1/120 "Black Falcon" armed brig - Work in progress pics

Ahhrrrgggg!  The Black Falcon is about as representative of a historically accurate 17th or 18th century sailing vessel as Captain Hook is of a real pirate!.   I picked up the Black Falcon off e-bay on one of my naive "I can kit-bash this into something" moments. To make an accurate ship out of this puppy requires melting it down and reinjecting it into another mold.

But, the kit is fun. From a popular perspective, it's what a pirate ship should have looked like. It's only missing the plank sticking out from the waist. Burt Lancaster or Robert Shaw would have loved to have sailed this boat. I used to crew on the Lady Washington (aka HMS Interceptor) and 90% of our battle sail customers came out to sail on  a pirate ship. Both kids and adults show up wearing outrageous costumes. When Pirates of the Caribbean came out business skyrocketed. When Master & Commander came out, we barely noticed.  If the Lady looked like the Black Falcon instead of a historically accurate brig, battle sail business would probably double.

So I'd recommend building it with the Jolly Roger flying to let historically accurate anal types know that your tongue was planted firmly in your cheek when you built it. But do build it, I think you're doing a great job and the kit makes a good looking model.  Plus it's a good kit to experiment on.

That sure brings back memories.  I had one those thirty odd years ago as a kid.  I am sure that as far as accuracy is concerned, it's for the birds.  On the other hand, your build of it is looking great thus far, so have fun with it and you'll probably have a pretty nifty looking ship.

Andy

I wouldn't dream of suggesting that somebody not buy or build a kit just because I don't like it.  Picking a modeling project ought to be an entirely personal decision on the part of the modeler.  I just think modelers are entitled to go into projects with their eyes open.  On more than one occasion when I was younger I spent a great deal of time on a kit only to find out later that it suffered from some serious problems with historical accuracy.  (If I'd read a competent review of the Heller Soleil Royal, for instance, in advance, I never would have bought it - let alone spent two years working on it.) 

EPinniger has done a remarkable job with this old fossil of a kit - and I can easily understand why he regarded it as a good starter project.  It makes a lot more sense to break into the hobby with something like this - a project that costs relatively little, takes a few weeks, and provides valuable experience - than to start out by spending vast sums of money on one of the big, sophisticated kits.  Better to learn some basic skills on a small, relatively simple kit than to be disappointed with the results one gets from a big, expensive one - or, worse, get discouraged and give up.

As to the historical aspects of all this - the vessel in question is a brig.  That means she has two masts, with square-rigged sails on both, and a fore-and-aft, gaff-and-boom-rigged mainsail attached directly to the mainmast.  (If she had no square-rigged yards on her mainmast, she'd be a brigantine.  If her fore-and-aft mainsail were rigged to a light "spencer mast" aft of the mainmast, she'd be a snow.  If she had a fore-and-aft, gaff-rigged sail on her foremast, she'd be a topsail schooner in American parlance - or simply a schooner by British definition.)  A frigate, in eighteenth-century terminology, by definition would have three masts.  This vessel is a brig (or brig-of-war, or armed brig).

I'm not absolutely sure, but I think the name "Black Falcon" orginated with Aurora's marketing department.  I haven't read the story of Captain Kidd in quite a few years, but I don't think a ship of that name was associated with him.  The Mantua kit, I suspect, is based on the Aurora one. Wood ship kit enthusiasts are sometimes disillusioned to discover that those hideously expensive continental European plank-on-bulkhead kits often owe their origins to plastic ones.  The most notorious example is the Mamoli "H.M.S. Beagle," which quite obviously is a ripoff of an old Revell kit.  Several other extremely expensive continental kits are pretty clearly based on Heller plastic ones. 

The story of Captain Kidd, by the way, is one of the great myths of maritime history.  There's no firm evidence that he ever committed an act of piracy. 

