A look at the 7-barreled sea sweeper that was Nock’s volley gun (VIDEO)

Ian with Forgotten Weapons got his hands on a weird but massive musket that was designed to unleash a lot of pain all at once.

An English engineer by the name of James Wilson developed a multi-barreled firearm in the mid-1770s that was a vast improvement on these devices usability in the field. The single weapon had seven .60-caliber barrels, one in the centerline with the other six clustered and brazed around it like a handful of flowers. Muskets of the day often had very long 30 and even 40-inch long barrels, but the volley gun used relatively short 20-inch long tubes and — in a very dramatic fashion — the whole setup went off when triggered all at once, or at least that was the plan.

As Ian explains, while the British Army wasn’t a big fan of the design, the Royal Navy hired the well-known firm of Henry Nock of London to make a few hundred of these volley guns for use at sea. Therefore, they went down in history attached to Nock’s name, rather than Wilson’s, and have since become almost infamous for their, often factually inaccurate, portrayal on the big screen.

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