Corrected entry: When Quatermain gains his first-hand experience with the Phantom men's automatic weapons, he calls them "automatic rifles". The first weapon using this term was the Browning BAR 1918, which saw use in World War I 19 years later. The only automatic weapons used in 1899 were machine guns like the Maxim (which was in the Victorian era used in the British army), so Quatermain should have dubbed these weapons something like "machine guns" or "machine rifles" instead of "automatic rifles".
papajim
9th Nov 2008
Correction: Just because the world called them machine guns there is no reason that Quatermain, a man mostly isolated from the world, could not have called them automatic rifles.
papajim