William Kidd was a successful New York businessman and merchant captain who, in 1695, was hired by a syndicate of wealthy merchants and government officials to head an expedition to the east coast of Africa.  His mission was to root out the considerable number of pirates who, based on the island of Madagascar, were preying on the ships of the East India Company.  Britain was at war with France at the time, and Kidd also was commissioned as a privateer - that is, he had the English government's approval to seize merchant ships that were sailing under the French flag.  (Privateering was a lucrative - and perfectly legal - business in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.)  He and his ship, the Adventure Galley, ran into all sorts of problems, ranging from bad weather to disease to a semi-mutinous crew.  One day, after more than a year at sea, Kidd got into an altercation with an insubordinate sailor, clobbered him over the head with a bucket (probably in self-defense), and killed him.  Sometime later Kidd captured an Armenian merchant ship; he always claimed it was sailing under French documents, but when word of that development and the alleged "murder" reached England Kidd was branded a pirate.  He returned to Boston with the intent of clearing his name, and was promptly placed under arrest.  In all probability, Kidd was the victim of a combination of politics and irritation on the part of the businessmen who had invested in his expedition.  They trumped up a series of charges against him and transported him to England, where he was tried and hanged for piracy.  His activities near the end of his disastrous voyage may have come uncomfortably close to the line between legality and illegality, but the consensus among modern historians is that he probably was innocent of the charges.  It has, for instance, been established that the questionable prizes he took were indeed sailing under French passes. 

Oh - and there's no sound reason to believe that he ever buried any treasure anywhere.

The literature about pirates and piracy is, of course vast, and I don't claim to be familiar with more than a small fraction of it.  Good places to start, though include The Pirates (a volume in the nicely illustrated Time-Life Books series, The Seafarers), Pirate:  Rascals of the Spanish Main, by A.B.C. Whipple (a really fun, and reasonably well-researched book that was my personal introduction to the subject, back when I was in high school), and David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag.  I particular recommend the latter book.  Mr. Cordingly was the curator in charge of the enormously popular exhibition on piracy at the National Maritime Museum of Greenwich, back in the early nineties.  His book traces not only the stories of the most famous actual pirates but the development of the mythology surrounding piracy - including such influential luminaries as Long John Silver and Captain Hook.  Entertaining, informative reading.

Enjoy the model, and learn from it.  That's what the hobby is supposed to be about.  Good luck.

jtilley wrote:

The most notorious example is the Mamoli "H.M.S. Beagle," which quite obviously is a ripoff of an old Revell kit.

  very, very nice job on a small kit !  I actually enjoy building that size more than I do the monsters (ie:the constitution at 36"), and they are FUN !  Yours is looking great, love the colour choices...it'll look alive just sitting on a shelf.

                    grge

Regarding Mantua, Mamoli, et al - I'll resist the temptation to launch into another one of my insomnia-curing rants against continental European plank-on-bulkhead kit manufacturers and let the following link speak for me:  http://www.naut-res-guild.org/piracy2.htm

That article is more than twenty years old now.  Unfortunately, though, Dr. McDonald's observations are as valid now as they were when he wrote them.  (One minor exception:  the Sergal Sovereign of the Seas kit, which is the centerpiece of his diatribe, is now sold by Mantua.)

Those kits are notorious among serious scale ship modelers.  The "Beagle" may be among the worst of the genre, but frankly I've never seen a kit from any of those companies that I'd allow in my house. 

For those who do want to make the transition from plastic to wood kits, I (like lots of other ship modelers; these opinions are in no way unique to me) can honestly recommend four companies.  Three are American:  Model Shipways, Bluejacket, and the recently reincarnated A.J. Fisher.  The other is British:  Caldercraft, aka Jotika.  The latter is a relatively new but ambitious firm; its kits are extremely expensive, and hard to find in the U.S.  (I've never actually seen one, but on the basis of photos and reviews they appear to be excellent.)  MS, Bluejacket, and Fisher have been around for many decades. (Bluejacket is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.)  They don't offer all the fancy, gingerbread-laden subjects that the European firms do, but these American companies understand the basic principles of scale modeling.  The continental p-o-b companies have something other than scale fidelity at the head of their list of priorities.  I sometimes wonder, in fact, whether the people running those firms know what a scale model is.

