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(re-)Building the Aurora "Sea Witch" - advice needed

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  • Member since
    January 2006
(re-)Building the Aurora "Sea Witch" - advice needed
Posted by EPinniger on Saturday, November 4, 2006 10:00 AM
I recently bought a built-up, broken example of the old Aurora Sea Witch clipper kit. (about 1/100 scale). I'm intending to restore, repair and repaint the model, modifying or replacing parts where necessary. Here's a photo of the hull: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pinniger/models/ship/seawitch.jpg (This is not the same as the Marx Sea Witch kit, though it's about the same size)

I know virtually nothing about the history of this ship, other than the information in the instructions, so would greatly appreciate any advice on paint schemes and possible improvements/corrections to the kit (other than the obvious one of replacing/removing the moulded plastic sails).
For example, were the deckhouses and fittings really painted blue? Both the Aurora kit instructions, and the old Marx model of the Sea Witch which recently turned up on Ebay, indicate that they were (the original builder of my model certainly thought so!)
  • Member since
    May 2003
  • From: Greenville, NC
Posted by jtilley on Saturday, November 4, 2006 7:09 PM

I've only seen this kit in its Aurora guise, in which it appeared (I think) sometime in the mid- to late seventies.  It was part of the small series that also included the Bonhomme Richard, Hartford, and Wanderer.  I believe it was reissued fairly recently (i.e., within the last fifteen years or so) by Lindberg.  I've read that the Aurora kit was a modified reissue of a kit sold by ITC, and I've read that the ITC kit, in turn was a modified issue of the Marx kit - with the metal deck removed.  (Why on earth would anybody want to make the deck of a plastic sailing ship kit out of metal?)  I'm not at all sure about that, though.  I've never compared the contents of the Aurora box with any of the others.

In any case, Aurora apparently was responsible for the ghastly injection-molded "sails," which were cast integrally with the yards.  That feature was common to all four kits in the series and, to my taste, just about wrecked them.  This one in particular, if I remember correctly (not to be assumed by any means) was especially objectionable in that the "sails" seemed to be ripped off from one of the big Revell clipper kits (either the Cutty Sark or the Thermopylae).  The sails in the Revell kits, of course, were vacuum-formed.  That process leaves raised lines on one side of the "sail" and grooves on the other - which the injection-molded plastic ones in the Aurora kit faithfully reproduced.  Those injection-molded "sails" were several scale inches thick, with ridiculous grooves in their aft sides.  Ugh.

I think Aurora also stole some crew figures from Revell, and maybe from Airfix.  Some of the figures in the Sea Witch kit bore a remarkable family resemblance to those in the Revell Bounty and Santa Maria, and the Airfix Endeavour - but without the incredibly precise details that characterized the figures in Revell kits.  The Aurora ones were downright blobby by comparison.

With those awful sails out of the picture, though, it wasn't such a bad reproduction of the real ship.  I think ITC (or Marx - whichever was the originator of it) probably pirated it from the wood kit by Marine Models.  That's how quite a few of the very first plastic sailing ship kits got their starts.

The Sea Witch was a beautiful and important vessel - one of the first of the great American clippers.  Howard I. Chapelle's The Search for Speed Under Sail includes a pretty good set of plans of her - at least the hull lines and external details.  One of the first books by the famous early scale ship model authority Charles Davis, Ship Models:  How To Build Them, has the Sea Witch as its focus; the book includes a set of fold-out plans, including a rigging plan.  It's currently available in a nice, bargain-priced paperback edition from Dover Books.  Model Expo sells it for $10.95.  The book was originally published in about 1927, so don't expect it to offer much practical help for the modern plastic modeler.  But the plans are, I think, reliable, and there's quite a bit of information about the details of the ship herself in the text.  Here's a link:  http://www.modelexpoonline.com/cgi-bin/sgin0101.exe?FNM=03&T1=DP25170-5&UID=2006110421020707&UREQA=1&TRAN85=N&GENP=

Igore the photo of the beat-up model on the cover; it apparently was added by Dover, and has nothing to do with the contents.

Another book worth reading if you're interested in the subject is the historical novel The Sea Witch, by Alexander Laing.  He was a maritime historian of considerability himself, who (I think) wrote novels to make ends meet.  The fictional story he concocted around the Sea Witch sticks closely to her actual career, and contains some fine writing and fun characters.

