Best Kit For HMS Bounty?

Mr. McKay has no bigger admirer than me.  He's a true master of the vanishing art of drafting.  His isometrics are especially mind-boggling.

I do have one small reservation about that particular book (and it's an extremely small one).  The amount of detail included in the drawings may lead readers to think they're something they aren't.  The reader needs to be aware that much of that detail is based on educated guesswork, rather than hard evidence.  All of the details of the framing, for example, are based on what's known of contemporary practice; so are the details of the rigging.  (And Mr. McKay is among those who think that box on the quarterdeck is a "flag locker."  That's just not likely.)  The same goes for the rigging.  There is virtually no contemporary information specific to the Bounty about the sizes and leads of her rigging lines.  Mr. McKay has provided a rigging plan that makes sense, on the basis if standard contemporary practice.  That's the best that can be done - and he's done a beautiful job of it.  But nobody should be misled into thinking that anybody knows that those diagrams are accurate.

I'm fairly certain that the genuine, contemporary pictorial evidence about what the real Bounty looked like consists of four pieces of drafting cloth:  the two Admiralty draughts, each consisting of two sheets (outboard/inboard profile and body plan on one, deck plans on the other).  So far as I know, nobody has ever found a contemporary painting or sketch of her.  That really isn't surprising.  From the standpoint of her era she was a small, insignificant ship.  She was in Royal Navy hands for only a few months before she sailed for the Pacific - and never came back.  It would have been remarkable if any artist had paid attention to her during that brief period.  (There is, of course, a famous old engraving showing Bligh and his supporters in the launch under the Bounty's stern while the mutineers throw breadfruiit plants at them.  That picture obviously was drawn after the mutiny; the artist couldn't possibly have made reference to the actual ship.)

Beyond the Admiralty draughts the only reliable contemporary information is in the form of written documents.  There is, fortunately, a set of spar dimensions (which is reproduced in Mr. McKay's book).  Some crumbs can be extracted from such documents as Bligh's correspondence with the Navy Board (he asked for "gratten," rather than "boarded" tops - presumably the "open" tops that were standard in the merchant service), the various first-hand accounts of the mutiny, and Bligh's log.  The latter doesn't get consulted often, but it does have a few little tidbits in it.  It mentions, for instance, that, in a storm off Cape Horn, a big sea struck the transom and "stove all to pieces between the cabin windows, where the sham window is."  I think that phrase refers to a "dummy" window painted in the middle of the transom.  That sort of thing was common in small, eighteenth-century ships; a real glass window in that position would only serve to give outsiders a view of the rudder post.  That's why the center window in the stern of my model doesn't have glass - or clear plastic - in it.  (I don't remember whether Mr. McKay caught that point or not.) 

We also know, from the documentary evidence, that she originally had studding sails, but Bligh concluded that the lower ones were "too long, so I cut them and made a royal out of the canvas."  That's why my model has studding sail booms on the lower and topsail yards, and a single royal (which I put on the mainmast because that seemed to make the most sense).  I don't have Mr. McKay's book in front of me; I don't remember whether he caught that detail or not.

None of this is intended as criticism of Mr. McKay.  He explains in the text where the hard evidence stops and his reconstruction starts.  And so far as I know (I haven't looked at the book in a long time) everything he's reconstructed is consistent with the Admiralty draughts.  (That can't be said about many of the other other published plans of the ship.  Most of those draftsmen felt obliged, for some reason, to include details that conflict with the Admiralty draughts.  I see no excuse for that.)  And though the standards of draftsmanship throughout the "Anatomy of the Ship" series are extremely high, my personal opinion is that Mr. McKay is tied with John Roberts and Janos Skulski for the title of the best of them all.  I don't feel competent to sharpen any of those three gentlemen's pencils. 

 

  Zar:   If you wish to do an indepth research for your model of the Bounty, I would highly recommend the Anatomy of the Ship series, "The Armed Transport Bounty," by John Mckay. ISBN 0-87021-280-X        This volume features:

    *Full description of the ship, how she came to be purchased and her naval history.