When I was working in a hobby shop (more years ago than I care to think about), I used to tell customers "most of the plastic sailing ship kits on the market are, in terms of historical accuracy, junk - and most of the wood kits are worse."  I've never found any reason to change that opinion.  I wish the plastic kit industry offered a range of sailing ship kits that offered the modeler a huge choice in terms of size, complexity, and variety of subject matter.  In the ideal world there would be a dozen or so different kits appropriate for newcomers - kits representing ships from a variety of periods and geographic regions, selling for reasonable prices, and representing their subjects accurately.  Unfortunately that world doesn't exist, and I'm not optimistic that it ever will.  That being the case, we might as well accept that kits like the "Black Falcon" and those ancient Pyro/Lindberg offerings are the best available for the purpose.

jtilley wrote:

The most notorious example is the Mamoli "H.M.S. Beagle," which quite obviously is a ripoff of an old Revell kit.

Sirdrake - I think you're right.  Two things keep me from blasting Mamoli quite as loudly on this one, though.  First - the Revell Golden Hind, in my opinion at least, is excellent; this time Mamoli picked something good to copy.  Second - I'm not at all sure the design is original to Revell.  As you probably know, there's scarcely any firm factual evidence about the real Golden Hind.  (The latest scholarly biographer of Drake, Harry Kelsey, isn't even convinced that the ship ever actually bore than name.  Kelsey thinks she may have kept her original name, Pelican, throughout her voyage around the world.)  Several competent people have undertaken reconstructions of the vessel.  The Revell one looks a lot like a set of plans published quite a few years ago by Franco Gay (before 1965 - I think - when the Revell kit was issued), and for a while Scientific was selling a Golden Hind kit that (unlike most Scientific products) featured a nice, believable set of plans by George Campbell.  There seems to be an intricate "family tree" of Golden Hind reconstructions stretching back at least fifty years.  I don't have copies of any of those plans, but I think Revell may have based its kit on one (or maybe more than one) of them.  At any rate, the Revell designers clearly knew what they were doing.  It's a lovely little kit. 

To give Mamoli the benefit of the doubt, I suppose it's possible that the Revell and Mamoli designers worked from some common source.  But it's just as believable - and certainly consistent with the company's behavior - that Mamoli simply copied the Revell kit.  Of one thing I'm quite certain:  whatever the origin of that wood kit may be, Mamoli won't tell us.  Those continental companies are utterly notorious for their unwillingness to talk to modelers.  Makes one wonder if they have something to hide....

Yikes.  I've seen both those sets of plans, but it's been a long, long time.  The Campbell plans were included in the old kit from Scientific (which has long since gone out of business).  I remember looking at them during an idle moment when I was working in a hobby shop - so that must have been between 1975 and 1980.  I think I saw the Franco Gay plans in a book at about the same time - and I haven't seen it since.  I think they're in the Taubman Plans Service catalog (www.taubmansonline.com), but for a higher price than I'm interested in paying at the moment.  My recollection is that the Gay plans were extremely detailed (including lots of information about the below-decks spaces - all highly conjectural).  The Campbell drawings obviously were intended as instructions for the Scientific kit, but I remember thinking that it was a pretty good, reasonably detailed one - far better than most of the Scientific ship kits I'd seen.

I suspect there's an interesting little detective project waiting to be done regarding reconstructed Golden Hind plans.  My guess is that several of them have been copied from each other, but it would take quite a bit of effort to figure out who copied what.  In any case, all the good ones, almost by definition, can be traced back to one source:  "Fragments of Ancient Shipwrightry," a manuscript by a man named Matthew Baker in one of the museums at Oxford.  The drawings and paintings in that document are, as I understand it, the only surviving English ship plans from the Tudor period.  (The Baker drawings are, in fact, generally referred to as "the oldest plans of English ships.")  It's quite obvious that the Revell kit is based, directly or indirectly, on those pictures.  They apparently depict a large English galleon of the Armada era; the Revell designers (or whatever modern draftsman drew the plans on which they based the kit) apparently started with the assumption that a tiny vessel like the Golden Hind would be, in essence, a smaller version of that same basic hull shape.  That assumption may or may not have been correct, but I don't know of any alternative approach to the problem.

