Owner's comments:"I picked this one up a few years ago. I don’t know much about it, except it was so unique I wanted to study it “in person”. The previous owner cleaned it up just a little by waxing the stock and replacing a screw or two. The lock appears to come from a Portuguese Baker Rifle. This is no buttplate. The barrel is 45 1/4 inches long and 70 caliber. The trigger guard is a wonderful iron Tennessee-style guard. The wood has wormholes, so I suspect it is of European origin".
---------------"No cheek rest".
Member question:"A quick question. Would you explain what you mean by "The wood has wormholes, so I suspect it is of European origin."? I'm not sure why wormholes mean European".
Owner's Reply:"Wormy wood is often a sign of European origin. Antique European wood items are full of wormholes. Antique furniture we brought back from Germany had to be treated for worms and other critters. I was told time and time again that wormy wood is a sign of European origin. I suspect this stock originated in Europe because of the wormholes.
"Below is copied from an article on the European worm infestation of 18th century Europe:
"Environmental catastrophe, economic collapse and a pandemic – prominent in today’s public discourse, but also crises that were wreaking havoc in 18th century Europe. On that occasion, the shipworm, a sea-living mollusk that scavenges floating and submerged wood, was to blame. Although relatively harmless today, at that time the creature was responsible for one of the world’s largest environmental, political and economic disasters. “It is still unclear why the shipworm population exploded in the 1730s, but these mollusks destroyed nearly all wooden structures along the North Sea coast in a few years,” says Michael-W. Serruys, principal investigator on the EU's SHIPWORM project, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions individual fellow and historian studying the shipworms’ impact on western Europe. “As the shipworms destroyed the wooden dikes that prevented the Low Countries from flooding, the region faced an ecological disaster.”
