2.75 m, and the weight reached 80 kg, that is, more than that of the Maxim machine gun with the machine tool! It took about 900 g to load into such a gun (with a caliber of 3, 96 mm pellets, that's 2560 pieces!), So you can imagine its amazing ability. But it was possible to hit a target from such a 50-mm pantgan at a distance of up to 90 m. At the same time, the angle of dispersion of the shot and its density made it possible to get up to 50 ducks with one shot. That is, only two shots and here's a dinner party for 100 people, and if not 100, but only 50, then in addition to roast duck, you could also make duck liver pate. 25-30 ducks with one shot were generally considered the norm, as were the stories about a certain lucky hunter who just shot a hundred ducks with just one shot.
Since no hunter alone can collect 100 ducks, they usually hunted in pairs: the second hunter sailed behind on a regular boat, finished off the wounded animals with a gun, and then collected the prey, since a large number of ducks did not always fit in the first boat, since there are many space was occupied by a huge gun.
The most widespread pantgans were in the UK and the USA. And you need to have a good idea of the volume of game shooting both in England and overseas, and the possibilities of the then nature, which for the time being still endured such a scale! By the way, we note that the American pantguns were longer and heavier than the English ones. Naturally, the American ones were more effective and allowed to knock out game on the lakes to the maximum. As already noted, instead of one pantgan, up to 10 trunks were often placed on the boat, arranged in a fan. Thus, game hunting was put on an "industrial basis". Wild ducks and geese went to stores in droves and were no longer considered food for the aristocracy in those USA. However, such a barbaric extermination of game very soon made itself felt and the pantgans began to be gradually banned, until by the 1880s this weapon was finally banned in all states. Well, the final act banning duck hunting with the use of large-caliber weapons in the United States was adopted in 1918. True, this did not bother the poachers for a long time, but the law is the law, so now the hunters involved in this could be caught, condemned and imprisoned, which was nevertheless much easier and safer than catching moonshaires and bootleggers.
As for England, which piously reveres the old traditions, here the barrel caliber is legally limited, which is allowed in 1.75 inches (about 44 mm). Previously, it was possible to have pangans with a caliber of 50 mm, but now they can only be seen in museums. When in the mid-1990s an inspection of hunting grounds was carried out in England, they found about 50 pantgans that were quite suitable for shooting - both of the 19th century, and samples of quite modern production.
However, I must say that the pantgan, even made at an arms factory, is a very difficult weapon. First of all, it has a very strong recoil, so some hunters on their boats installed homemade devices for damping the barrel rollback, attaching them to the bottom of the boat. In addition, human greed, and hunting with such a weapon cannot be explained by anything else, is usually always punishable from above. The trunks of pantguns tore apart much more often than all other types of hunting weapons. It is clear that this led to dire consequences for their owners. Well, in those pantguns that were charged from the breech, it happened that even the breech was tore apart.
The most famous pantgans were produced by the French company Verney-Carron. Before the complete prohibition of duck hunting with the help of this barbaric weapon, her enterprise produced three types of pantgans: caliber 33, 42 and 48 mm. The weight of the latter reached 240 kg, and the barrel had a length of 350 cm. They were installed on boats on special metal carriages. Interestingly, this company still produces small-caliber shotguns.
And now a little more about human stupidity. People were smart enough to shoot ducks from such "weapons" in the wild, but they did not have enough to use them in war. Meanwhile, in the conditions of linear tactics, and then the tactics of the "big battalions" of the era of the Napoleonic wars, this would be the most effective weapon of all that ever existed.
"Boat multi-barrel"
It is quite possible to imagine that the first ranks of infantry companies could be armed with such “guns”, 10 “ghans” per company. The calculation is two people, one in battle puts the barrel on the shoulder in front of the one standing. Or three - the third carries an A-shaped support and a sledgehammer. When approaching the enemy's line, a man hammers the support from the ground, the trunk with a hook clings to the support and - bang! In fact, the same fortress gun, only much more powerful and shoots buckshot. With a barrel length of about 2.5 m, the weight of the weapon could be quite acceptable for carrying so many soldiers. Caliber - 30-40 mm. Considering the caliber of an infantry musket from the period of the Napoleonic wars - 17-mm, then this is not so much. To facilitate the recoil, one could use a spring shock absorber, or an emphasis of some kind in the ground. Such a weapon could be loaded either with small grapeshot, or with a dozen ordinary musket bullets at once. At one time, foreigners who visited pre-Petrine Russia and observed the teachings of the archers, noted the strong destructive effect of their muskets, stemming from the fact that they did not pour bullets at them, but chopped them from a lead rod, and besides, they hammered into the barrel several chopped and cast bullets at the same time! Of course, it happened that their weapons exploded, but the destructive power of the shots was great. So in this case: a volley of pantguns at the advancing dense mass of infantry would have wiped out dozens of people at once, after which the defeat of the enemy could have been completed with a valiant bayonet attack or salvo firing with plutongs. But … either stupid nobility prevented, or people simply did not realize that the pantgana can shoot not only at ducks!
