uss frolick

A scuttle opening that large on one side of the deck, but not on the other, and so close to a hatch corner, just seems structurally wrong. Assuming that the helmsman is right handed, then what shallow round object, otherwise in need of protective covering, might he need to grab quickly from a handy locker with his left hand, but not take his right hand from the helm?

That makes sense. Although a stretched 20-gun Cruiser would have looked really cool ...

I was re-reading William James's "Naval Occurances ..." (1817) today, and he mentions on page 351 in his discussion of the Peacock/Epervier and Wasp/Reindeer/Avon fights, that one Cruiser Brig, HMS Primrose, was built 8 feet longer than the rest of her class. But all modern references for Primrose's design describe her as a standard Cruiser. But James was usually spot on with his technical analysis, albeit a tad Ameriphobic in his conclusions. I wonder if they just enlarged her amidships and gave her an extra port per side?

The book is in French - a language that I do not speak - but it is one of the most informative books in my library due to the excellent large color photographs. I bought Volume One, ten years ago, and it is masterful in its own right. But this has so many models that are historically important to me that I feel I must share my thoughts. I will mention some, but not all of Volume 2's many vessels. L'Egyptienne, 1798, Frigate de 24. Here is a beautiful, powerful, but forgotten ship. She was captured intact after the fall of Alexandria Egypt in 1801. The model is very accurate, but there are also British Admiralty drafts of her available. She is less known than her famous sister frigate La Forte, of 1794. She was noteworthy for having been part of a small French frigate squadron that defeated a more powerful British squadron in the Indian Ocean, whose ranks included a 74 gun ship. Forte was later taken in an epic bloody nighttime battle against the 18-pounder frigate, HMS La Sybille. What makes these two ships so important? They were about 170 feet long between perpendiculars, and both carried batteries of thirty long 24 pounders on their main deck. They were as powerful as, and they look very much like, the Frigate Constitution and her sisters. But they were afloat and famous years before plans for the Yankees were even drawn up, let alone launched. Were they an influence on the American designers? They must have been ... The Egyptienne model is done admiralty style, in unpainted wood at 1:36 scale, and it is very complete. It is rigged, and there is a full interior, viewable through removable sections of planked hull, that reveal cables, casks, ballast, etc stacked beneath. The carvings are shown on the stern, but the figure head was either removed or it fell off. It is shown on the Admiralty draught, though. Every little deck detail and obscure piece of rigging is shown. She has ten windows across her stern, the out four being fakes. Historical note: There were two other french 24 pounder frigates built at the same time of a radical design: La Resistance and La Vengeance. The latter frigate fought the Constellation in 1800, after exchanging her long 24's out for long 18's. I have the NMM draught of La Resistance, later HMS Fisgard. Her figurehead is of a young topless woman with no arms - hardly the symbol of resistance! La Renommee, 1806, Frigate de 18. This model was the reason I bought the book. She was captured off the Ilse de France in 1811 and taken into the Royal Navy as HMS Java. She was the very ship that fought the Constitution. There are thirty photos of her. Anyone wanting to build a model of either of the Connies' big foes are in for a disappointment. Admiralty draughts of neither the Guerriere nor the Java survive. You would have to reconstruct them from other plans of similar French prizes in the Royal Navy. Boudroit claims that Renommee was a standard Joel Sane' designed 18 pounder frigate. I've seen enough plans of Sane frigates through the years to know that this is not true. This model show several features not seen in other Sane ships. Her stern is unusually upright, lacking that extreme Sane rake. Her stem post is oddly shaped, and although it is hard to tell from the photographs, she may have an old fashioned, beak-head bulkhead stem, as did La Clorlinde, with whom she was sailing when captured. I believe that she was a Forfait designed frigate. I have found an Admiralty draught of another frigate, built in the same city and at about the same time, that looks a lot like this model. La Renommee has eight windows across her stern, the outermost pair being fakes. Sound familiar? But all Sane's frigates had an odd number of windows. This 1:48 model is rigged, and has much minute deck detail. She even has a windsail rigged to bring fresh air below decks. Dr. Herbert. You mentioned that you have this book. Does Renommee looks as though she has a beak-head bulkhead to you? La Belle Poule, 1822: La Belle Poule is a massive, 60-gun spar decked 30-pounder frigate. She is of the size and force as that of the 44-gun American Potomac/Columbia/Raritan Class of super-frigate. Of the American ships, there is very little in detail that survives from the interwar period, other than just the lines decks and profile plans. On the 1:40 scale model of La Belle Poule, everything is shown, from deck houses to ships boats to special cones and baskets designed to hold coiled rigging. There are scale scuttle butts, match tubs, horse blocks, and all brass binnacles. I cannot overstate the importance of this and other french models in this regard. There is AUTHENTIC CONTEMPORARY detail here, that is not available elsewhere on British models or plans. It is not just French Navy detail. I believe these small items of sailing gear to have been mostly universal by this point. I've seen that wooden rigging basket in a real photo of an 1860s American sail frigate's spar deck. Her gun ports are two piece hinged affairs, just like Connie has now. This was a transitional period, where iron fittings were just being introduced. The brass skylight gratings and brass companionway cover frames are beautifully done and apply to ships of other nations. According to this model, the old French practice of rigging her carronade breechings in a continuos loop that ran outboard in a trough, had been discontinued for the standard English breeching. The Brig Cygne (the Swan), also shown in this book, shows the old method. It was originally designed to keep even tension on the breech no matter which angle the gun was traversed. But it probably proved vulnerable and impossible to repair during an action. All the above statements apply to the double decked, spar-decked La Tage, rated 100 guns, which, for all practical purposes, could be the North Carolina or the Ohio or the Vermont, American 74's. La Tage is a 1: 40 scale rigged, waterline model with a flotilla of ships boats displayed floating along side her. La Tage and her capital class have an unusual feature. The forward bow is double planked! The doubling starts before the fore mast, extending forward, and bends over the rabbit of the stem post and continues all the way across the stem. The white painted gun-deck stripes also continue across the entire stem post. I guess this was done to protect the planks butt heads mortised into the stem post, but that's one hell of a corner to have to bend planks into! Ships carvings, flag lockers, hammock netting decorative batten patterns are there in abundance. La Tage has a light weight metal stern gallery (Which the USS Vermont got in her later years) that has zig-zagged deck planking! The 120 gun four-decker La Valmey is more of the same. Imagine, if you will, the USS Pennsylvania. There are many smaller vessels too. An all of them are completely rigged to the finest detail. If you could go back in time with a color film camera, and walk the decks of French Naval vessels, I doubt you could record as much information as there is presented in this book. These two volumes are destined to be future, rare classics. At $139 shipped each, they are well worth it.

