Queen Ann's Revenge

Lindberg makes a model of Blackbeard's ship (which was the Queen Anne's Revenge, right?), but I have my doubts to its accuracy.  The model has 3 masts, whereas the Queen Anne's Revenge only had 2 from the images I have seen.  If I had to make a bet, it is problably another German Frigate i.e. Captain Kidd's ship (actually the Wappen von Hapsburg)

Yes, the Quenn Ann's Revenge was Blackbeards flag ship. I also have my doubts about the Lindberg kit.

The university where I work has been closely involved with the investigation of the wreck that's thought to be the Queen Anne's Revenge, off Beaufort Inlet.  I haven't taken part in the project or even followed it particularly closely, but I do know a little about it.

The first point that needs to be emphasized is that the wreck has not been positively identified.  It may be the Queen Anne's Revenge; it's even reasonable to assert that it likely is.  But none of the artifacts found so far provides firm, positive identification.  A couple of my colleagues got into some hot water a few months back for emphasizing that point in print.  (The state is relying on private donations to keep the archaeological work going, and it's a big tourist attraction.  In this neck of the woods, the name "Blackbeard" is a guaranteed money raiser.  If this ship turned out to be something else, public support undoubtedly would fall off dramatically.)

So far the divers have brought up some fascinating stuff, most notably some guns.  The process of conserving all those artifacts and getting them ready for public exhibition will take months or, in some cases, years.  Unfortunately there's no guarantee that it will ever be possible to identify the ship with certainty.

Here's the link to the project's web page:  http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/qar/

To my knowledge, nobody has yet undertaken to draw a set of detailed plans of the ship the archaeologists are studying.  That will be a major project.  Not a lot of the hull is left, and taking measurements of it isn't easy.  I suspect the state will eventually publish a massive site report, including drawings, but that's a long way in the future.  And I'm not at all sure that there's enough down there to give us more than a sketchy impression of what the ship looked like.

A couple of folks have made nice scratchbuilt models based on the limited evidence available so far.  And the Raleigh News and Observer has commissioned a full-color poster featuring a cutaway drawing of the ship.  It's a nice, intelligently-rendered picture - though I suspect some doubts about it will emerge as more work is done on the site.  (I tried to find it on the newspaper's website; no luck.)

The word "pirate" seems to fascinate people for some reason, and it's driven ship model kit manufacturers to some pretty extravagant - and deceptive - marketing stunts.  The Lindberg "Jolly Roger" is a reissue of a pretty nice kit from the 1960s that represented the French frigate La Flore, and the "Captain Kidd Pirate Ship" is a reissue of the German warship Wappen von Hamburg.  Both were excellent kits for their time, and hold up pretty well by today's standards - but neither of them has anything whatsoever to do with piracy.  I think I may have seen a Lindberg box with the name "Blackbeard" on it; as I recall, the picture pretty clearly was of the seventeenth-century English warship Sovereign of the Seas.  If so, it probably was one of the many Lindberg re-boxing of old Pyro kits.  Calling the Sovereign of the Seas a "pirate ship" is even more ridiculous.

The modeler wanting to build a realistic replica of a genuine, honest-to-goodness pirate ship is not well served by the plastic (or wood) kit industry.  Part of that has to do with the fact that, in reality, most vessels operated by pirates weren't particularly interesting or romantic in appearance.  Maybe - maybe - the public interest in the Queen Anne's Revenge will result in a kit some day.  But at this point I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.

Thanks for all of the info jtilley, it helps a great deal. I have done some more research and from what I can find the Queen Ann's Revenge was originally named the Concorde. It was a French slave trader operating in the Carribean. It was 90' feet long, around 25' wide with three masts and capable of carrying 200tons of cargo. After it was seized by Blackbeard it carried around 40 large cannons. Is there a kit out there close to this? 

I'm not aware of any plastic kit that even remotely meets that description.  One of the many Heller sailing ships might be capable of being modified, though; I can't claim to be familiar with all of them.

I haven't done much reading about this story (frankly, in this part of the country one either becomes a Blackbeard enthusiast or gets thoroughly sick of him), but I have to express some doubt about those numbers.  A ship with a length of 90 feet and 40 large guns would be mighty unusual - and unstable.  (I guess that depends on how one defines a "large" gun, though.)  And 40 guns would be a huge number for a pirate vessel.  It takes quite a few men to handle a full-sized cannon; most pirate crews were relatively small.  (They had to be paid out of the proceeds from the voyage - with enough left over to make the enterprise profitable for the captain and any investors.) 

The literature about Blackbeard, and pirates in general, is of course massive - and extremely variable in quality and reliability.  That website I mentioned earlier in this thread is a good starting point for the genuine history of the subject.  Beyond that I'd better keep my mouth shut; this isn't a topic I've ever studied with any thoroughness.

If I recall, Queens Ann's Revenge was originally indeed a French frigate before being sold out of the service and converted to merchantmen.   But the constuction of "Frigate" during late 17th and early 18th century differed substantially from later in the century.   Early frigates were built more like minuature ship of the line, with low, but fully enclosed gun decks, sometimes with 2 stepped gun decks, their ports very close to the water.      Later frigates never put guns in their fully enclosed decks, instead it puts them in the partially open upper deck, with ports a good distance out of water.    So I am not sure if a model of a later French Frigate can be convincingly passed off as Queens Ann's Revenge

Chuck

You are correct. I have done some further research on the Quuen Ann's Revenge and indeed the design was like that of early Galleons. To be precise it was a type of vessel called a Fluyt (pronounced flight). These were strictly dedicated to hauling cargo and originated in the Netherlands. This specific design either minimized or completely eliminated all armament in favor of cargo space. The masts on these vessels were higher than Galleons for increased speed. This certainly fits the description od La Concorde/Queen Ann's Revenge.

