Flying Cloud drawings or pictures

BlueJacket Shipcrafters (www.bluejacketinc.com) has a comprehensive set of plans for FLYING CLOUD that were part of the kit they used to offer.  Contact them at info@bluejacketinc.com

Al Ross

Go to your local public library's online catalog, and search for the following  book:

The American built Clipper Ship, by William Crothers.   This is a terrific book, with all sorts of info about the american clippers.  

My local library didn't have it, but one of the others in the local consortium did.   In my town, you can do the serach online, enter your library card number, and they'll ship the book to the local branch for pickup. 

Thanks!  I wrote to Bluejacket and am waiting for a reply.  My library didn't have the Crothers book, but does have:

Greyhounds of the sea : the story of the American clipper ship  Cutler, Carl C.,

How to make a clipper ship model  McCann, E. A.

Glory of the Seas   Mjelde, Michael Jay.

Do y'all think any of these might be trustworthy and helpful?

I'm still searching for references on Flying Cloud.  I've found some titles, but haven't been able to get my hands on the books.  I did, however, find what looks like a pretty well-done wooden model on the internet.  It isn't for sale; it appears that someone put the pictures up out of appreciation for the ship and/or the model.

I'd be MOST appreciative if any of y'all could take a look at this model and tell me if it is near enough to use as a reference for a very informal, small-scale project. 

http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/album/202846493JzIpHG?start=0

A general question on sailing ships:  If a ship were to be docked for a short time - say, while taking on cargo - would the sails be secured below the yards or on top of them?

Thanks!

Not sure about the 1850s, but when I sailed on the USCGC Eagle in the early 1980s, we had two ways to furl the sails-- "harbor furl" and "sea furl".

Harbor furled sails were tightly folded so that they laid on top of the yards, and did not hang over at all.  This was only done, as the name implies, when we were entering a harbor, and would be tied up at the dock for a day or more.  The goal was to fold the sail as tightly, evenly and neatly as possible.

Sea furled sails were furled more quickly, and with less precision to get an even look. They were rolled up fairly tight, and secured with gaskets, so they wouldn't catch the wind. 

Sails "in their gear" are the ones that many think of when you say "furled sails".  These are sails that were hauled up to the yards using just the clewlines, and buntlines -- this pulled the bottom edge of the sail up the yard, and left the big scalloped curves of bunched up sail material hanging below the yards.  This is this the style of furled sails in some of the old Revell plastic kits.   The sails could be doused and later reset all from the deck-- no one needed to go aloft.  This means the sail could be doused and set fairly quickly.

 As I said, I don't know for sure about 19th century practice, but most modern practices are derived from the old days, for good reason.   In general, you wouldn't want the sails just "in their gear" at the pier, as any gust of wind could catch them and start them billowing, putting a strain on the mooring lines, etc.  Also, it doesn't look very shipshape!

Hope this helps...

My poor old computer (which is going to get replaced within the next week) had trouble opening the link to which Styrenegyrene linked us, but on the basis of what I can see of those pictures it looks like a beautiful model.  I think it would be an excellent guide; if you can match that standard you're a first-rate modeler.

The Flying Cloud is one of the many extremely famous ships out there about which surprisingly little hard information exists.  The sources already mentioned in this thread - especially the Crothers book and the Bluejacket plans - are about the best you're going to find.  There are also some rather useful reproductions of contemporary paintings of her in David MacGregor's British and American Clippers.

In the mid-nineteenth century the sail on a square-rigged yard was secured, not to the yard itself, but to the jackstay - an iron rod that ran through a series of eyebolts hammered into the top of the yard.  When the sail was to be furled, a gang of men stood on the footrope beneath the yard hauled the sail up into a bundle, and lashed it there with the gaskets - a series of short lines that were also tied to the jackstay.  So the bundle that was the furled sail wound up on top of the yard (actually sort of on the upper forward quarter of it).

One of the most common mistakes among inexperienced ship modelers is to make the bundles of furled sails too big.  A real furled sail is a surprisingly compact thing.  The bundle is usually slightly smaller in diameter than the yard.  If a ship with furled sails is tied up to a pier and you come strolling along the pier looking up at the ship from aft, you probably won't be able to see that the sails are there.

