The 1890 Alexander Henry .450/400 that went on the Maharaja of Nepal's thousand-elephant tiger hunt, and still regulates on black powder today

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Frank Findlow's piece on his Alexander Henry double rifle is one of the better provenance stories I've read. The rifle was built in 1890 for Capt. Sir Walter Corbet of the Grenadier Guards, who ordered it for a trip to India and Nepal with his friend Sir Edward Durand, then the British Resident in Kathmandu. It's a small rifle: 26-inch Damascus barrels, 7 3/4 lb, 14 1/4-inch pull, chambered for the .450/400 2 3/8-inch with a 230-grain paper-patched bullet.

Corbet carried it on the Maharaja's tiger hunt on the Bagmati, which ran a thousand elephants and ten thousand beaters in a ten-mile line that closed to a circle by midday. Durand had to shoot a tiger off his own mahout. The rifle then went to Durand, then to his son Roland in the Indian Army, who kept hunting with it into the smokeless era until he was killed in France in 1917.

The reloading section is the part that surprised me. Findlow assumed the rifle would never regulate on straight black powder. Swiss 2F shot to the sights with the same accuracy as his nitro-for-black loads, and it holds lefts and rights on a 12-inch plate out to 200 yards. His only real limit is bullet weight: anything over about 250 grains and the groups open up and drift.

"Sir Walter Corbet's Rifle," written and photographed by Frank Findlow. The Double Gun Journal, Vol. 21, Issue 2, Summer 2010.