The MM can't claim to have had any influence on Crabtree's choices of subjects. He finished the last of the models quite a few years before the museum bought them.
Back in the early eighties, when I was there, the long-range plans for the development of the museum included a series of detached buildings ("pavilions," somebody called them) along the lake front. I was one of several people who advocated a separate "marine art gallery." It would have included most of the paintings and drawings, some of Anna Huntington's sculptures, the decorative arts objects (scrimshaw, creamware, glassware, etc.), and the Crabtree models. My argument was that they would be better presented as works of art than as a means of teaching maritime history.
That grand scheme, of course, never got beyond the very early planning stage. Right about that time the museum's management committed some really spectacular financial blunders, putting all major programs on hold. I imagine that "marine art gallery" concept has been completely forgotten. But I still think it was a good idea.
To put it bluntly, Crabtree was an extraordinarily gifted craftsman and artisan who didn't really know much about the history of the ship. To be fair, at the time when he was building those models (from the 1920s through the 1940s) nobody else knew a great deal about the subject either. Most of the reference books that modelers of today take for granted hadn't been written. Crabtree's genuine interest in historical accuracy made him unusual among ship modelers. His models deserve to be understood and appreciated in that context. To criticize him for failing to meet the research standards of 2005 makes about as much sense as criticizing the Wright Brothers for failing to invent the jet engine. But those models simply are not good tools for teaching history.
The most glaring example is the one now labeled "Armed Brig, Circa 1810." Crabtree originally called it "Continental Brig Lexington." His research for that model consisted of reading a series of articles by Charles Davis in Mechanix Illustrated magazine. The magazine also published a set of plans, which Crabtree used to build the model. Nowadays they're regarded as the classic example of how lousy, in terms of accuracy, a set of plans can be. Davis was a retired naval architect, a former sailor in latter-day square-riggers, and an extremely competent modeler. But in trying to reconstruct the appearance of a warship from the American Revolution he was hopelessly out of his depth. His "Lexington" contains all sorts of nineteenth-century anachronisms, ranging from the jackstays on the yards to the hinged quarter davits to the carved eagle on the transom. (The eagle was not an American patriotic motif during the Revolution. Congress didn't make it the national bird until quite a few years afterwards.) Furthermore, since the 1920s two contemporary pictures of the real Lexington have surfaced - and they establish that she didn't look anything like that. (She had a raised quarterdeck and a plain, unadorned stem, with no headrails or figurehead.) I was responsible for getting the label changed - to the accompaniment of quite a bit of bad language from various sources. (In retrospect I realize that, maybe because I was more worried than I should have been about the political ramifications of that label change, I made a mistake of my own in it. That model isn't a brig; it's a snow.)
That model demonstrates another aspect of the Crabtree collection that escapes many people. Crabtree - like every other model builder - got better as he got more experienced. If I remember correctly, that "Lexington" is the oldest one in the collection. (He built the Dutch yacht first, but redid it several years later.) Take it out of that gallery, with its bewitching lights and atmosphere, and you'll see a model that's neither better nor worse than the hundreds of other bogus "Lexingtons" that have been built over the past seventy years by Mechanix Illustrated readers (and readers of Davis's book, The Built-Up Ship Model, which uses the same plans). There's really nothing remarkable about it. On the other hand, the Venetian galleass, the French galley, and the English ship-of-the-line were built decades later. They're among the finest models I've ever seen.
It would be nice if the MM could - and would - install a gallery that really did teach the history of shipbuilding. Such a project would be expensive - probably prohibitively so. It would include, in addition to the vessel types I mentioned in my last post, such things as a Viking ship, a medieval cog, an Arab dhow, and a Chinese junk. The total number of models necessary to tell the story properly would be, I imagine, somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred. I really wish the MM would give up on the idea of using the Crabtree models for that purpose. They just can't do it.
With that caveat, the MM has my best wishes in conserving the models and renovating the gallery. I'm sure modern technology will make it an even bigger success with the public than it was before. That public isn't going to include me, though. I've seen enough of those models to last me the rest of this lifetime.