    *Pictorial section of recent close-up replicas of the vessel.

    * Color guide of possible paint scheme. 

    * More than 300 perspective and 3-view drawnings of every detail of the ship arrangements, hull construction, fittings, masts, sails, rigging, armament and the launch in which Captain Bligh made his epic voyage of over 3,000 miles to safty in Timor. 

      This book might be out of print, so contact Amazon or used book stores.

         Montani semper liberi !  Merry Christmas and happy modeling to all and every one of you.                                                   Crackers

I'm a huge fan of Mr. Horwitz.  I've got his most recent book, which deals with common myths of early American history, high on the list of "books I'm going to read as soon as I can."

His Confederates in the Attic, which deals with the various ways in which Americans (especially Southern ones) think about the American Civil War, is simultaneously one of the most hilarious and frightening books I've ever read.  One anecdote in it that really stuck with me concerns a visit he paid to a tiny, privately-owned Civil War museum in eastern Virginia.  Its prize artifact was a gold-painted statue of Robert E. Lee, made out of automobile parts.  And hanging on one wall was a photo of what Horwitz described as "a remarkably hideous woman."  The museum curator explained that she was "my first wife, Juanita, God bless her.  She was fond of collards, which cause gas, you know.  One day, she ate a whole pot.  I heard the explosion from the field, but by the time I got to the house it was too late.  Nothing left.  Lord, how I miss that woman."

I haven't eaten a collard since I read that.

jtilley wrote:

Zar, you have my eternal envy.  There's nothing like actually seeing the places where historical events took place.  I used to fantasize about being able to make trips like that; nowadays I've accepted that it probably will never happen.

Writer Tony Horwitz did all that travelling for us: in his book Blue Latitudes; Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Latitudes-Boldly-Captain-Before/dp/0312422601/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229522228&sr=8-4 he visits all the places where Captain Cook (and after him others) left his footprints. In an (often) humerous way he tells about his journeys around the globe in search of traces of this honored (and at the same time despised) man.

Highly recommended to anyone interested in Cooks travels, how the places he visited look like today & how present day native islanders look upon the man who 'discovered' them.

 

Welllll....

Actually that story about water rationing (forcing the crew to climb the rigging and get the dipper before they could drink fresh water) was one of the few pieces of outright fiction that Nordoff and Hall added to the novel Mutiny on the Bounty.  There's no record that it actually happened - and the written record of this story is remarkably thorough.  If that story were true, either it would have shown up in the logbook, or it would have come up in one of the courts martial, or one of the numerous private memoirs and journals by the participants would have mentioned it.

Generally speaking, Nordoff and Hall were pretty careful about sticking with history in that book.  They changed a couple of names ("Roger Byam" was based closely on the story of Midshipman Peter Heywood) and invented some details to fill in gaps in the documentary sources (e.g., the personal stories about life in Tahiti), but apparently figured out early on that the true story didn't need much embellishment.  (The other two volumes in the "Bounty Trilogy," Men Against the Sea and Pitcairn's Island, contain a good bit more outright invention - especially the latter, for obvious reasons.) 

The old Charles Laughton/Clark Gable movie actually sticks quite closely to the book.  By modern standards the acting is, well, sort of over-the-top, but the narrative actually isn't bad - until the mutiny itself is over.  The Hollywood scriptwriters then took leave of history by making Bligh the captain of the Pandora.

The second movie, with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard, is, in terms of historical accuracy, a mess.  (I've always thought Trevor Howard was a great actor, and was perfectly capable of doing a good job of playing Bligh, but the script he was given was pretty awful - and he was about twenty years too old for the part.)  The third one, with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson, has a lot to recommend it, but in my opinion it's let down by an extremely disappointing script.  

