Is this right??? Jolly Roger with Flying Dutchman parts????

I guess the Revell Batavia would be more appropriate than anything else - if you can find it.  As I understand it, it's a nice kit, but was only in the Revell Germany catalog for a couple of years.

For heaven's sake don't tell Revell about this idea, lest we get another one of their reissues complete with "glow in the dark paint" or something.

I've never studied the Flying Dutchman legend in any depth.  I don't know how old it is.  My recollection from what I have read about it is that a Dutch merchant captain named Vanderdecken (or something like that) supposedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a fair wind to take him around the Cape of Good Hope, and has been sailing the seven seas ever since. 

It certainly was a well-known story among Europeans by the mid-nineteenth century, when Richard Wagner based his opera on it.  (In that variation, the Dutchman can be rescued from his fate by the love of a woman - usually a 250-pound soprano with a voice that shatters glass.)   I have a vague impression that the legend, in one form or another, dates back at least to the seventeenth century.  If so, a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ship would be the most likely candidate.  I don't know of any models of such ships in kit form - certainly none in plastic.  The only plastic sailing ship kits with cearly  northern European accents that I can think of are the Airfix Wasa (which is distinctly Swedish) and the old Lindberg Wappen von Hamburg, aka "Captain Kidd" (German, but with lots of features that have a rather Dutch look about them - at least to my eye).  She's a large warship; I don't know whether any of the "Flying Dutchman" permutations are warships or not. 

Maybe our good Forum friend JWintjes can help us out here.  He certainly knows a great deal more about northern European seafaring than I do.

Man you are a wealth of info jtilly! Thanks for all the info. I I don't mind building an "incorrect ship" so long as I know it's incorrect. I have learned so much in this section in the past week. What you have told me (and what I inadvertantly learned on the History Channel about pirite ships being relatively shall fast vessels with small cannon) have educated me ALOT. Now In can go into this build "forwarned and fore armed" so to speak. I gues if Am going to build a fictional ship I might as well use the fictional kit for my Joger or paint my La Flore the revell Roger's colors.lol

I never knew these ships were repops of other vessels. Makes sense considering the same thing happens in the car genre all the time buuuut since i mostly build sci fi the subjects tend to be unique and don't lend well to "renaming" and "reboxing" which generates outragous prices when a kit goes out of production...

What type of ship would the "Duchman" really be?

I do remember that little "brig of war."  It was originally a Pyro kit - part of the "fifty-cent series."  My mother bought several of them for me when I was in grade school.

It was another example of the "Pirate Plastics" phenomenon:  it quite clearly was based on the Model Shipways Fair American.  That kit, in turn, is a reproduction of a fascinating - and uncertainly-identified - contemporary model in the Naval Academy Museum at Annapolis.  If I remember correctly (as may well not be the case), Pyro distorted the shape of its hull considerably, making the ship fatter and squatter than the Model Shipways version.  If one were determined to make a model of a "pirate ship," that kit might indeed be a reasonable candidate. 

I'd suggest leaving off most of the guns, though.  Good-sized carriage guns like that actually weren't popular among seventeenth-and eighteenth-century pirates, for a couple of reasons.  First, they (and their ammunition) were expensive, and required relatively large gun crews.  (A pirate captain wanted as small a crew as he could get away with, because paying his men ate into his profits.)  Second, such guns were designed to punch holes in enemy hulls - and the last thing a pirate wanted to do was sink or seriously damage his opponent.  He'd be more likely to use swivel guns and blunderbusses to chew up its rigging and maim the people on its deck, forcing the survivors to surrender the ship intact.

I've never built the Revell kit, but my impression from having looked at the contents of the box is that it's a reasonable reproduction of the "ship" at Disneyland.

Let's take a couple of steps backward and be sure everybody knows what we're talking about here, though.  All of the plastic sailing ship kits claiming to represent "pirate ships" actually represent something else.  The four Lindberg kits, "Jolly Roger," "Captain Kidd," "Blackbeard," and "Sir Henry Morgan," are reissues of old kits that were intended to be scale models of real, extremely non-piratical ships:  La Flore, Wappen von Hamburg, Sovereign of the Seas, and St. Louis, respectively.  It's reasonable to assert that no real pirate ship ever looked even remotely like any of them.  The Revell "Peter Pan Pirate Ship Jolly Roger" is a reasonably accurate scale reproduction of a theme park prop, which apparently was designed by a group of cartoonists on the basis of animated images in a kids' movie.  To my knowledge, no plastic kit (or wood one either, for that matter) has ever represented a real pirate vessel with anything resembling scale fidelity.  (The least outrageous just may have been the old Aurora Black Falcon, but it's so crude that modern modelers find it difficult to take seriously.)

I'm having trouble, in fact, thinking of a currently-available plastic kit that could be used reasonably as a basis for a scale model of a pirate ship.  The kit in question would represent a small, fast, single-masted or two-masted ship of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century.  (A wealthy pirate might, I suppose, occasionally have operated a three-masted ship, but that certainly wouldn't be typical.)  Somewhere in the vast Heller range there just may have been a hull that would meet that description.  Or maybe something in the old Pyro "$1.00 series" could be modified convincingly.

Three Model Shipways wood kits come to mind as reasonable candidates for sailing under the black flag.  The most likely might be the armed Virginia sloop.  The little schooner Sultana might be believable in piratical guise, though she probably was a bit slow for the job.  And the generic War of 1812 privateer Dapper Tom would have made a good pirate schooner - though she's a bit modern for the role. 

As for the Flying Dutchman - that legend has taken so many different forms over the centuries that just about any ship could be considered consistent with it.  But I have to say I find it a little difficult to believe that a ghostly Dutchman would be sailing around in an eighteenth-century French frigate.

To each his (or her) own; anybody whose tastes run to fantasy and fiction will find plenty of willing collaborator among ship model kit manufacturers.  It's not for me to suggest that there's anything wrong with such projects.  But I do think modelers ought to go into them with eyes wide open.  For the task of helping introduce an eight-year-old to the world of Peter Pan, any of those kits will do fine.  But they won't produce scale models of real pirate ships.

Revell re-issued the Lindberg La Flora or alias Jolly Roger as the Flying Dutchman several years back.They probably had the name plates added only to make the kit look different.As far as that goes Lindberg might have produced the kit for Revell in just put it in there box.Manufactors have been doing this for years.This model makers trade molds back and forth like crazy.Heller,Revell. Lindberg,Mpc,and Emtec.Even Imai produced some of the Heller kits.Thats why you got to watch what you buy .Sometimes your paying a lot of money for just a different box.

Rod