It's called a "punt" gun. Used for commercial duck hunting back at the "turn of the century," when it was legal. Even had a boat call a punt boat and a special oar with the end looking like two opposing duck bills. You "rowed" in a pumping motion. There's a picture of a boat with seven of them mounted (obviously owned by a Cajun).
A
punt gun is a type of extremely large
shotgun used in the 19th and early 20th centuries for shooting large numbers of
waterfowl for commercial harvesting operations and private sport. Punt guns were usually custom-designed and so 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.
[1] A single shot could kill over 50 waterfowl resting on the water's surface. They were too big to hold and the recoil so large that they were mounted directly on the
punts used for hunting, hence their name. Hunters would maneuver 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 maneuver the entire boat in order to aim the gun. The guns were sufficiently powerful, and the punts themselves 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.
In the United States, this practice depleted stocks of wild
waterfowl and by the 1860s most states had banned the practice. The
Lacey Act of 1900 banned the transport of wild game across state lines, and the practice of market hunting was outlawed by a series of federal laws in 1918. In the
United Kingdom, a 1995 survey showed fewer than 50 active punt guns still in use. UK law limits punt guns to a bore diameter of 1.75 inches (44 mm) (1 1/8 pounder).
01-11-2012, 08:08 AM
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