Heller Belle Poule on ComSale at Squadron

Celestino wrote:

Hope this is allowed. Squadron has the La Belle Poule for just under $29.00 Was this vessel a common design for the era or a one off. Could it be built as a frigate for another country?

That's funny, "La Belle Poule" translates as "The beautifull chicken" but sometimes we call some good looking ladies "belle poule" so it could mean "The gorgeous chick" or something like that.

I am not sure which Belle Poule the model represents.   The Belle Poule I know is a typical French Sene designed frigate, around 40-44 guns, that operated in the Indian ocean for a time during the Napoleonic war.   She isn't quite like any non-French freigate I know of, but she is still a reasonably typical frigate for the period.

  

This one is from the 1850s.  She is noteworthy for carrying Napoleon's ashes back to France, many years after he had died and been buried on the island of St Helens.  They felt that after 30-odd years, there wouldn't be any political movement centered around the event of his "return" to France.

I haven't built the kit, but I thought it looked great in the box.  But it is a fairly small scale - 1/200 - so will not have reasonable detail compared to the large ships of the line or clippers.

So if you're going to convert this kit to anything else, it is not going to be of the Napoleonic period, but of the Crimean War period.  Good luck.

Rick

I think it is a great kit. I have been slowly working on it for some time now. The detail is very good for the small scale. The wood grain detail is pretty good. Everything seems to fit together. At this small scale, there are no blocks or deadeyes. I have been wondering what to do about the chainplates, but Dr. Tilley's post concerning making them from thread seems to be the answer. Of course, the Heller directions are horrible, especially for the rigging. But that can be found elsewhere. I don't know how well it represents the actual ship, but it is a beautiful model.

This beautiful frigate's interesting name is in fact "La Belle Paule". It was how the french king François I called his mistress Paule d'Armagnac (I may be wrong for the family name), a woman renowned in all of renaissance europe for her beauty. For the frigate, she was a Sané designed 60 gunner; a type produced in series for the french restoration navy and for the nizam-i cedid (reformation) navy of Mehmed Ali Pasha, Ottoman viceroy of Egypt. It is quite ironic that at the battle of Navarino; both the Sirene, flagship of  french admiral Comte Gauthier de Rigny and the Murshid-i Cihad (the disciple of jihad), flagship of egyptian admiral Muharrem Bey were of that same class.

There may indeed have been a ship named La Belle Paule, but every reference I've seen to the frigate that brought home Napoleon's remains has spelled it Belle Poule (or Belle-Poule). 

To modern English speakers (especially American ones), the idea of naming a ship "the beautiful chicken" may seem a little bizarre.  But different cultures - and different generations - seem to create different associations with birds and animals.  When I was in college, one of the nastiest ways to insult somebody was to call him a turkey.  (Come to think of it, I wouldn't take the term as a compliment now.)  But Benjamin Franklin saw nothing inappropriate about recommending that the wild turkey be named the national bird of the United States. 

I can only conclude that "beautiful chicken" (or perhaps "beautiful hen") was a term of endearment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France.  It probably is no coincidence that Franz Josef Haydn's Symphony #83, which he wrote for a Parisian orchestra in 1787, has the title "La Poule."