I'm disappointed to hear about the MS Taurus kit.  I'd been thinking about buying one; I'll reconsider.  That trick of deleting fittings that are described in the instructions really rubs me the wrong way.

Model Shipways used to be a tiny, extremely personal and friendly operation run by two first-rate gentlemen out of a small storefront in metro New Jersey.  I'm afraid that in the 25 years or so since Model Expo took it over it's gone downhill in some respects.  Some recent MS kits that I've seen have been excellent; others I'd have to call slightly better than marginal. 

The only one I've actually bought or built since the the Model Expo takeover is the pilot schooner Phantom.  I was attracted to it largely because it was being sold at that time (about four years ago) with a cast-resin hull, and I was curious to see how that idea worked.  I was generally satisfied with the kit, though it had some problems.  In this case some of the included fittings - I recall specifically a bag full of enormously oversized deadeye strop rings - were utterly irrelevant to the model.  And the resin hull did require quite a bit of work beyond what the instructions described to make it acceptable.  (There was no planking detail on the exterior, it didn't have the distinctive "step" at the base of the bulwarks, and the helmsman's cockpit, which was supposed to be sunk a couple of scale feet below deck level, was flush with the deck.)  I guess we have to accept that the products of any manufacturer are going to vary somewhat in quality.  Let the buyer beware.

Mr. Miller confirms my impression of Calder/Jotika.  I wish they had better distribution in the U.S.  They're acquiring an enviable reputation for quality materials, accuracy, sensible design, and fine customer service.

ABARNE wrote:

That sure brings back memories.  I had one those thirty odd years ago as a kid.  I am sure that as far as accuracy is concerned, it's for the birds.  On the other hand, your build of it is looking great thus far, so have fun with it and you'll probably have a pretty nifty looking ship. Andy

 I love it! You did a great job. It brings back rich memories of of the old  (Ideal Model and Supply Co.) wooden kit I built as a teenager in the early 50's. It was the same ship but about 18 inches long with a precarved balsa hull, called the "Pirate Brig" and cost $6.50. Boucher Models made one also with a hardwood hull and lots of fittings and much more expensive. The Aurora Black Falcon was the first plastic ship I built. Seeing yours makes me want to go on ebay and find one and built it!

jtilley wrote:

As to the historical aspects of all this - the vessel in question is a brig.

And a quarter deck brig at that, which means she may be a good candidate for conversion to Patrick O'Brian's fictional Sophie. 

Surprised to see that this ancient thread has resurfaced! Thanks for the comments - but this model still looks very crude to me now, with its incredibly crude transom detail, solid ladders and fife rails, crude cannons + gunport lids, and other problems! As I mentioned before, though, it gave me very valuable experience with painting and rigging.
I finished the Black Falcon last year -  you can see the complete model in this thread. I posted this thread when I was still working on the model, however I replaced the "work in progress" photos with the completed ones when I uploaded them - hence the text in my first post doesn't match the pictures.
You can also see from my first post that when I wrote it I knew very little about sailing ships; I know now that "two-masted frigate" (although the description in SMER's instruction manual uses these exact words) makes about as much sense as "two-winged triplane" :D

I've since bought another of these kits which I'm going to kitbash into a more accurate representation of an 18th century Royal Navy brig, using the hull and spars from the kit and everything else scratchbuilt or taken from the spares box. I haven't (yet) read any of O'Brian's books, but from pictures I've seen of HMS Sophie, this looks like more or less the sort of ship I'm intending to build. 

modelbob wrote:

The Aurora Black Falcon was the first plastic ship I built. Seeing yours makes me want to go on ebay and find one and built it!

Great job, EP! It looks great!

You do realize, of course, that I am eyeing this kit for a project. The hull is suspiciously close to that of the American privateer "Rattlesnake"; trim down the hull sides, attack it with chisel, multiple tools and sure grit. Replace the deck, new masts...

Yes, call me crazy, but I would love a crack at this one...