Her external color scheme probably was the one carried by almost all American clippers:  black hull over copper (or "yellow metal") bottom, perhaps with the various external rails either picked out in white paint or left unpainted and varnished.  The rest of the colors on the one EPinniger's acquired are believable (unpainted deck planking, white inside the bulwarks, etc.), with the notable exception of those bright blue deckhouses and other deck furniture.  A pale, greyish blue (sometimes referred to in contemporary accounts as "pearl color," though that term also seems to have referred sometimes to a shade of grey or green) does indeed seem to have been a fairly common color for the roofs of deckhouses, but the bulkheads almost certainlyl were painted white.  (Incidentally, the horizontal planking on the sides of the main deckhouse is a strong indication that the ship in question is American.  British deckhouses of the period usually were planked with vertical panels.)  To my eye the blue on that model looks outrageously bright.  If I were doing it I'd strip the existing blue (if possible) and paint the vertical surfaces white and the the roofs a dull blue-grey.  It's also entirely possible that the roofs weren't painted at all; that they were treated the same as the deck planking.  Deckhouse roofs often were surrounded by a shaped molding, which might be painted white.

Hope that helps at least a little.  Good luck.  

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

  • Member since
    July 2004
  • From: Monterey Bay, CA
Posted by schoonerbumm on Sunday, November 5, 2006 12:05 AM

The lines and sail plan for the Sea Witch appear to be the only documented plans, coming from the Griffiths Collection in the Smithsonian. They have been published in a variety of sources, as mentioned by Dr. Tilley.  From what I can find, the deck layout and deckhouses are conjectural.

Colors and inferences on the deck arrangement are available from an oil painting in the Peabody, 'Clipper Ship Sea Witch coming to anchor at Whampoa', attributed to an unidentified chinese artist. 

  As Dr. Tilley surmised, her hull was black with a narrow white band on the sheer line. The rail and figurehead are painted black (per the New York Herald, as quoted by Cutler, "Her figurehead is intended to represent the black dragon - the symbol of the chinese empire").  All masts, bowsprit and jib boom are brown (including tops and caps). All square yards are black and the gaff is brown.  The driver boom is not visible in the painting.  Studding sail booms are brown. There is no boot topping at the waterline.

One of her boats is shown on the port davits and has a black hull and black gunwale. 

From the figures on deck, she apparently had a raised foredeck and poop.

Deck features are not visible, but other paintings in the Peabody collection confirm Dr. Tilley's recommendations: bulwarks and deck houses are most probably white, roofs of deckhouses are the same as decks. The hatches are a greyish or 'beigeish' color to reflect the canvas used to seal them.

I haven't been able to find any supporting references, but 'Bavarian' blue on deck features for the Sea Witch would not be outrageous... the house colors for the Sea Witch's owners were blue and white, which brings up another important feature....

If the kit doesn't include a house flag, you should make one to fly from the head of the main mast.  The Howland and Aspinwall house flag had a white cross, outlined in blue, with the upper left and lower right corner 'boxes' left white and the lower left and upper right 'boxes' in blue. 

Of course, after typing all of this from looking at my "Marine Paintings and Drawings in the Peabody Museum" I discovered that the painting is shown on p. 19 of the Time-Life Seafarers volume 'The Clipper Ships'.  if you don't have access to this wonderful and easy to find book, let me know and I'll scan and post it.

Alan

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Benjamin Franklin

  • Member since
    January 2006
Posted by EPinniger on Sunday, November 5, 2006 9:33 AM
Many thanks for the advice and information!
  • Member since
    November 2003
Posted by steve14 on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 5:24 PM

Two other sources of information on Sea Witch are Thomas Cutler's magnificient 'Greyounds of the Sea,' which documents the entire American clipper era, and 'American Clipper Ships A to Z.'  I don't remember the authors of the last one, but it is a two book set that written during or sometime just after the clipper era, and contains many descriptions quoted directly from the newspapers of the time.  

'American Clippers' does perpetuate the fallacy of the 79 day passage from China to New York that Cutler shows in 'Greyhounds' to actually have been 74 days.  This is a sailing record which I believe still stands today.  Sea Wicth was also the first clipper to make the run to San Francisco via Cape Horn in under 100 days, and one of only a few dozen clippers to ever have accomplished that feat.

