The history of sporting arms made in Britain and intended for travel, mostly to serve the needs of colonial ex-patriots, adventurers or settlers, is interesting because the expansion of European interest in Stanley’s ‘Darkest Africa’ coincided with some seismic shifts in firearms development.
In 1890, the Cape Colony was busy building railways, Cecil Rhodes was its Prime Minister and Paul Kruger was President of the South African Republic. However, much of the interior was still relatively untamed.
European sportsmen hunting in the 1850s and 60s, like Sir Samuel White Baker, favored smooth-bore 4-bore percussion guns firing solid ball for dangerous game. Henry Morton Stanley also carried a single 4-bore when searching for Dr. Livingstone in 1871.
However, with the advent of ‘smokeless’ powders, and rifled breechloaders beginning to dominate the market in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, smaller calibre rifles began to gain universal acceptance, with nitro-express cartridges in .450, .500 and .577 taking over from the old ‘borerifles’. Magazine rifles became more common in the early twentieth century, as did even smaller cartridges, like the .318
