Steampunks tend to be fond of preposterous weaponry with things you can point at people being popular features for costumes. Hopeless, from that perspective, is disappointedly short of things you can shoot people with. 

Part of the problem is the damp. Which is relentless and gets into everything. Gunpowder is notorious for needing to be dry in order to work and so mostly… it doesn’t. 

If you were going to try and make your own gunpowder, you would be further thwarted by the total lack of saltpetre on the island.

Import used to be a thing, back in the days when boats managed to get to the island deliberately, and it wasn’t all accidental shipwrecks. If you’ve wondered about salvaging gunpowder from a shipwreck, let me refer you back to the issue of dampness and the impossibility of drying anything out without using a fire.

This, incidentally is almost certainly how Ignatious Chevin blew up his house a couple of years ago. His grasp of chemistry was not all that it might have been, and he had managed to get a lot of barrels of gunpowder from the beach.

About the only reliable ways of firing weapons is either to get some wood and gut and make a bow, or you have to stuff a demon up your blunderbus (not a euphemism) and keep it angry enough that it will attack someone else when you fire it, but not so angry that it blows up in your face. Firing an apathetic demon who is sick of your shit can lead to results that will amuse onlookers but will do nothing to help you in a fight.