There is a very nice modern oil painting of Sea Witch on the cover and frontspiece of the most recent revision of 'Greyhounds.'  It is of higher quality than the Sea Witch coming to anchor painting, even though it obviously was not able to use the actual ship as reference.

I have two copies of the Lindberg release of the kit.  The hull lines of the kit are fairly accurate, but the deck furniture is speculative.  I have never heard of any contemporary inboard plans of Sea Witch ever having been located.  There is also only limited verbal/written descriptions of her inboard profile, but I would suggest matching the blue from the Howland and Aspinwall house flag and using that for the deckhouse roofs, and possibly also the trim, with the basic structure white.

Whitewash was a common and inexpensive finish in tht era, and although it is said that Howland and Aspinwall did tend to lavish attention on Sea Witch, I doubt that they would have gone to the trouble and expense to have painted the entire deckhouse blue.  This is expecially true when they were already using white for the waterways and interior bulwarks, which would have made their upkeep easier, just like it would have for the deckhouses.  Another item against the completely blue deckhouse is that her captain, Robert Waterman was known to be your sterotypical tough, sea-dog and he had a hand in her design and fitting out.  A blue deckhouse would have most likely been too garish and tawdry for a man of that type and time to have agreed to.  This was a time when use of a lot of color was uncommon,  with men's clothing, for example, almost always black or very dark/somber.

I have seen copies of the Marx 'Flying Fish' kit, and it appears to be identical to the Sea Witch kit with different box art.  Since the hull lines in the kit are accurate for Sea Witch, I believe that the Flying Fish version is the repop and not the other way around.  The two kits even have the same identically poor vacuform sails, including the crudely reefed main course.

Sorry if I have gone on too long, but it isn't often I get to go on about a pet interest of mine...

 

 

  • Member since
    August 2005
  • From: vernon hills illinois
Posted by sumpter250 on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 9:24 PM

The plans from Marine Models, drawn by R.L. Bittner in 1937, have both an inboard profile, and a deck plan. The Marx kit has the same layout, as does the Lindberg.

Paint: On the MM plans the paint schedule is:

Full White: Quarter rails_stanchions;  T'gallant and main rails; inside of bulwarks, houses, mastheads, doublings, and bowsprit cap.            Black: Topsides, LWL to bottom of t'gallant rail, all ironwork, bowsprit to cap.     Bright Red: Pump wheel rims.    Light Blue: tops of houses, and skylight.    Copper: Keel to LWL.

Lead me not into temptation ..................I can find it myself

  • Member since
    May 2003
  • From: Greenville, NC
Posted by jtilley on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 10:07 PM

I believe the two-volume work mentioned by Steves is the one by Howland and Matthews.  I agree; it's an excellent source - full of good, solid information, the stuff daydreams are made of.  I'd have to dig out my copy to check the date of publication, but I believe it was originally published in the early twentieth century.  Dover Books (bless 'em) published a cheap paperback edition fairly recently; I don't know whether it's stil in print or not. 

I don't have any firm evidence to prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that Marx based its kit on the old Marine Models one - and that the Marine Models draftsman based his drawings on the ones in Charles Davis's book of 1927.  Davis was so widely known in the (then very small) world of scale ship modeling that virtually any self-respecting modeler would have been familiar with his works.

This sort of thing frequently happens in sailing ship modeling.  One draftsman interpolates something or other into a relatively scanty set of real historical evidence, and that draftsman's conclusions come to be accepted as gospel.  (The most egregious example of which I'm aware is the HECEPOB company Mamoli's "H.M.S. Beagle."  Mamoli clearly was inspired - if that's the word for it - by Revell's plastic "Beagle," which is a modified reissue of Revell's H.M.S. Bounty.  In reality the two ships bore scarcely any resemblance to each other - but the model companies probably have convinced thousands of innocent victims that the Bounty and Beagle were near-sisters.)

The good news is that in this particular case the widely-accepted basis for the traditional view of the Sea Witch's appearance seems to have been pretty sound.  Davis was a good draftsman and a fine modeler.  He made one awful blunder in his career (his thoroughly misguided "reconstruction" of the Revolutionary War brig Lexington), which has seriously damaged his reputation among modern modelers.  The truth is that Davis was an excellent guide to ship modeling (within the strictures of his time, the 1920s), as long as he stuck to the subjects he thoroughly understood.  When it came to nineteenth-century sailing merchant ships, he knew what he was talking about.  His plans for the Sea Witch don't have a great deal of detail (and I don't imagine the Marine Models ones do either - though I haven't seen them for years).  But what's there is, I think, pretty reliable.

