HMS Sophie

I guess that depends on how demanding you are - and who's going to look at the finished model.  The Bounty had a pretty distinctive hull shape - the shape of a small, late-eighteenth-century merchant ship.  That hull is pretty chubby for its length, and pretty bluff in its lines, to represent a warship.  And just about any halfway experienced ship modeler can recognize that shape from a mile away as that of the Bounty.  (One of the biggest scams in the history of the plastic kit industry is Revell's infamous attempt to sell a modified version of that kit as a representation of Darwin's ship, H.M.S. Beagle.  The Bounty and the Beagle resembled each other only in that each of them had a hull, a deck, and three masts.)

Unfortunately the number of plastic sailing ship kits on the market is so small at the present time that I'm having trouble thinking of a better candidate for such a conversion.  The one that comes most readily to mind is the Aurora privateer Corsair.  It's a two-masted schooner, but the hull form could just possibly be that of a sloop-of-war, and it has the requisite row of gunports.  But it's been out of production for about thirty years.  Examples occasionally show up on e-bay, but usually at pretty extravagant prices.

I'm afraid that's about the best suggestion I can offer - and it's not of much help.  Maybe another Forum member can come up with a better idea.

I can't imagine that the "Beagle" kit would be any better than the Bounty for such a purpose.  (The Revell Bounty is a reasonably accurate scale model - given the limitations of the state of the art in 1956.  In my opinion it's a little better in terms of accuracy than the much more recent Airfix version.  The "Beagle" is a marketing stunt; it's not a scale model.) 

I haven't read the book in some time and my memory is foggy, but if I remember correctly O'Brian describes the Sophie as a three-masted sloop-of-war.  What you need is a relatively long, skinny hull with full bulwarks above the maindeck, and row of guns on each side of that deck.  The Revell Bounty comes with four carriage guns, to be mounted on the quarterdeck, and a few swivel guns.  The Bounty only had bulwarks above the maindeck aft of her waist.  The "Beagle" kit has, if I remember correctly, no guns at all - and it's rigged as a bark, with the yards for the mizzen mast deleted.  In either case, the hull is considerably too wide in relation to its length to represent a sloop-of-war, and virtually all the deck gear is wrong for the purpose. It's not a conversion I'd want to try. 

Somebody really ought to offer a plastic kit for a British, American, or French sloop of war.  I can't recall that any plastic manufacturer has ever done it - though several wood kits of such vessels are available. 

Come to think of it - Heller used to make quite a few sailing warship kits.   Most of them were of highly dubious accuracy, and I frankly didn't take a lot of interest in them.  It's conceivable that one of the hulls in that line would be a reasonable starting point for this particular project.  You might want to check out EPinniger's online list of sailing ship kits.

I am just finished with reading the first of the Aubrey/Maturin series, "Master & Commander" and from the description in the book I get the impression that Sophie is definitely a two masted vessel.  In fact they have an encounter with a Dutch brig (merchant rigged) that very much resembles her and that one is two masted as well.

Sophie strikes me as an older vessel that I think was Spanish at one time (this according to the book)...Heller did offer a wide variety of sailers...ebay here I come.

I jst paged through this forum and found a movie version of HMS/HMHV Surprise!  That looks really great!  Any way I digress...check this link for what looks to be some interesting (not absolutely correct, of course) research information.

http://hometown.aol.com/batrnq/aubrey4.htm

JoeRugby wrote:

I am just finished with reading the first of the Aubrey/Maturin series, "Master & Commander" and from the description in the book I get the impression that Sophie is definitely a two masted vessel.  In fact they have an encounter with a Dutch brig (merchant rigged) that very much resembles her and that one is two masted as well.   Sophie strikes me as an older vessel that I think was Spanish at one time (this according to the book)...Heller did offer a wide variety of sailers...ebay here I come.

Yes.   O'Brain descibed Sophie as Spanish built 2 masted brig, which may have began its life as a merchantmen, and which was then converted for war, captured, and brought into the Royal Navy as a 14 gun brig with 4 pdrs.  She also has a sistership, or very near sistership, that continues to operate in a Merchant role for the Dutch.   Sophie is also said to ship an elmtree pump on her f'c'stle, which is said to be extremely unusual for a Brig.    All this is fair enough.

But O'Brian also discribed Sophie's single most distinguishing physical feature:  She was the only quarter deck Brig in service.   He went on to reinforce the point several times, explaining that Sophie's internal structure is unusual, her captain's cabin reposes upon a sort of shelf perched in between decks, rather than on any deck proper, in order to accommodate the unusual quarterdeck above.    This is very problematic.    It is not easy to imagine how a small brig could have a "quarterdeck".