If you do a Forum search on the term "furled sails," you'll find some useful ideas on how to make them.  Here's a thread devoted to the subject:  /forums/350916/ShowPost.aspx

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

I don't go into that much detail, but EAGLE has jackstays as you'd expect.

What Jtilley says is pretty accurate-- from astern,  on deck, about the only evidence that the sail is there at all is the clews-- the bottom corners, with the metal ring sewn in-- will stick out a little from the furled bundle because they have the sheets and clewlines attached.

On EAGLE, a sail that was roughly 20 feet wide and 15-20 feet deep could be tightly furled into a bundle that was 20 feet wide, 15 inches deep, and about 3-4 inches thick.  That's on top of a yard that is a foot or so in diameter.    (Of course, period sails will be bigger-- EAGLE's sails are made from modern materials, and are thinner and lighter for the equivalent strength of a the same sized  canvas sail from 1850.)

Hope this helps.....

Charles Davis, on page 139 of the Ship Model Builder's Assistant, talks about the two ways sails were furled on sailing ships, furled to the bunt or furled to the yard arm.  Furling to the bunt was the older way, and favored by the Americans.  When clewing up,he writes,  "the bulk of the sail comes naturally toward the middle and makes quite a big bundle. This is termed the "bunt".

He continues:

" This was the old-style way and in later years it was the style of furling sails adhered to by all American ships...it was a means of distinguishing an American ship from a foreigner, most of whom adopted the method of clewing up their sails straight up to the yard-arm so that the canvas was evenly distributed. This made a more even distributon to be sure, but it did not give to a ship the smart symmetrical appearance of the bunt-stowed sails on the American ships. It also brought a heavier strain on the outer ends of the yards which was soon apparent in the clumsy, stubby-looking spars of an English ship when compared with the tapered and more delicate looking spars of a Yankee."

Okay!  Great stuff!  I looked at  the threads you gave me, jtilley, and they were outstanding.  At this point, I should tell y'all what I'm working on.  In the late '70's, my grandson built his first model - the Flying Cloud.  I helped him with it a little, but mostly, it was him.  When he grew up and left home, he left the model with me.  He's now 36, and has two daughters and a sail boat.  It isn't a square rigger, but he and his wife figure on taking the girls around the Pacific in it for a year or so, so it's a fairly significant boat.  I thought that for his birthday this year, I'd update that old model, since it's been in my case for lo, these many years.  I disassembled it and have started painting and rebuilding it.  But there's a catch - a little dab of insanity in all this.

The model is the 1/538th scale Pyro kit.

I'm not afraid of scratchbuilding, and stuff in the .005" range doesn't scare me.  I know I can't put every line and cleat on the little thing, but I'd like to get most of the standing rigging and some of the running rigging, and at least the major deck features.  I threw away the one-piece yard/sail things and am making new yards out of basswood.  The sails will be 000 silkspan - or at least, that's the plan now - "harbor furled" (thanks for that term!)

I can't tell y'all how much I appreciate your willingness to share knowledge, or how much I'm in awe of your modelling.  Even if I can't use all this stuff on this particular model, there will be others - and other modelers, too.  Thanks again!

Styrengyrene - Many thanks for your kind comments - in this thread and others.  That little old Pyro kit is a tiny one!  I'm not sure I'd recommend making furled sails out of tissue, or any other material in sheet form, for it.  I wonder if a better approach might be to build up the shapes of the bundles on top of the yards with something like artist's modeling paste - or maybe my old favorite, PolyScale paint mixed with white glue.  If you do decide to try the tissue approach, check out what your local photography supply store has to offer in the way of lens tissue.  That's the thinnest silkspan-like material I've encountered - and the small sheets would be plenty big enough for this project.

Gerarddm - Charles Davis was a fine modeler in many ways and had a great deal of firsthand knowledge about sailing ships, based on his own experiences.  His description of the two ways of furling sails is absolutely correct - in the context of his time, the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I'm fairly certain that, in the days of the Flyling Cloud, the system of "furling to the yardarms" hadn't yet come into use.  The clewlines virtually always led to the the yard just outboard of the mast, and when the sail was furled it turned into a tapered bundle, with the center portion considerably thicker than the ends.  It wasn't until the 1870s or thereabouts that ships started rigging clewlines to the yardarms. 

