A 19th century naval boarding ax

[CutlassCollector]

Hi Mark,

It is a great axe but very hard to positively identify for all those reasons already expressed by Jim and others.
The evolutionary link to fire axes is well known. Early French personal fire axes were almost exact copies of their naval cousins - just smaller. There are Gilpin fire axes identical to the mid 19th century boarding axe that are marked to some of the first British fire brigades created earlier in the century.

Most surviving boarding axe examples tend to be military. I guess this is because they may have been returned to stores for re-use when a ship was scrapped or sold and also being well marked they may have been more likely to have drawn a collectors eye in later years.
But Mark is right we know much less about private purchase axes, they are much harder to identify and much rarer. Ship owners would have purchased spike axes made locally that could do the job or they may well have been supplied by the shipyard as part of the equipment. This would have included axes following military patterns but unmarked.

I can't be sure either way but I would tend to agree with Bruno in that it is probably a later axe.

Unlike langets that are forged as part of the head, separate langets need a way to stop the shaft pulling up or down through the eye. Usually a step in the wood underneath and lugs over the top as in French and Scandinavian axes do the job.

It is hard to tell from pictures alone but the lugs on top are embedded in the head. A recesses need to be cut out in the head to accept the lugs - easy to do with machine tools a lot harder using hand tools. If they were just hammered over as opposed to into a recess it would be too weak.
If taking the trouble of making the top flush then there was probably a reason. Is there any sign of a way that a cap was fixed over the eye?

Jim sums it up well...:

Without specific markings or provenance we cannot unequivocably say this axe is one or the other, but safely that it is distinctly of a form that was used in both an axe on vessels as well as in fire fighting ashore.

CC