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HMV Bounty details???

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  • Member since
    November 2005
HMV Bounty details???
Posted by Anonymous on Thursday, July 13, 2006 11:18 PM

I am currnetly starting the Revell Bounty kit and need a few questions answered.

 

I know she was a Coal barque converted to a blue water exploerer.

1.  Was her hull below the water line copper sheathed?

2.  Asuming that the Revell kit is a copy of the movie ship, what does the current reproduction in California have?

 

I have seen finished models by world class wood scratch builders build them with both copper and others with the white yellow ocher stuff.

Thanks for any insight and leads to websites that may inhance my knowledge of this vessels details.

Lon Hill

  • Member since
    June 2005
  • From: Biloxi, Mississippi
Posted by Russ39 on Friday, July 14, 2006 12:33 AM

Lon:

The Bounty (formerly the Bethia) was coppered when she was taken into the Royal Navy, just before she left for Tahiti. Before that, she had some other anti fouling concoction on her underwater hull, perhaps the white stuff, but it also could have black stuff. I think they used both during that time period. But, as the Bounty, she was coppered.

A good reference is The Armed Transport Bounty, by John McKay. This book is from the Anatomy of the Ship series. It covers the ship in great detail with dozens of useful drawings. Check the online used book sellers like ABE or bookfinder.com and you can perhaps find a used copy for cheap.

Russ

 

 

 

 

  • Member since
    May 2003
  • From: Greenville, NC
Posted by jtilley on Friday, July 14, 2006 9:31 PM

I think I can claim some familiarity with this subject.  Back in the late seventies I read everything I could get my hands on regarding the Bounty, in preparation for building a model of her.  (A couple of books and a movie about her have come out since then, but I'm unaware of any newly uncovered hard information about the ship.)

Russ is correct:  the Bounty was copper-sheathed when she was taken over by the Royal Navy, in preparation for her voyage to Tahiti.  She underwent quite a few other modifications - some of which the Revell designers noticed while they missed others.  A while back I posted a summary of what I'd dug up on another website:  http://forum.drydockmodels.com/viewtopic.php?t=1339

I'm a big admirer of Mr. McKay; in my opinion he's one of the finest draftsmen working today - or at any other time.  I have two very small quibbles with his book about the Bounty.  One - it could perhaps have been made more clear that a good deal of the book's content is reconstructed on the basis of inference and contemporary practice.  There is, for instance, no actual contemporary drawing or other document showing the details of the hull framing and other internal structure of this ship.  (Such drawings of eighteenth-century merchant vessels are virtually unheard of.)  Two - I disagree with Mr. McKay's interpretation of the little "deckhouse" on the stern.  He calls it a "flag locker."  Maybe so, but I don't think so.  The modifications the navy made to the ship in order to accommodate the breadfruit plants had the effect, among others, of evicting the captain from his cabin.  That structure on the stern is just the right size (and the deck plan shows a hinged door in just the right place) to serve as a privy, or, to use the slighly more nautical term, water closet.

The story of the Bounty mutiny has been the subject of at least three movies.  For each of those three, Hollywood created a full-sized replica of the ship.  The first film, starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, was released in 1935.  (My source for the dates is Leonard Maltin's 2004 Movie and Video Guide.)  The ship in that one was a skillful conversion of an old schooner that the producers purchased, if I remember correctly, in Canada.  The second movie starred Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard, and was released in 1962.  For that one, MGM hired a shipyard in Nova Scotia to build a replica from the keel up.  It was deliberately made 20+ feet longer than the original, to accommodate the Cinemascope cameras (and, one suspects, Mr. Brando's ego).  Yet another replica was built for the 1984 movie, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson.  This one, to my eye, is the most realistic of the three - marred most conspicuously by the obviously synthetic white running rigging.  The latter two replicas are still afloat.  (I don't know what happened to the first one.) 

The Revell kit was originally issued in 1956.  (My source for that is Thomas Graham's outstanding book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.)  At that time, the second and third replicas didn't exist.  MGM, as part of the publicity campaign for the first version of "Mutiny on the Bounty," did publish a set of plans for the ship.  I don't think the Revell kit was based on them, though.  When I was digging around for dope on the real ship I found an excellent article in a 1936 issue of The Mariner's Mirror, which included fold-out copies of the Admiralty drawings of the ship.  One of them was on the same, odd scale of 1/110 as the Revell kit.  In those days Revell was choosing scales on the basis of what fit in a standard-sized kit box, but that two sources would use such an oddball scale is a little too much for coincidence.

I suspect many members of the Forum are sick of my posting links to photos of my old model of the Bounty, but I venture to hope they may be of some use to anybody tackling the subject himself.  They're on the website of our good friend Michel.vrtg, who has my deep thanks for posting them:  www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/johntilleygallery.htm .  Click on "Bounty."

Hope some of this helps a little.  She is perhaps a rather hackneyed subject (indeed, one of the most popular modeling subjects of all time), but a fascinating one.  Good luck.

Youth, talent, hard work, and enthusiasm are no match for old age and treachery.

  • Member since
    June 2005
  • From: Walworth, NY
Posted by Powder Monkey on Friday, July 14, 2006 10:24 PM
Here is the link to Bounty number two:

http://www.tallshipbounty.org/main.html


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