Plank width and lenght - HMAV Bounty / Bethia

There's actually a decent book on the ship--and of course, I can't find an on-line referece to give a proper link.

Ship's deck planking ran from 1 to 2 inches thick, and in varying lengths and widths.  The length was generally an even number of frames (so that the planke ends "landed" on something)  Width was what the local mill turned out, unless there were published scantlings (that were actually followed by the yard).  References are the key, usually (until you have two definitive and exclusive references <g>).  Oh, and planks were laid so that the butts staggered in either 1:4 or 1:5 patterns (back to needing references <sigh>).

Now, at 1/100, an 1.75" plank is 17 thousandthe, and a two inch plank is twenty thousandths (0.020) -- hmm, calcualtor tells me that's 0.444 mm versus 0.508mm.  You could "eyeball" a size from around 6-7" wide and probably carry that off; but it will be the way the fiddly bits like hatch coamings, waterways, and such fit to the deck that will "sell" it.

I can't add much to what CapnMac82 said, beyond the observation that the typical maximum length of such a plank probably would be in the neighborhood of 24 feet.

I think the book CapnMac couldn't remember is probably John McKay's Anatomy of the Ship:  The Armed Transport Bounty.  I'm a great admirer of Mr. McKay; he's a superb draftsman - one of the last, and best, practitioners of a rapidly-dying art form.  The book needs to be approached with one big caveat in mind, though.  Many of the superb drawings are extremely hypothetical.  The actual, contemporary visual evidence regarding the Bounty consists of four pieces of drafting cloth:  two sheets drawn just after she was purchased (with some proposed "contrivances" indicated in red and green ink, which doesn't show up in black-and-white reproductions), and two more sheets that show her as, presumably, she looked when she left England for the Pacific.  Quite a few details are shown in those Admiralty drawings, but quite a few aren't.  They don't give the slightest hint, for instance, of the transom decorations or the figurehead.  And they don't show individual planks, or the arrangement of the frames, or any other structural details.  Mr. McKay's drawings of those parts are speculation, based on contemporary practice - and our knowledge of eighteenth-century merchant ship construction (this ship, remember, was built as a merchantman) is extremely scanty.  I don't suggest that anything Mr. McKay reconstructed is downright wrong.  I do suggest that inferences other than his may be equally valid.

For what it's worth, here's a link to some pictures of a model of the Bounty that I built quite a few years ago.  It's based on the Revell kit:  http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/JohnTilleyBounty/index.html

In conjunction with that model I spent a considerable amount of time digging up all the information I could find about the real ship.  The genuine primary sources about her are surprisingly few, given her popularity as a model subject.  (Actually if you think about it that's not so surprising.  She was a small and, prior to her departure from England, not especially important ship.  She was purchased by the Royal Navy, modified over a period of several months, set out from Portsmouth in December, 1787, and never came back.  After the mutiny, when people started getting interested in her, nobody except the mutineers knew where she was.  And the remains of her at Pitcairn Island are so meager that they reveal next to nothing about her.)  I summarized what I'd learned about her on another website a few years ago.  In case anybody's interested, here's a link:  http://forum.drydockmodels.com/viewtopic.php?t=1339&highlight=information+bounty

For heaven's sake, avoid that Revell "H.M.S. Beagle" kit like the plague.  It's one of Revell's most egregious marketing stunts.  Plenty of evidence about the real Beagle exists; we probably know more about her than we know about the Bounty.  The two vessels resembled each other only in that each had a hull, a deck, and three masts.  The original Revell Bounty was an outstanding kit for its time (the mid-fifties), and in some ways it holds up quite well by modern standards.  (In my opinion it's marginally superior to the larger Airfix version.)  But the "Beagle" is nothing more or less than a marketing stunt.

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

Thank you CaptMac82,

I got the AOTS with McKay´s drawings and findings. I just got nervous since I learned in another discussion that planks used to be 25 - 30 cm in width. The drawings in the book lead to a with of 14 - 15 cm. But the discussion I remembered dealed with older ships where they might have used that width.