 Generally Brigs and other small sailing ships are flush decked, there being no clear midship gap to delineate a separate quarter deck from the f'c'stle.   It is hard to imagine why a small ship like Sophie might be arranged otherwise.    She would not have had a open well with gangways to delineate the quarterdeck because sloops have only one main deck below the weather deck, and unlike Frigates have no additional berth deck below the gun deck.   As a result, an opening in the weather deck midships to delineate a quarterdeck would mean much of the crew would sleep with no roof over their heads, unless the crew slept in the bilge.

Conversely, O'Brian might have meant that Sophie had a poop, a raised platform in the back above the continuous, flush weather deck.   This too is unlikely.   Brigs ship a large gaff sail abft the main mast.   A elevated quarterdeck would seriously hamper the working of the spanker boom.

 So I have to say the single most distinguishing physical feature ascribed by O'Brian to the Sophie is likely to have been impossible.

BTW, if you are undeterred by the fact that O'Brian's Sophie might very well be distinguished by an impossible feature, then you would be right in thinking about using a good model of the Beagle as a starting point.

 The real Beagle started life as a 2 masted Brig like the Sophie.   Her third mast was not really a proper mast, but a sort of temporay arrangement to enable a temporary brigantine rig for her round-the-world trip.   But like JTiller said, there is no good model of the Beagle in injection plastic. 

One other possible kit occurs to me:  the old Pyro "Brig of War."  This was a tiny kit (when I was a kid it sold for 50 cents), based, like so many other Pyro kits, on a Model Shipways wood kit - in this case the brig Fair American, from the American Revolution.  The MS kit, in turn, was (and still is; it's just been reissued) based on an old model in the U.S. Naval Academy Museum.  Nobody's 100 percent sure what real vessel (if any) the museum model represents (perhaps an American privateer), but it's a fascinating model of an attractive little vessel.

The Pyro kit didn't amount to much; it had only a handful of parts, including injection-molded "sails," and was intended primarily, I suspect, for younger modelers.  And it had a pretty clearly 1770s or 1780s look to it - a good bit broader in the beam than would be likely for a vessel of the 1790s.  (I think Pyro may in fact have distorted the proportions of the Model Shipways plans a little; my memory's foggy on that point.)  But it did have some rather nice little guns - and a raised quarterdeck.  (That configuration was fairly common in brigs, schooners, and even single-masted sloops and cutters during the last half of the eighteenth century.  The quarterdeck wouldn't interfere with the boom, as long as the quarterdeck didn't project much above the bulwarks.) 

I have no idea how hard the Pyro "Brig of War" is to find nowadays.  But if you do run across one, and don't want to spend more than a few weekends on a "Jack Aubrey" project, this little kit might be a good starting point.  I certainly had a lot of fun with it years ago.  A careful paint job and a bit of improvement to some of the deck and hull details, along with some rigging, could turn it into a really pleasant-looking decoration - and on such a tiny model few observers would complain if the rigging was simplified a good deal.

H.M.S. Beagle did indeed start her life as a brig-of-war.  She was very heavily modified - almost beyond recognition, in fact - in preparation for the surveying/exploring voyage in which Darwin participated.  Her upper deck was removed and rebuilt on a higher level (presumably to make her a bit more habitable for such a long voyage), her armament (or virtually all of it) was removed, and she was given a third, fore-and-aft-rigged mast.  That addition made her into a bark (or barque).  (A brigantine has two masts - the foremast square-rigged, the mainmast fore-and-aft-rigged.)  The new mizzenmast was permanently stepped, and, so far as I know, she kept it for the rest of her days.

The connection between the Beagle and the Bounty is, so far as I can tell, a piece of complete fiction generated by Revell purely for purposes of marketing.  The two ships had virtually nothing in common.  Reliable contemporary plans of both have survived; they show vessels of completely different proportions, dimensions, and hull lines. 

Unfortunately the Revell Beagle/Bounty hoax seems to have been picked up by some other people who should have known better.  Mamoli, one of the HECEPOB (Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank On Bulkhead) kit manufacturers, has recyled its Bounty kit into a "Beagle," which sells for several hundred dollars and quite obviously is a copy of the Revell one.  (Such fictitious Revell additions as the phony-looking deckhouses, which have no basis in reality, show up again on the Mamoli kit.  There's just no way two minds could conceive such nonsense independently.)  Somebody in Mamoli's employ drew up a set of "Beagle" plans that obviously are copied from the Revell kit, with some impressive-looking but thoroughly fictitious rigging details added.  Those plans, I think, have been reprinted in some other publications, apparently leading quite a few people to think there was some connection between the Beagle and the Bounty.  There was in fact none whatsoever.

