Thanks for the enlightening input. Glad that some of my uneducated guessings were somehow close from reality. As for 'with or without' a tiller, Bill says they found none; this doesn't exclude there has been one, or some kind of it ... just saying.
As for Cortez, we know that according to his letters (Cartas de Relacion) to the King, he mentions that he arrived with sixteen cannons of diferents sizes and four small naval cannons, called falconetes. Yet in is fourth letter (1524) he wrote that he was smelting bronze cannons from scratch in Tenoctitlan and Tlaxcala. So it is plausible Bill's assumption that the gun being discussed could has its origins in such foundries, as Cortez initial arsenal didn't include such typology
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