Antique Naval weapons

Much less naval weapons have survived than military and civilian ones, and in terms of quantity they are significantly inferior to the huge variety of land-based weapons. An important role was played by the fact that the sailing ships of the XVI-XVII centuries. were still quite unreliable in management and often drowned, taking with them the crew along with all its weapons. We owe this to the almost complete absence of naval cutlasses and officers’ swords of the 17th century in museum and private collections. In addition, very often, almost always in the 17th-18th centuries, samples of weapons used in land armies were used as sea edged weapons on ships. Special models of sea edged weapons in the period of the XVII-XVIII centuries. was not created, except that the boarding cleavers had a more powerful and shorter blade, unlike their land counterparts.

However, it is the sea blades that have an amazing attractive power.
WHETHER it was a boarding broadsword with a serrated blade, an officer’s sword with a frayed scabbard, or a dagger with a cracked bone handle – they were all faithful companions of their owners both on the rocking deck of the ship and at the brilliant ball. It was naval weapons that were most often inherited in naval dynasties. A dagger or saber emphasized the special position of a naval officer in society, whose status became especially high at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.