Dear Prof. Tilley

thank you too - as always a very interesting answer, filled with so much information. I appreciate that a lot! Its always fun to read your comments.

Your Bounty looks great! First I believed its made in wood - but you said its the Revell kit. You added a Copper sheeting? The Revell kit does not have that, did it? In that case the mould would have exchangeable inserts - which I doubt. May I ask how you did it? Papersheets? 

I bought the Beagle some days before I found modellbuilder forum´s as a source of information. Only some days later I knew: it was a mistake to get THIS ship!

But I try to make the best out of it - and I try to prepare a merchant ship - similar to the Bethia - but with respect of what I got within the kit. So I cutted the deck and rebuild now a flat deck. Anyway its purpose was to be an exercise before I wanted to start with my Revell USS Constitution. Meanwhile I have some more exercises: the Heller Sirene (a similar junk-ship based on the Phenix - so I will try to rebuild this too as "typical french Men-o-War" without the huge cabins) and the Heller Glorieux - which I got much cheaper than the Superbe - but which - as I know - differs just in 4 or 5 parts.

You see: I always got the "wrong" models. But I try to do the best. At least the Constitution is a good one!

The collection you got concerning all information about the Bounty is amazing. I onced was on the "Marlon-Brando"-Bounty. It visited Boston in 1996, when I had the luck living there for some months.

I´ll have to go to bed now! Its late here. Thanks for answering so quick!

The Revell Bounty does not have any indicaton of the copper sheathing.  (That strikes me as a little odd; Revell did a pretty nice job of representing the copper sheathing on its 1/192 Constitution, which was released a year earlier.)  On my model I sanded off the "planking seams" below the waterline and "sheated" the hull with pieces of .001" copper sheet, held in place with old-fashioned contact cement.  (I had my doubts about whether contact cement would stick to plastic, but almost thirty years later it shows no sign of coming loose.)  This is one of the few instances in which the Airfix Bounty is a little better than the Revell one.  Airfix did make a pretty passable effort at the copper sheathing. 

I probably tend to get a little over-emotional about things like Revell's Beagle/Bounty stunt.  As a basis for a representative model of a generic late-eighteenth-century merchant ship I guess it's not so bad.  But it bothers me that such marketing scams seem to be so common in the small world of plastic sailing ships.  In any other sector of the scale plastic modeling universe, such behavior would be regarded as utterly unacceptable.  Imagine what would happen if a manufacturer made some irrelevant cosmetic changes to its B-17 kit and marketed it as a B-47.  Or reissued a Sherman tank in a box labeled "M1A1 Abrams Tank."  Or a 1957 Chevrolet in a box labeled "1987 Ford Mustang."  The plastic sailing ship kit industry appears to be just about dead.  I wish it would come back to life, but without the deceptive marketing practices in which Revell and Heller used to engage.

Good morning @all - hello Prof. Tilley,

I was rereading your expertise about the historical facts about the bounty (this time wide awake) - and again - its very interesting. Very impressive your conclusion concerning the "compartmented flag locker". Looking into McKay´s drawings it is visible, that - if it was used that way - there was no hole through the cabin for his vestiges.. Would he have used a chamber pot? Propably!

Is the dimension of the locker given in the admiralities drawing of the Bounty?

Does anyone know how big a usual flag locker has to be? When I was reading it´s official purpuse (or at least McKay´s describtion) I was surprised how big it is. In my imanginagion a flag locker is used to accommodate signal flags and so on. Since these pieces of cloth can be folded real small, I imagined that a much smaller locker must have been sufficient - although the british navy might have had a huge number of flags.

Do you see any "problem" in leaving away the quarter galleries? The Beagle kit dos not contain them and I do not trust my skills to do them in scratch.

Another question concerning the rigging: the crew of a merchantmen was much smaller than the one of a men-o-war. Reason is probably that the manoevres have to be much faster and more precise during a battle. But that also meant, that on a trading ship they had fewer men to work with the rigging. Does that necessarily mean that they used more blocks to decrease the necessary power to move something? They sure did use a "smaller" rigging - which means many functions used on war-ships where not used on traiders. But - in my thinking - they must have done something to decrease the loads for the smaller group of men? Or did they just do one operation after the other - instead of moving everything the same time on a war ship?

