The smaller gun is very interesting! As it has the "Trophy No. 51" marking on it, could it be a Fil-Am War trophy? Also the "65. CLASS 7" sounds like a museum number or something similar..? Any idea who put those markings there?
And what's your opinion on the swivel yoke, is it original? All other spanish colonial swivels I've seen have had wrought iron yokes.
Good observations as usual from you, Steeley. One reason I went after that one was those markings. That combination of markings, indicates to me it was once in the small, long-gone ordnance museum in the Washington Navy Yard. For example, the "famous" small King howitzer and Brit Coehorn mortar once displayed at the USNA museum had much the same marks, and they are both documented to have come from the WNY ordnance museum in 1925. Many pieces with that set of markings were sold as scrap in the late 1950's when the museum stuff in storage was displaced by new buildings and other reasons. Many of those scrapped pieces (they were in fact sold to a Washington DC scrap dealer located near the WNY) have turned up in private collections, so the scrap dealer realized he could get more for them on the collector's market than from sending them to the smelter. Among the other pieces I've seen that were scrapped at that time were the great pair of mortars from Castillo de San Marcos, Florida. The 10-inch one with single broken dolphin made its way back to St. A. via a DC area militaria dealer, who traded it to the NPS for a 6-pounder bronze gun M1841. The 6" mortar from St. A. is in a private collection. I'd love to find some records of all of those guns, but except for those still in possession of the Navy, the records, if any, apparently did not survive, unless (hopefully!) they are buried in the National Archives somewhere.. Since most all of those pieces are numbered, one would almost have to believe that some type of catalog of them was compiled, if not printed, at some time between when the small museum was formed during the Civil War and when it closed (ca. 1950?) but many years of searching at WNY, Nat. Archives, and USNA have been fruitless.