Thanks for the FYI, Dr. Tilley.

BTW, in Frank O. Braynard's wonderful old book Great American Ships he has an evocative chapter on Flying Cloud, with a thrilling pen and ink drawing of her thundering along under full sail, including stuns'ls, with a towering cloud behind her. A very romantic impression that completely captured me when I was a kid. It was this very image that got me interested in ships, and sailing.

Another one that's worth taking a look at is the novel All Sail Set, by Armstrong Sperry.  It's a "young adult" book (there used to be lots of those around, in the far-off days when kids read books as a form of recreation), telling the story of a fictitious young man who starts out as an apprentice in Donald McKay's shipyard, then sails as a seaman on the Flying Cloud's maiden voyage.  I read it for the first time when I was in grade school, and it was instrumental in getting me hooked on sailing ships.  I recently found a paperback reprint copy of it and bought it for old times' sake.  I started reading it one Sunday morning and couldn't put it down for the three hours it took to finish it.

Another good one is The Challenge, by A.B.C. Whipple.  It tells the story of the rivalry between Donald McKay and William Webb, as exemplified by two ships:  McKay's Flying Cloud and Webb's Challenge.  Good stuff.

John, I think you're right about the silkspan not working.  No matter how small I cut it, it's still too big.  I'd thought about using putty, laid in a line and scored on the yards, but what you said about ships of the '50's and '60's running clew lines to the masts struck me.  That would make the sails bunch up around the masts, wouldn't it?  I haven't tried going for that look with paper, but we'll see how it works tomorrow.

Gerarddm, like you, I was hooked by a couple of books.  In my 7th grade year, I read, "Two Years Before the Mast," "Voyage of the Beagle," "Mutiny on the Bounty," and "Bluejackets of 1812."  There was also a book about clippers, but I don't recall what it was. This is my first ship modeling project since I got out of high school, and I'd forgotten how fascinating sailing ships are - how beautiful and ingenious.  (I also read "The First and the Last" in the 3rd grade.  That one did permanent damage, too!)  Thanks.

I guess I could have chosen my words better.  The clewlines don't lead to the mast; they lead to a pair of blocks fastened to the yard a few feet outboard of the mast.  So when the clewlines are hove in, the lower corners of the sail get hauled up near the middle of the yard, and the bundle gets fatter in the middle.

Charles Davis's reference to "clewing up to the yardarms," which was quoted earlier in this thread, points up one of the most common misunderstandings of sailing ship terminology:  the difference between a yard and a yardarm.  The yardarms are the outermost extremities of the yard - the portions outboard of the yardarm cleats.  Each yard has two yardarms.  In the more modern sail handling system Davis was referring to, the clewline blocks were located at the yardarm cleats.  Heaving on the clewlines had the effect of hauling the lower corners of the sails straight up, and the bundle was more-or-less the same thickness throughout its length. 

I always get a laugh when I watch the old, original movie "Mutiny on the Bounty."  One of the big moments comes when Charles Laughton yells at Clark Gable, "Mr. Christian, I won't rest till I see you hanging from the highest yardarm in the British navy!"  The real Lieutenant Bligh never would have said such a thing.  He'd know that there were two highest yardarms in the British navy - one at each end of the highest yard.

Okay!  The wheels of fate turn on!  I think I've figured out a pattern for deadeyes in stand-off scale.  I discovered the original bowsprit and jibboom are quite a bit too big and long, so I'm going to scratch build a set.  I found a web site devoted to Flying Cloud that includes a transcript from a period newspaper that is very technical.  It gives dimensions, but there's a couple I don't understand.

It says "The bowsprit is 28 1/2 inches in diameter, and 20 feet outboard; jibboom 16 1/2 inches in diameter, and is divided at 16 feet for the inner and 13 for the outer jib, with 5 feet end."

So what's this inner and outer jibboom, and that business about "...5 feet end?"

And BTW, I experimented with clewing to the inner part of the yards, and if I make the sails out of 000 silkspan, treated as John suggested, and cut them short, I think they'll look just fine for what I'm trying to achieve. If I cut the sails to their full scale height, they make too big a wad under the yard.