I just received my online Ancre order, "Musee de la Marine: Modeles Historiques, Tome 2", two weeks after placing it with no problems. Review to come.

Ordered it through Ancre! There goes this month's grog budget ...

Wow! The 44-gun L'Egyptienne! Sister frigate to the famed raider La Forte with 30 24-pounders on her main deck. The French Constitution. And La Renomme of 1806 !!!!!!!!! This is HMS Java, of whom no plans survive at the NMM. I Thanks, Wayne!

Volume One by Ancre is fantastic, but it is expensive. What ship models are photographed in the second volume? I am specifically interested in the frigates and the corvettes. Thank You.

I would imagine that there were different ways to rig the netting, depending upon the type of expected attack: whether by an enemy frigate of by a flotilla of armed enemy boats.

There is an 1802 watercolour of the flush-decked Ship Jason of Boston by Antoine Roux showing her with her boarding nettings rigged. They appear to be secured somehow to the outer, lower level of the hammock cranes. They do not appear to extend down far enough to cover over the gun ports. Midshipman James Fenimore Cooper described the boarding nettings fitted to the Constellation in 1813: "The boarding nettings were made of twenty-one thread ratlin stuff, that had been boiled in half made pitch, which rendered it so hard as almost to defy the knife. To give greater security, nail rods and small chains were secured to the netting, in lines about three feet apart. Instead of tricing to the rigging, this netting was spread outboard, towards the yard arms, rising about twenty five feet above the deck. To the outer rope, or ridge line of the netting, were secured pieces of kentledge, with the idea that by cutting the tricing lines when the enemy should get along side, his boats and men might be caught beneath, by the fall of the weights." See, "Boarders Away with Steel, Volume 1, Edged Weapons and Pole Arms", by William Gilkerson, Andrew Mobray Publishing, page 53.