I also did some research on types of models to use to depict this ship. Lindberg has a decent line of pirate ships. One in particular is labeled Black Beards pirate ship. From what I can see all of these look like Galleons, so theoretically any of them could be used.

Just thaught I would share the info.

Very interesting!  Do remember, though, that every one of those Lindberg kits is just a re-boxing of an old kit that was originally intended to be a scale model of some other specific ship - one with no pirate connection whatever.  The "pirate ship" labels are just a merchandising stunt. 

I'm pretty sure (though not absolutely; I haven't seen it for quite a while) that the one labeled "Blackbeard's Ship" is a reboxing of the old Pyro Sovereign of the Seas.  That vessel was one of the largest, and probably the most lavishly decorated, of all seventeenth-century European warships.  She carried about 100 guns.  The money King Charles I spent on her was regarded at the time as a national scandal; there was talk that if the king continued to spend money like that on warships, England would go bankrupt.  The Sovereign of the Seas was, in fact, one of the lesser causes of the English Revolution, which cost Charles his kingdom and his head.  There's just no way that any private individual, merchant, pirate, or otherwise, could ever afford to build or buy such a vessel - or to man it, or to maintain it.  In fact, nobody else ever built a ship that looked like the Sovereign of the Seas.  To call that kit a "pirate ship," and place it in the American colonies of the eighteenth century, is utterly ridiculous.  And the kit is extremely basic, if not downright crude.  Pyro made some pretty nice sailing ship kits in its day - but this isn't one of them.

Plastic kit manufacturers (and wood kit manufacturers, for that matter) are notorious for doing things like that with their sailing ship kits.  For some reason the ethical standards that are taken for granted by airplane, car, armor, and railroad modelers just don't seem to apply to sailing ships.  (If some manufacturer tried to market an Avro Lancaster as a B-47, I daresay there would be a major howl from the modeling press.  But when Lindberg markets a seventeenth-century British warship as an eighteenth-century American colonial "pirate ship," nobody notices.) 

I'm not suggesting that anybody refrain from buying a kit just because I don't like it.  I firmly believe that model building should be an entirely personal hobby; what's most important about a ship model is that it give the builder whatever he/she is trying to get out of it - and that's entirely the builder's business.  But I do object to outright deception on the part of manufacturers, and I think buyers are entitled to go into a model building exercise with their eyes open.   That thing isn't a scale model of Blackbeard's ship or any other pirate vessel of any century.  It's a scale model (albeit not a very good one) of the Sovereign of the Seas.

Incidentally - I see that a special about Blackbeard is going to run shortly on the National Geographic cable TV channel.  I won't be able to watch it; our benighted local cable company doesn't carry that channel.  (We were among the last in the country to get the History Channel.)  But I suspect it will be pretty good.  The NG usually covers subjects like that pretty accurately.

I think I have an idea for a possible and a relatively simple project of building the plastic model of a ship that played the leading role in what a famous historian (beg pardon, I cant remember the name right now) called "the greatest and most lucrative single crime in the naval history". That ship is the 46 gun Fancy of the "arch-pirate" Henry Every. Every raided, with a host of other european robbers, the annual pilgrim fleet of the indian mughal empire to mecca in 1694 and captured the flagship of the fleet Gang-i Sawai. This large ship was carrying a bullion of gold, silver and jewels worth 600.000 pounds but more tragically, A host of pilgrims and the young daughter of emperor Aurangzeb with her 40 virgin maids. The Pirates horrendously tortured the crew and pilgrims to reveal the treasures; raped and desecrated the imperial princess and her household. When the two-day orgy and slaughter was over every member of the pirate crews had a share of 1000 pounds. Upon the reach of the disaster's news to india, a storm of fury broke out and british was about to be thrown out of india by the mughals once and for all. Only a gorgeous reparation exceeding a million pounds and official assurance for intercepting those who took part in the hilarious raid saved flourishing british interests in india. But before anything could be done, the pirate fleet had been dispersed and Every made his way to bahamas. Tales of his fate vary; some say that he bribed the governor of bahamas to buy an official pardon, changed his name and disappeared from records to die in his bed a wealthy man. Others say that he lost all his fortune to lousy entrepreneurs in britain and died while begging his bread-money. One thing is certain that his fantastic and succesful robbery in the indian ocean became the ideal of every pirate after him and inspired Daniel Defoe to write The Adventures of Captain Singleton.

To determine what Fancy looked like, I looked to my Osprey publishing New Vanguard series book "The Pirate Ship" and Elite series "Pirates 1660-1730". There was not much information except that she was a 46 gun privateer that was fitted by a bristol merchant to operate against french under the spanish flag in the caribbean, and her initial name was Charles II. The only picture of the ship is in a near contemporary gravure that shows her in the background to Every; locked in combat with Gang-i Sawai. That blurred and not very sophisticated picture anyway shows the general lines of a mid-17th century dutch man-of-war and I assumed that the Lindberg Wappen von Hamburg may provide a good hull for the Fancy. Modifying her with a minimum surgery as possible, by taking the excellent isometric drawing of a 46 gun dutch man-of-war in the Landström's The Ship, pages 156-157 as the main guide shall not be so outrageous I think. This possibility may open a new opportunity for those who are bored of building a beautifully rendered but historically insignificant vessel isn't it ?

Has anybody else been watching the special on Blackbeard on the National Geographic Channel tonight. Great info.

I am right now.  I'm finding it absolutely fascinating and I am glad my next model is a sailing ship and not the tank I was planning, since now I feel a strong desire to build one....

Blast our local cable company, which doesn't carry the National Geographic Channel....Well, those shows usually turn up - eventually - on the Discovery Channel, which we do get.  And NG releases the more popular ones on video....