The writer, Robert Bolt, was a great playwright (author of "A Man for All Seasons," among others), but apparently he did no research whatever before tackling the Bounty story.  He invented several big dramatic incidents and circumstances (Bligh "replacing Fryer with Christian"; Bligh announcing that he'd decided to go around the Horn on the way to Jamaica; Christian being of a higher social caste than Bligh; Bligh's obsession with circumnavigation) that had nothing to do with reality.  And Mr. Bolt apparently made no effort whatever to familiarize himself with the eighteenth-century nautical idiom.  (Christian may have said "Get aboard the boat, sir," or "Get on board the boat, sir," or "Get in the boat, sir," but there's no way any professional seaman would have said "Get on the boat sir.")  On the other hand, the acting in that version was, at least to my taste, the best of the three.  And I liked the fact that the filmmakers turned it into an intimate story of human relationships, rather than a massive "epic," which the first two tried to be.

Good luck on your build and remember to hang that water dipper from the main topgallant yardarm.

John, I do consider myself vey lucky that when I took my trips to Tahiti it was very affordable. No longer, the honeymooning once in a life timers have ruined it. Now one has to be a Rockefeller or a Getty to even think about going there.  People are IMNSHO foolishly spending more for just 3 nights room rate only than what one month trips cost me for every thing!  When I walked the black sands of Pont Venus it really hit me that Cook, Bligh, and Christian just to name a few stood there too. For history though give me England. Another topic for another place.

Zar, you have my eternal envy.  There's nothing like actually seeing the places where historical events took place.  I used to fantasize about being able to make trips like that; nowadays I've accepted that it probably will never happen. 

By all means tackle a Bounty model.  Any of the good kits we've been discussing will get you off to a good start.

John, another informative post. I love the story of the Bounty and it was my inspiration for me having taken as of now 20 trips to the South Pacific. Seven were tot he Society Islands and I have been to Matavai Bay, Point Venus, and One Tree Hill.  I will have to do a Bounty model one day.

She was indeed coppered after her acquisition by the Royal Navy.  (Her original, merchant service name was Bethia.  I think she was a general-purpose cargo carrier; it was Cook's Endeavour that started out as a collier.)  When I built my model that adhesive-backed copper tape wasn't available yet (or at any rate I didn't know about it).  I used .001" copper sheet, which I ordered from Model Shipways (this was before that company got taken over by Model Expo).  I sanded all the "planking" detail off the plastic hull halves, cut the copper into scale-sized sheets, and stuck it to the hull with old-fashioned, solvent-based contact cement.  I had my doubts about how well that stuff would stick, but thirty years later it shows no sign of coming loose.

One point that trips up lots of Bounty modelers:  there are two sets of contemporary plans ("Admiralty draughts") for her.  The first apparently was drawn shortly after the Royal Navy bought her.  It seems to show her in her original, merchant ship configuration, with some proposed "contrivances" added in red and green ink (which, of course, doesn't show up as such in black-and-white reproductions).  The second set apparently shows her after she was modified for her mission of carrying breadfruit plants.  It shows quite a few modifications.  The most notable (apart from the racks for the pots in what was previously the captain's cabin) are the gunports, the stocks for the swivel guns, the capstan on the quarterdeck (a capstan, with a relatively large navy crew to work it, was more efficient than the typical, merchant-style windlass on the forecastle), and an odd-looking, box-shaped structure next to the taffrail.  Some sources claim it's a flag locker; I say it's a "water closet" for the captain, who'd been evicted from his private quarters when they were turned over to the breadfruit plants.

Unfortunately almost every Bounty kit, plastic and wood, seems to have been based on the first set of drawings.  (The one exception that I'm aware of is the Calder/Jotika wood kit, which does show the water closet.  None of the other kits, so far as I know, does.)  The same goes for the various full-size replicas.  In a least one shot in the 1983 movie, Anthony Hopkins is sitting in his cabin in front of an Admiralty draught that's hanging on a bulkhead.  It's the first drawing - the one made before the ship was modified.