If you play the Movie 'Titanic' backwards, it's about a magic ship that saves people ...

Thanks for the book review, Joss. I will still pick one up, should I ever find one. I will definitely buy your Amphion book! (Hint, hint.)

Mr. Matrim, I wonder if you could briefly review the "The Frigate Amphion" book by Michael Feather, and please let me know where a hard copy may be found!

Let me first say that I love this frigate and I love your work! The inboard profile plan of Leander, 50, 1813, shows the spar deck ports mostly above the gun deck ports. Leander was a fir built ship. (Sadly the lines drawings have been lost, but the deck plans and frame plans survive.) The model of a fir-built (with a square tuck stern) 50-gun frigate, thought to be possibly Leander, but minus the gangway ports, in The Science Museum has the same set up. There is a detailed painting of the USS Constellation, circa 1830, by one of the better Italian marine artists of the day, showing all her spar-deck ports placed exactly above her gun deck ports. In my long suffering thread on the Essex's stern, (Page 1, Post # 8) I quote a 1807 letter written by American Naval Constructor Josiah Fox on the subject of upper deck port placement that may be of interest here. Also, I was wondering what you thought of the "Later Amphion" revised sheer draught, dated February 1, 1800, that shows a complete barricading over of the forecastle ports of her sister-ships Aeolus and Medusa. Would they have done the same with the Amphion? (See Robert Gardiner, The Heavy Frigate, Conway, page 48-9.)

In honor of the Siren's fateful final cruise, you could say that you "Met the Medway", or "Pulled a Parker", after the British 74 that captured her, or her late ailing captain who died at sea.

Anyone remember the scene in "The Far Side of the World" where JA and SM fall overboard through Surprise's cabin windows undetected one night, and just when they think that things could not get worse, they are rescued by militant, lesbian, native women escaping their home island, who decorated their raft with dried severed male members tacked to the sides? I don't think that happened to Lord Cochrane. Anyway, this is evidence that Mr. O'Brien occasionally smoked wacky-weed.

That is a great letter! I love these little snippets of every day life back in the Napoleonic days. Not many survive. I like how they flogged the perpetrator. The Lively had a great history, aside from PO'B's, and her plans are very well documented, including even her carvings. Is she a modeling project with you? She was a handsome ship and, of course, was a sister to the famed HMS/USS Macedonian. You should print the letter here in its entirety for all of us to savor!

Thanks!

David, Where did you find that lovely bit of early history of the Avon? When I was researching my Blakeley/Wasp book back in the pre-internet days, I came across several newspaper editors crowing loudly about the Avon's defeat. They kept harping back to an incident in or about 1807, when the Avon supposedly did something really obnoxious off the Chesapeake Bay. They had hoped that the Avon had the same captain on board her when she met the Wasp! But they never recapped Avon's misdeeds. I never learnt, until now, exactly what naughty thing she had done. Stealing the French Admiral's dispatches, forsooth. Bad Avon! Bad! Thanks!

You have chosen one of the most complex parts of a ship to build. The very first thing you must do, is research how the actual shipbuilders assembled Leopard's stern and quarter galleries, and then try to replicate their techniques in a smaller scale.

Note: The ward room chairs supplied to the Frigate Essex, fitted out in Salem, Mass, in 1799, were described as "Windsor-backed chairs". They were lightweight, but very strong. I suspect that this was a standard, so the Enterprise's six chairs listed above were certainly Windsors too.

