If you had an Irishman in Eritrea paying another to kick his boat out on to the water so he could go hunting with one of these guns, you'd have a man in Punt with a punt paying punts for a punt at his punt
Richard-Osman-level pun
t
Bravo
And if he only needed a tiny bit of distance, he'd do well to watch out for the rare-but-devastating fake punt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_gun?wprov=sfla1
Punt guns were usually custom-designed and varied widely, but could have bore diameters exceeding 2 inches (51 mm) and fire over a pound (≈ 0.45 kg) of shot at a time. A single shot could kill over 50 waterfowl resting on the water's surface. They were too big to hold and the recoil was so large that they had to be mounted directly on punts used for hunting, hence their name. Hunters would manoeuvre their punts quietly into line and range of the flock using poles or oars to avoid startling them. Generally, the gun was fixed to the punt; thus the hunter would manoeuvre the entire boat in order to aim the gun. The guns were sufficiently powerful, and the punts sufficiently small, that firing the gun often propelled the punt backwards several inches or more. To improve efficiency, hunters could work in fleets of up to around ten punts.
Nothing about this looks safe ☠️ but I guess it was really about the load, not about the velocity.
https://youtu.be/bTQQfKxkZpk?si=qmulJVPNfha6JET0
IIRC they banned them in the US because they were too good at "hunting" waterfowl.
Oh wow, that’s like a cannon! I thought you’d have to get your ducks in a row, but nope.
e: I can’t spell
Damm yo
Looks like paper shells loaded with lots of shot were the default ammunition.
I’m going to guess that chamber pressure would be quite low. It seems no more dangerous than firing a normal shotgun really.