Is there a good book describing the rigging of trading-ships of those days? I found a lot about navyies (british and US)...

Concerning your understandeble and shared anger about the plastik-kits industrie attitude to "recycle" kits .. One of it´s reasons is based in a fact which you mentioned in your bounty-thread: there is most of the time little known about the ships we are interested in. This opens the door wide for a lot of "interpretation" which makes it ... "acceptable" for the engineers and of course for the traders in the kits industrie.

They would not dare that with a B-17 or a Chevrolet - since this is obvious to anyone! Most kids - which used to be the focused customer - do not know enough about the ships so that it would be (was and is) easy to bluff them. And most of them never would blame! So - where is the risk? "Lets do it! - its money we safe!" Since in the last years adult men are finding back to their hobbies of their youth, its more often discussed. But most of them switch to wooden models and scratch-building anyway. So why should a company as Revell or Heller change their attitute? 

Please do not misunderstand me: I do not like this behaviour. Its wrong and in future I will be very carefull before I will buy a new kit of something. I will do my homework BEFORE buying it.

By the way: you said "This has gone on too long, and most readers probably have stopped reading by now." .. I do appreciate every line. There is so much to learn. So many questions for which I find answers in your postings! Thanks again! 

Well, let's take up those questions in order.

A couple of other people have commented on the lack of any opening under that box on the Bounty's stern, but I don't think that disproves my theory of what it is.  If there were such an opening, imagine what would happen when a heavy sea came up under the stern while somebody was occupying the box.  Contemporary drawings of the quarter galleries of larger ships (where we know the officers' water closets were located) rarely if ever show any drain openings - probably for the same reason.  I think the chamber pot is a reasonable inference.

Admiralty drawings generally don't have dimensions written on them - just a scale at the bottom of the sheer plan, from which it's possible, using a pair of dividers, to figure out the dimensions of anything shown on the drawing.  When I'm working on a model I always get hold of a copy of the plans on the same scale as the model, so I can transfer dimensions directly from the plans to the model.

I've never seen a drawing of an eighteenth-century flag locker that looked anything like that thing.  The flag lockers I have seen illustrated are relatively small, low boxes (about the height of a man's waist), which sit at the base of the taffrail.  (H.M.S. Victory is a good example.  If I remember correctly, her flag lockers are in fact made of canvas, on wood frames.)  I think you're right:  there would be no rational reason for a flag locker to be the size and shape of that box on board the Bounty.  But it's just the right size for a water closet.

The Admiralty drawings only show the little quarter galleries ("quarter badges" probably would be a better term) in elevation, on the sheer plan.  I'm not convinced that they projected from the sides of the ship at all; they don't appear in the deck plans.  Anything a modeler put on the sides of the ship that matched the outline shown on the sheer plan would be defensible.

The reprinted version of David Steel's Elements of Rigging and Seamanship (it gets sold under several different titles; any book by him with the words "rigging" or "seamanship" in the title is almost certainly the right one) contains lots of information about the rigging of merchant ships, in the form of notes added to the information on warship rigging.  The slightly later Young Officer's Sheet Anchor, by Darcy Lever, was updated some years after its original publication to include some information on merchant ship rigging.  The nice, reasonably priced reprint edition sold by Lee Valley (www.leevalley.com) includes those notes.  Another good source is Karl Heinz Marquardt's Eighteenth-Century Rigs and Rigging.  Generally speaking, the differences between warship and merchant ship rigging don't seem to have been major.  I don't think a competent merchant ship crew would have had any trouble handling the Bethia/Bounty with the rigging I put on my little model.

