Need a little help from the sailing ship guru's

Hi -

The Bonhomme Richard was a French East Indiaman, originally named Le Duc de Duras. Over the past two hundred years ship modelers and other enthusiasts have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what she looked like. Nobody has ever discovered a set of contemporary plans, and the few contemporary paintings are so vague as to be useless.

The late Howard I. Chapelle, long-time curator of maritime and naval history at the Smithsonian, once wrote an article for the Nautical Research Journal called "Ship Models That Should Not Be Built." He put the Bonhomme Richard close to the head of the list. Chapelle's argument was that, since the reliable information is so meager, it's just not possible to build a respectable scale model of this ship.

For the opposing viewpoint, take a look at the works of Jean Boudriot. He's a French maritime historian who's produced a series of magnificently-illustrated books on vessels the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French navy. One of them deals with the Bonhomme Richard, which Boudriot has meticulously reconstructed on the basis of what contemporary information about French East Indiamen he was able to locate. (He found, for instance, the hull lines of an Indiaman from the same date, built in the same yard.) I suspect they're out of print, but you might find used copies through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or bookfinder.com. Be warned: they're expensive. If you live within convenient distance of a good library, you might be able to get them through interlibrary loan. I'm pretty sure the library at East Carolina University, where I work, has a copy of at least one of them - and participates in the interlibrary loan service.

I remember both the Pyro and Aurora kits pretty clearly. I'm afraid neither of them came close to meeting any reasonable definition of the term "scale model." The Pyro one was about six inches long, and the Aurora one had injection-molded "sails" (about six scale inches thick) molded integrally with the yards.

Hope this helps a little - and isn't too discouraging.

I don't think that Revell ever released a model of JPJ's ship. (The link ot the ebay auction is not for a Revell or Lindberg kit.)

There are two kits of the BHR that I know of. Pyro had a kit in the late 1960s, one of the series of small period ships. The model was about 6-8 inches long, and fairly simple, IIRC. Lindberg now has the Pyro molds, and released at least some of the old Pyro kits in the last 10 years.

Aurora had a big BHR kit-- it was probably 2+ feet in length. It came in the same size box as the USS Hartford and the WHaling SHip Wanderer. (I built the Hartford and Wanderer as a teen- a friend had the BHR.)

I expect that the Aurora kit will have lots of little details wrong-- things such as the stropping on the blocks, the type of deadeyes used, etc.

The Aurora kit is pretty rare, and the couple I've seen on Ebay in the last few years have sold for well over $100 (US).

There might be other little models of the BHR, such as the "in the bottle" series, but their accuracy will be highly suspect.

HTH,

-Bill

thanks for the info, I am aware of size of most of them I was looking for a rather large one an thought that Revell had put it our but wasn't sure as I couldn't find any reference on it. You wouldn't happen to know the scale of the Revell kit by chance??

Rob G.

From what I can gather, the Bon Homme Richard was,
what was known at the time, an "East Indiaman" class of ship.
Named for their service to the "East India Company"

[edit]
Here's an informative link.
http://www.globalindex.com/clippers/museum/history.htm

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/site/request/setTemplate:singlecontent/contentTypeA/conMuseumAsset/contentId/2910

Hi,

Yes it was released by Revell as well as Lindberg. Here is one I found on ebay

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3163227069&category=4248

You usually find 1-2 a month. The model above is rather small.