We had an interesting discussion of all this in another web forum a few years ago:   http://forum.drydockmodels.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1339&p=8764&hilit=+Some+information+about+the+Bounty#p8764

She's a fascinating little ship; though I confess I got pretty tired of her when I was building that model, I can still get interested in the story.  I confess I tend to think of it as a pretty hackneyed tale.  On the other hand, last month I invited some grad students from the "maritime history and underwater research" program at the university where I work over to the house to watch the movie (and a couple of brief excerpts from the Clark Gable and Marlon Brando versions).  None of those students had ever heard the story of the Bounty; they were all utterly absorbed by it.

I haven't built either, so I couldnt comment on the kits themselves. (The ship is on my very very long to do list though!) If the Revell model doesnt have copper shaething on the lower hull, then I wouldn't panic too much. You can either add it from self adhesive copper tape (available at hardware shops), OR considering the vessel was originally built as a Collier, then I assume the vessel only got coppering when purchased by the RN??

 

Best of luck

 

Will 

There's little room for doubt that the best H.M.S. Bounty kit currently on the market is the wood one from Calder/Jotika.  Unfortunately it's also expensive - extremely expensive - and I wouldn't recommend it to a newcomer.

Of the two plastic kits on the market, I think I'd still pick the Revell one.  It does show its age (it was originally released in 1956, the second sailing ship the company ever produced), and suffers from some errors (most notably, perhaps, the omission of the copper sheathing below the waterline).  But it's a basically decent kit.  For what it's worth, here's a link to some pictures of my model, which is based on it:  http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/JohnTilleyBounty/index.html .

The Airfix kit does have a couple of advantages that might well be significant - especially to a newcomer:  it does have a reasonable representation of the copper sheathing, and it's considerably bigger.  (Bigger, in the world of sailing ships, generally means easier - especially when it comes to the rigging.)  And it does have its share of nice features.  I really like, for instance, the "deck beams" molded on the bottom of the deck, to keep the camber right.  There is the problem of the fore-and-aft slope to the deck that I mentioned in that earlier thread, but I don't imagine that would be terribly difficult to fix.

Good luck.  It's a great hobby.

 

I appreciate both responses, very helpful. 

The Revell kit is fine. It is old and suffers the drawbacks of all plastic sailing ship models, particularly in the area of rigging but can be built into a reasonable model with some scratchbuilding. If you have basic skills, it is not too hard.

I would suggest getting a copy of John McKays book, The Armed Transport Bounty from the Anatomy of The Ship series. A used copy can be found for around $20 at www.addall.com

It will provide you with more detail information than you could ever incorporate.

Good luck with your project.

 

I have a Revell kit of the bounty and it looks to be pretty good. i picked it up in the discount bin for $10. I built the Airfix Wasa earlier this year and there realy wasn't much detail to the build. Now the painting on the other hand is a different story. in my opinion i would go with the Revell Bounty.

Also after a bit of digging I found something that I remebered reading that was posted by Prof. tilley a while ago regarding the HMS Bounty and the differences between the two. He wrote:

"The Airfix Bounty got left off that list deliberately.  It dates from the very late seventies, when Airfix was having one of its close encounters with the bankruptcy courts, and it represented a step backward by comparison with most of the firm's earlier sailing ship kits.  It's riddled with inaccuracies, some of them downright ridiculous.  For starters, the designers sited the hawseholes too low in the bow - and, in order to get them above the maindeck (so the anchor cables could pass through them to the windlass), mounted the whole deck assembly on a pronounced downward, forward slope that makes the whole model look silly.  The ancient Revell kit actually looks more like the real ship.  (To be fair, the Revell designers had problems with the Bounty's hawseholes too.  Revell omitted them altogether, and advised the modeler to tie the anchors to each other with a piece of thread looped over the knee of the head.  That, I must admit, looks just as absurd as Airfix's solution to that particular problem.)"

Here's the whole thread in case your interested.
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