In researching my biography of Captain Johnston Blakeley, USN, 1781-1814 - Shameless plug: "Blakeley and the Wasp: The Cruise of 1814", Stephen W. H. Duffy, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2001, I came across this little gem. The following enclosure was in a letter dated March 27, 1811 from the Washington Yard Commander, Captain Thomas Tingey, to the Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton, Washington Navy Yard: "Sir, I have the honor to enclose a requisition, of Lieut. J. Blakeley [Commander] of Cabin Furniture of the [uSS] Enterprize. In submitting this indent for your consideration, I feel it is my duty to state that, when this vessel was fitted from the Yard in 1808, she was furnished with silver table spoons, tea spoons, and other usual plate, with chairs, table clothes, and all the customary articles for the cabin: Not one single material of which was returned with her." I consider it also incumbent to inform you, that all the vessels equipped from this yard have been furnished with bosun's calls, of silver, very few of which have ever been returned." [Note: Lieut. Johnston Blakeley, was just then assuming command of the newly repaired Enterprise. Blakeley would immediately set about re-rigging her as a brig.] "One dozen dishes Ditto Soup Plates Ditto shallow plates Ditto small plates Ditton tureens - one of tin 2 bowels 2 sugar dishes 1 dozen wine glasses 1 dozen tumblers 2 quart decanters 2 pint decanters 2 salt cellars 1 looking glass 2 tea kettles 2 sugar canisters 1 tea tray 2 waiters 12 table spoons 12 tea spoons 6 iron table spoons 1 set casters 1 soup ladle 1 dozen large knives 1 dozen large forks 1 dozen small knives 1 dozen small forks 12 table clothes 2 ditto covers 12 towels 2 brooms 2 candel sticks 2 pair steel snuffers 1 cork screw 6 chairs 1 coffee mill 1 pepper mill 2 brass cocks 2 brass canisters 1 mattress and [1]pillow. The above is a list of the furniture wanted for the use of the US schooner Enterprize, washington, 25th March, 1811, J. Blakeley approved and submitted." Blakeley was, or course, to go on to glory in the second corvette named the USS Wasp. But he found it very difficult to procure these items for his Wasp in 1813 using, as he stated, this very list, due to wartime shortages in Newburyport, Mass, and Portsmouth, NH. But by this time, the stressed Navy Department was not so picky. The official indent, dated Baltimore, 1813, for use in all the six new corvettes then building [Wasp, Frolick, Peacock, Erie, Ontario and Argus] contained but one word: "discretionary".

Many of us have been waiting for this new, detailed photo book about the Annapolis Collection of admiralty models for twenty years now. It was to be called "Colonel Rogers Fleet/Navy", or something similar, if I recall correctly . A post on the pre-crash board implied that it finally would see the light of day very soon. Is there any recent news?

If you're going to all the trouble of scratch building a model, then why not take the extra step of building a contemporary sloop of war other than the recently, much modeled Siren? You could use her same plans and the instructions as a guide toward building, say, the 18 gun brig USS Argus, a sloop with a tremendous history. Her plans, redrawn by Howard Chapelle for his 'History of the American sailing Navy' are available for little more than the cost of the copying. Argus would require no more material than the Siren. There are many flushed deck American ship and brig rigged sloops of war, built in 1813 of only slightly larger dimensions, that rarely ever see the modelers bench: Wasp I, Hornet, Wasp II, Peacock, Frolick, Erie, Ontario, and the Argus II. Their draughts are also available from the Smithsonian. Then there are the similarly sized British Cruiser Class sloops that they fought: HMS Frolick, HMS Peacock, HMS Pelican, HMS Reindeer, HMS Avon, HMS (later USS) Epervier and the HMS Pelican. How about the mighty little 450 ton 20-gun, flushed-decked ship sloop HMS Levant, that fought the USS Constitution? And there are so many more beautiful and larger American sloops build after the war ... All these sloops deserve to be built. Don't limit yourself. If you're going to spent many months, if not years, of your life scratch building a ship, why not make her unique and special?

A real problem in having a model kit in such an odd scale, 5/32", is that you will have a hard time finding replacement twelve and six-pounder cannon in 1:76 scale if the kit guns are done poorly, which apparently they are. Had MS designed the Essex kit in the more common 1:64 scale, the same scale as Portia Takakjian's classic Essex plans and booklet, then you could use a commercial set of 1:64 Essex cannon already available.