Scott - In order to comment on this alleged Crabtree model I'd need to know what book the picture is in. The Crabtree collection at the Mariners' Museum doesn't contain a model of the
Royal Louis. The closest thing to it is an English 50-gun ship from the reign of James II. That model doesn't have any masts or rigging. The only French ship by Crabtree in the MM is a seventeenth-century galley.
Crabtree finished his last model shortly after World War II, and sold the whole collection to the Mariners' Museum in, if my memory is correct, 1948 or 1949. That, of course, was before Heller - or anybody else - started manufacturing plastic model kits. I've done minor conservation work on all the Crabtree models that are at the MM. None of them has any plastic in it.
He did start one more model - a Swedish royal yacht. Nobody at the museum ever saw it; by that time the Crabtrees were on bad terms with the institution, and he was trying to keep the model a secret. So far as I know he never finished it. Crabtree apparently built some ship models for Hollywood in the thirties and forties (including some for the movie "That Hamilton Woman"), but I've never seen any evidence that any of them survive.
The visitor center of the National Park Service site at Jamestown has models of the
Susan Constant, Godspeed, and
Discovery that are labeled as having been built by Crabtree. I've never found out anything about those models. They look distinctly different from the ones in the MM; the Jamestown models have solid hulls. But they most emphatically aren't plastic. I don't think Crabtree ever did anything with plastic - and he scorned kits of all sorts.
Two books specifically about the Crabtree models have been published. The first has a text by Crabtree himself, and was published in the late forties. The photographs, all (except the one on the cover) in black and white, were taken by the museum's photographer of that period, Bill Radcliffe. (I hope I'm not mis-remembering his name.) The second book was published in either 1982 or 1983, with the photographs (all in color this time) by Ray Foster and the text by me. A slightly revised version of that second book (the revision mainly consisting of adding about a dozen typographical errors) was printed in about 1990. Unless the museum has published something since then, those are the only "official" publications about the Crabtree models.
I don't know what that picture in that book is, but if it claims to show a model of a French ship-of-the-line built by August Crabtree I'm 99.9 percent sure it's in error.
Heller's designers showed a great deal of ingenuity, and a considerable amount of artistic skill, in recycling all those hulls and other pieces. The problem was that they apparently knew virtually nothing about ships. Only a handful of the Heller sailing ship kits meet any reasonable definition of the term "scale model." In later years Heller got serious; its
Victory and
La Reale are surely among the best plastic kits ever. But most of the others are hard to take seriously.
It's interesting to speculate on how the airplane modeling community would react to similar stunts on its turf. Suppose a company slapped a couple of extra engines on a B-25 and called it an Avro Lancaster.
A couple of years ago Trumpeter issued a 1/32 F4F Wildcat whose fuselage contours were off by something in the neighborhood of half an inch. The modeling community set up an ear-splitting howl, and Squadron Mail Order refused to sell the kit until the manufacturer revised the molds - which Trumpeter thereupon did. But when a manufacturer produces a sailing ship kit that bears no resemblance to anything that ever floated, or recycles an eighteenth- century hull to make a "scale model" of a seventeenth-century ship, we're supposed to say, "well, that's nice." I'm sorry, but I can't regard such products as anything other than deceptively-advertised, overpriced junk.
The point is probably moot for all practical purposes, though. Few if any of those old Heller kits are still on the market, and the pipeline of plastic sailing ship kits has just about dried up. I miss them. The best of them showed the plastic kit industry at its very finest.