Hello, Junker. Was hoping you might pop up on this one. So now, apart from all the confusion of what is a boarding ax and what is a fire ax, we can now throw in that early fire implements were carried into war! I would imagine that boarding axes from the early era were used as early fire axes and they might have been put to use in modern warfare as well. Sigh-
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Goes back to what I deduced earlier. Unless it is the classic boarding pattern with govt markings, it could be a private purchase maritime boarding piece or it could be fire. No clearer answer has come to me in the last decade I've been studying these...