Antique of the Month - 19th Century Maritime Flare Pistol

The featured antique this month is another maritime one: a 19th Century maritime flare pistol. This one comes from the US East Coast, but that’s all I know about it (other than it’s 19th Century). Still, it’s undoubtedly similar if not just about identical to flare pistols that would have been carried by Bay View’s lake captains from that period aboard their ships. It’s in perfect working order. I don’t have any flares from that period to go with it. It hangs on a wall in my dining room.

Flare pistols (and accompanying flares) were carried aboard ship because of emergencies at sea, especially rescues. With no shipboard and ship-to-shore communications systems like we have today, the only way the captain of a ship could signal if he was in trouble (or to acknowledge his presence to help others in trouble on the lakes) was to send up a flare.

On schooners, the pistol and flares would have been stored in the ship’s cabin near the entrance leading to and from the ship’s wheel. In larger ships inside the pilot house. Both locations were to permit quick access in times of emergency, with the pistol hung on the bulkhead.

The pistol’s operation was simple, much like loading a shotgun. The operator would merely press the barrel release button whereupon the barrel would open upward on a hinge attached to the stock. Once the barrel was open, exposing the breech, the operator would merely slip into the breech a flare round, then return the barrel back down to its closed and locked position. Then, the hammer would be pulled back, the pistol pointed up towards the sky, and the trigger pulled. This would send the flare flying up into the air about 150 feet, it’s burning glow being easy to spot by another ship’s officer using a spyglass or even lookouts with the naked eye.

Any captain using or seeing a flare at sea would recognize it as a distress signal and a rescue would be undertaken. The color of flares used on the Lakes at the time is unknown