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

  • Member since
    August 2005
  • From: vernon hills illinois
Posted by sumpter250 on Thursday, November 9, 2006 8:30 AM

  First, I have no problem admitting I have not done extensive research, so I appreciate the positive suport for the Marine Models plans. I had no idea they were most likely based on Davis' drawings.

   Second, keep the book recommendations coming ( it's getting close to Christmas )!

Lead me not into temptation ..................I can find it myself

  • Member since
    May 2003
  • From: Greenville, NC
Posted by jtilley on Thursday, November 9, 2006 9:22 AM

I feel obliged to emphasize one point relative to my last post.  I don't know for a fact that the Marine Models Sea Witch plans are based on the ones in Charles Davis's book.  I'm just making what seems to be a reasonable inference.  The book was pretty well-known in the late twenties and the thirties, when (I think) the MM kit was originally released.  But for all I know that draftsman may have worked from some other source. 

The full title of the two-volume set we were discussing yesterday is American Clipper Ships, 1833-1868, by Octavius T. Howe and Frederick C. Matthews.  It's apparently out of print at the moment, but copies of the Dover paperback edition can be had for ridiculously low prices via the web.  Here's a link (for vol.1):  http://search.barnesandnoble.com/used/productMatches.asp?PEAN=9780486251158&z=y

On the subject of clipper ships, four other books come to mind immediately.  George Campbell's China Tea Clippers is a well-informed, nicely illustrated work by a man who really knew what he was talking about - and was sensitive to the needs of modelers.  (He was, among other things, the naval architect in charge of the restoration of the Cutty Sark, and designed several kits for model manufacturers, including Model Shipways and Scientific.)  The title notwithstanding, the book covers clippers of the period in general - including some interesting discussions of the differences between American and British ones.

David MacGregor's British and American Clippers:  A Study of Their Design, Characteristics and Performance (I may have garbled the subtitle a little) is also excellent.  Mr. MacGregor spent much of his life collecting contemporary plans, drawings, photos, and paintings; there are more contemporary illustrations of the great ships in this book than any other with which I'm familiar.

William Crothers' The American Clipper Ship is one of my great favorites.  Mr. Crothers - a retired naval architect and a first-rate modeler - spent quite a few years compiling all the information he could get his hands on about all the individual American ships that met the definition of the word "clipper."  The result doesn't make page-turning reading; much of the book consists of tables listing, for instance, dimensions (sometimes in excruciating detail), color schemes (when available - which they frequently aren't), deck furniture layouts, etc., etc.  The illustrations consist almost entirely of Mr. Crothers' drawings, which are excellent.  The only topic that gets slightly short shrift is rigging - and there's nothing at all about sails.  But for hull construction, fittings, and just about everything else from the deck level down, this is the closest thing to a definitive study of the ships that we're ever likely to get.   The original hardback edition was pretty pricey, but a few years ago the publisher issued it in paperback.  Unfortunately both editions seem to be out of print, but I'm sure used copies can be found.

The contemporary non-fiction literature on American clipper ships isn't as large as might be expected.  One valuable book for modelers, though, is Richard Henry Dana's The Seaman's Friend.  It contains a massive glossary (including some terms I've never encountered elsewhere), and chapters that explain such things as rigging, sail handling, and a merchant ship's daily routine in great detail.  The good folks at Dover Books published this one in a cheap paperback edition just a few years ago; I don't know whether it's still in print or not.

Those are the ones that occur to me off the top of my head.

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 Thursday, November 9, 2006 6:55 PM

China Tea Clippers is available online here:

 

http://www.all-model.com/Clippers/Page1.html 

 

I don't know if it is the entire volume or not. 

  • Member since
    May 2003
  • From: Greenville, NC
Posted by jtilley on Thursday, November 9, 2006 7:07 PM

I think the online version of the Campbell book contains the whole text and all but a few of the illustrations.  The ones that are most usefull to modelers are there.

The same site has a complete (I think) copy of Mr. Campbell's old classic, The Neophyte Shipmodeler's Jackstay.  I strongly recommend that one - especially to newcomers, who'd be well-advised to print it out and keep the printout by their workbenches.  Learn everything in that little book and you'll be well on your way toward becoming a knowledgable ship modeler.

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

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