One FReeper, who gave me a very good response when I asked why pilgrims starved when I figured there were many animals around, said the guns they had were not rifles and not good for hunting.
Comments?
I don’t know if he was right or wrong on that point, but he made many other valid ones, so i am not knocking him.
According to the article, this gun was rifled.
IIRC: Rifles were rare. Most armies used matchlock muskets back in the 17th century. Didn’t need a lot of accuracy when firing into a wall of men. Pistols were wheelock, but smoothbore.
Hunters on the other hand, did have some rifles.
They first tried to live as a "socialist" collective and they almost starved the whole colony.
Smoothbores can be used very effectively for hunting but you have to know something about hunting to do so. The Pilgrims were religious separatists from the urban areas of England, they were ill prepared for a subsistence lifestyle in the new world. Farmers and their families would have likely had an easier time of it. The Pilgrims knew little of farming and essentially nothing about hunting, plus as mentioned they had ideas of operating as some sort of socialist commune and we all know how that inevitably works.
To the poster that asked about longbows vs. firearms, even the most primitive firearm was a monumental leap over the longbow. English longbows were effective at the time but firearms quickly displaced them. Longbows take a lifetime of training to employ effectively while a conscript soldier can quickly be trained to use a musket. Firearms vastly multiplied the lethality of armies at the time. Never take a knife to a gunfight as they say.
The indigenous peoples had no guns. They managed.
They arrived in November and likely did not bring adequate food supplies with them for the winter.