I don't have any objection whatever to a manufacturer's putting a generic label on a ship (i.e., calling it a "typical eighteenth-century schooner" or a "typical East Indiaman.")   I do, however, take exception to the re-labeling of a reasonably accurate model of a specific ship as a generic one.  (An example: Revell's "Yankee Clipper," which is just the Flying Cloud in a different box.)  And I really take exception to the reissuing of a kit under the guise of another vessel for which adequate documentation does exist.  We know that H.M.S. Beagle did not look anything like H.M.S. Bounty.  And the Cutty Sark and the Thermopylae resembled each other only from a distance - as did the Alabama and the Kearsarge, etc., etc.  When companies like Revell and Heller behave like that, they are, in my personal opinion, guilty of deception and dishonest marketing.

All these opinionated rants are, of course, just about irrelevant to reality.  The plastic model manufacturers have just about given up on the sailing ship.  From the financial standpoint - the only one that matters to those people - that makes sense.  I do wish, though, that when one of those companies decides to reissue and old sailing ship kit it would pick a good one.  Rather than inflict that infernal "Beagle" monstrosity on another gullible generation, why not bring back the Flying Cloud?  Or the Charles W. Morgan?  Or the Golden Hind?  Or the Mayflower?  Or the yacht America?  Or the Batavia - which, to my knowledge, never got released in the U.S.? 

The best sailing ship kits represented, for a long time, the best the plastic kit industry had to offer in the way of serious scale models.  It would be nice to see some of those kits again.

Marcus.K. wrote:

Does anyone know how big a usual flag locker has to be? When I was reading it´s official purpuse (or at least McKay´s describtion) I was surprised how big it is. In my imanginagion a flag locker is used to accommodate signal flags and so on. Since these pieces of cloth can be folded real small, I imagined that a much smaller locker must have been sufficient - although the british navy might have had a huge number of flags.

Well, "everybody's" signal flage collection runs large, twenty-six letters, ten numerals, and (usually) 9 or 10 numbered pennants, and 9 or 10 more "signal" flag/pennant/burgees.  Flags are sized to the dimensions of the vessel they are used upon, too. 

A size 7, the smallest USN size is about 3' x 5' (call that 91 x 152 cm).  The pennants are only about half as tall, but twice as long; numbers are triangular about 3x3 (or 91x91).  A size 6, IIRC, is 4 x 6' or so.

They are also made of stout material, even in the modern synthetics.  In days of old, each signal flag had an affixed "lanyard" about a fathom long (2m).  The top eye i nthe fly had a wooden toggle laced in; a suitable eyesplice made up the end of the lanyard.  Modern hoists use a snap-hook on either end of a separate "hoist" (or lanyard).  In modern practice our signal men have duplicate lockers on each side of the ship, with a rail or a bin for the hoists. 

The pennants are typically rolled or folded so that the "fly" of the pennant is uppermost.  This not only presents the grommets for "making up" the signal, but also exposes the identifying ink stamp on the fly.  The signal flag box on a destroyer is most of 1.75-2m wide, 50-60cm deep, and 1m± tall.  With wooden construction, the scantling dimensions will not be as fine as with sheet metal, but the flags were made of sailcloth, and you needed room for 2m of 75-90mm (circumferece) line, too.

I want to remember seeing a reference, long ago, that was part of an article (might have been in Naval History) on the making up of Nelson's "Expect" signal.  From that, I want to remember that signal flags on a first rate were in the 12 x 8' (3.6 x 2.5m) range.  So, there was some effort spent in making up the signal in batches, some more effort hoisting it, too.

jtilley wrote:

I don't have any objection whatever to a manufacturer's putting a generic label on a ship

And the key is probably in that crucial difference between marketing and modeling.

A Chauchat, a BAR, and a Type 96 and all box-magazine fed automatic rifles of rather similar operation and use--they just don't happen to look much like each other at all.  Ok, so maybe if one were comparing, oh a Bren to a Type 99; where the profiles are very close, that'd be different. 

I'm on the same page as you are here; relabeling a Sherman M4A1 as a Panzer IV would cause howls through the armor modelers no end.  Labeling an M4A1 a Firefly is almost defensible, as you cogently point out--but the armor modelers would want to sack the company HQ like revolting peasants in a Frankenstein movie.  Yet, ship modelers are rather, well, expected to "lump" it.  Go figure.