I wish some manufacturer would release a genuine, scale model of the Beagle.  She was an interesting, historically important vessel - and there's more than enough information available to make a nice, accurate model of her.  Some years ago Donald McNarry, one of the best ship modelers in the world, did a beautiful small-scale model of her; he wrote an article about the project for the British magazine Model Shipwright.  I also have very pleasant memories of a BBC/PBS TV series, called "The Voyage of Charles Darwin," that ran in the late seventies.  The acting, narrative, and scenery were first-rate; the ship that represented the Beagle suffered from many of the usual movie-maker's inaccuracies and anachronisms, but looked nice in the distant shots.  That series achieved something rather remarkable in my family:  my brother, who's a professor of zoology, and I got equally interested in it - and had equally high opinions of it.  If it showed up on DVD I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Sorry for drifting away from Captain Aubrey.  Good luck.

Mr. Fan and Mr. Tilley,

Many thanks for the thoughtful response to my initial inquiry.  Mr. Fan, my compliments, for it is obvious to me that either you posses a singular memory for Mr. O'Brian's outstanding narrative or the volume was not far out of hand.

This is another interesting link:

www.chucksshipmodels.com/Ship%20Models%2002/HMS%20Sophie/hms_sophie.htm - 3k

I am not at all sure that this is considered to be accurate in the historical sense, but it does catch the eye and set the imagination all about the points of the compass.

Mr. Tilley, I believe I have come upon your Pyro kit.  It was mentioned as a Brig of War and hails from Baltimore serving in the Americas campaign.  I will watch closely.

(you know it reads so much better coming from O'Brian then my hap-hazzard attempt at something in the literary)

Not a bad model.  Some of the detail work is a bit rough, and I don't care for the sails, but I guess that's largely a matter of personal taste.   The hull form looks a little odd to my eye - as though the bow and the stern were from different decades.  But we are, after all, talking about a ship that never actually existed.  I don't know what a Spanish merchant brig converted to a British naval vessel would look like; I'm not sure anybody does.  

The modeler certainly isn't going to get rich selling his work for prices like that.  I have no idea how many hours he put into that model (it's always hard to tell, because experienced modelers work a lot faster than newcomers), but at that price he won't make much more than minimum wage.  I suspect this gentleman's primary motivation is something other than profit.

Keith Stewart Thompson's H.M.S. Beagle:  The Story of Darwin's Ship (1995) relates her last years in depressing detail.  After the "Darwin voyage," which ended in 1843, she spent two years rotting in the Thames.  She made one more voyage, along the English coast to a place called Pagelsham Pool, where she became a stationary "watch vessel" for the Coast Guard Service. That institution operated a chain of these "watch vessels"; they served, as Mr. Thompson puts it, as "observations stations, living quarters, office and storage space, and so on." 

Officially renamed Beagle Watch Vessel, she never sailed under her own power again.  Mr. Thompson says that "her upper masts and spars" were "taken away, for she was not expected to be moved again."  There's no specific mention of the mizzenmast being removed, but I suppose it's possible.

What was left of the Beagle was sold to a company called "Murray and Trainer" in 1870, presumably for scrap.  Mr. Thompson asserts that there's no reliable record of her after that; he thinks she probably was towed to the Thames Estuary and broken up.

The Thompson book is a good, well-written piece of scholarship; I can recommend it to anybody who's interested in the story of the Beagle. It contains some plans (by a modern draftsman, on the basis of original Admiralty drawings) that, while not detailed enough to serve as the basis of a scratch-built model, would be a good deal of help to anybody working from a small-scale kit (if one existed).  My only complaint about the book is that, at least in the copy I have, some of the captions for the drawings are mixed up.   One drawing is printed twice, with different captions; I think another one got accidentally omitted.  (That must have made the draftsman happy.)  Maybe the publisher, Norton, corrected the mistake in a subsequent printing.

We seem to have meandered a long way from the ships of Patrick O'Brian's imagination - but this is interesting stuff.  Oh, for a genuine Beagle kit.

jtilley wrote:

I also have very pleasant memories of a BBC/PBS TV series, called "The Voyage of Charles Darwin," that ran in the late seventies.

 Me too!   I loved that series and I think I have a few episodes of it on tape that I recorded when it aired.   Over the years I have periodically checked to see if its available on VHS or more recently DVD.   No joy, as Captain Aubrey would say ( trying to keep in line with the original subject of the thread here).  I remember reading a while back that there were copyright issues involved so unfortunately video release is unlikely, at least in the near future. 

The series had the effect on me that good TV should have:  Before I saw it my interest in Darwin was about zero, after I saw it I read two books about him. 

Yes, I remember that series as well.   I was in elementary school when it aired.    I am reliably informed that it is still shown in Highschool biology classes.   Perhaps it is available through educational material sources.

Well, the fictional captain Aubrey would have been a Vice-Admiral of high seniority when the Beagle sailed on her defining voyage in 1831.    So we may imagine the now more mature Jack Aubrey, no longer the big boy of Sophie days, but an august oak of British naval might, passing the word for the diffidential Captain Robert FitzRoy of the sloop Beagle, instructing and requiring the young captain to take onboard a suitable naturalist, while recalling his own old friend Maturin from that long ago cruise off Port Mahone, when, with the sloop Sophie not unlike the Beagle, he had taken the great Spanish Xebec frigate Cacafuego.   Vice Admiral Aubrey foresees that, in this new era, with another naturalist of equal caliber to his his friend Maturin, great things of a different kind might come out of this new voyage, and admonishes the young captain to fail not except at his peril.

: -)

That's a stretch, huh??? 

I think I built the Aurora Corsair at least once when I was a kid, but I haven't actually seen the kit in at least thirty years.  My vague recollection is that it was quite basic, with injection-molded plastic "shrouds and ratlines" and the gun carriages molded integrally with the main deck.

I'd have to have the kit in front of me to form a reasonable opinion about it accuracy, but my vague recollection is that it seemed to have been based (loosely) on the overall shape of the well-known American privateer Prince de Neufchatel,  from the War of 1812.  (Plans for that ship appear in Howard I. Chapelle's History of American Sailing Ships; I suspect the Aurora designers may have looked at that book.  A more detailed set appears in Chapelle's later work, The Search for Speed Under Sail.  I don't think that one had been published at the time when the kit was released.) 

If I'm right, the kit's hull form is that of an early, large "Baltimore clipper."  That's a fairly distinctively American shape, but not so distinctive as to make it impossible that a ship like that could hail from another nation.  If I remember right, it has a large, trapezoid-shaped deckhouse aft.  (I may be wrong about that; these are thirty- or forty-year-old memories talking.)  I suppose it would be possible to install a raised quarterdeck on the kit, using scribed styrene sheet or something of that sort - being careful to add the appropriate deck camber.  Giving the model a raised quarterdeck would have something of a chain reaction effect; the mainsail boom would have to be mounted a bit higher on the mainmast to keep it from clobbering innocent souls standing on the quarterdeck.  (If it gets them in the head, that's ok; sailors are used to ducking swinging spars.  But if it hits them in the kneecaps, somethings's wrong.)  Turning the rig from schooner to brig wouldn't be too difficult.  Remove the gaff from the foremast and add yards to the mainmast.  The proportions of the main and main topmasts might need some adjustment; a good book on sailing ships should clarify the typical spar proportions of an early-nineteenth-century brig.

I can date the TV series "The Voyage of Charles Darwin" pretty accurately (for once).  It premiered on the BBC in the fall of 1978.  I remember that because I happened to be in London at the time, working on research for my dissertation.  I was staying in a small, cheap (i.e., affordable for a grad student) rooming house with one "television room," where the guests congregated in the evenings - and argued over which channel to watch.  On the evening when the first Darwin episode aired (following quite a bit of publicity in the newspapers), I happened to be the first person to get to the television room, so I quickly turned that show on.  It aired in the U.S. for the first time in, I believe, late 1979 or early 1980 - with additional, Americanized introductions by Neil Armstrong.  My father and I watched every minute of every episode in the family living room.  Age and nostalgia, of course, tint one's memories of such things, but I recall that series as one of the finest things I've ever seen on TV. 

   The Pyro "Brig of War", is now the Lindberg "Brig of War". the hull measures 5-7/16" from figurehead to the top of the transom, and 2" of beam. The profile almost exactly matches that of "sophie" in the  http://hometown.aol.com/batrnq/aubrey4.htm illustration. The text indicates Sophie as having a beam of 25'-9" with a length of 78'-3". these proportions agree with the "Brig of War" kit hull. The kit would make a 1:170 scale model of the ship described in the link.

What about the Zvezda kit?  I have only seen the box art representation and have not any idea as to the quality of the kit maker itself.

This the "Life-Like" kit.  From the description, notably the injected sails, could it be possible that this is a rebox of the Pyro>

I am still searching for a review of the Zvezda English Brigantine...