Thanks for all the help. I'm having a heck of a lot of fun on this silly thing!  Did y'all know Flying Cloud's navigator was the captain's wife?  Strike me dead for being politically incorrect, but that does invite stereotyping about backseat driving!  On the other hand, given Flying Cloud's record, the lady must have been pretty handy!

The description you're talking about is, almost certainly, the one written for the Boston Atlas by the reporter Duncan MacLean, whose articles are among the best resources we have regarding the details of American clipper ships.  This is, in fact, one of about three major contemporary sources about the Flying Cloud.  Considering her reputation and importance, the documentation about her is surprisingly scanty.

The word "bowsprit," in its strictest sense, refers to the innermost (and largest) section of the assembly that sticks out of the bow.  The jibboom is an outward extension of the bowsprit.  The inner part of the jibboom rests on top of the bowsprit.  At the outer end of the bowsprit is a wood or iron fitting called the bowsprit cap, which has two holes in it; the end of the bowsprit is housed in one hole, and the jibboom passes through the other. 

A good modern drawing of the Flying Cloud that I happen to have within reach shows her with three headsails set.  The terminology for labeling such sails varied somewhat, but I think the terms for these three would be fore topmast staysail, inner jib, and outer jib.  The fore topmast staysail runs up the fore topmast stay, which leads between the bowsprit cap and the fore topmast crosstrees.  The inner jib runs up the inner jibstay, which leads from the fore topmast crosstrees down through a sheave in the jibboom.  (MacLean's article seems to be saying that the distance from the bowsprit cap to that sheave is 16 feet.)  The outer jib runs up the outer jibstay, which runs from the fore topmast crosstrees down through a sheave in the jibboom 13 feet outboard (according to MacLean) of the sheave for the inner jibstay.  The expression "5 feet end" presumably refers to the length of the jibboom outboard of the sheave for the outer jibstay.  That's consistent with the drawing I have in front of me.  That length of 5 feet presumably had to accommodate the lower ends of at least three other stays:  the fore topgallant, fore royal, and fore skysail stays.  I think she also set a flying jib, which probably was run up the fore topgallant stay in fine weather.

Mrs. Cressy, the captain's wife, had quite a reputation as a navigator.  It actually wasn't so unusual for the captain to take his wife along on a voyage, but for her to be responsible for the ship's navigation certainly was remarkable.  Quite a lady.

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

Yep.  That was McLean's article.  I think I've got the dimensions of the head gear figured out pretty closely.  There are three models of Flying Cloud at The Drydock site.  In your opinion, are they accurate enough to use for reference?  I have noticed several differences, but all are relatively small - placement of capstains, longboats, etc..

All of those models show studding sail yards on the courses, topsails, and topgallants.  None of them show booms attached to the hull for the course stu'nsails.  Is that an omission, or did Flying Cloud use some other arrangement for securing the lower corners of her stu'nsails? 

Triangular lower studding sails, which didn't require a boom, were not unheard of.   But I think it's far more likely that the Flying Cloud had lower studdingsail booms - at least on the foremast, and probably on the mainmast as well.  (Studdingsails on the mizzen were rare, if not unheard of.)  That sort of thing frequently gets omitted from models.

I gather the website you're talking about is the Drydock Models one.  I don't take part in that site any more - since the operator of it outlawed (literally) plastic kits from it.  But there are some nice models in the gallery section.  That's all I know about that subject.

What I do have to question, in all honesty, is that little old Pyro kit.  (As I understand it, we're talking about a kit that's just a few inches long - a member of the batch that I grew up thinking of as the "fifty-cent series.")  I can't recall much about it, but most of the kits in that series are mighty basic, and a lot of them (probably not all of them) suffer from really major distortions in outline accuracy.  Personally, I'd hesitate before putting much work into a kit like that.  For one thing, the plastic masts and yards almost have to be way over scale in diameter, just to be practical as styrene injection moldings.  And if they're shaved down to near-scale diameter they'll have a strong tendency to snap.  My inclination would be to replace all of them with wood and/or wire.  I think that series of kits was intended primarily as a means of introducing little kids with pocket money into the hobby.  (They certainly had that effect in at least one case; I can remember my mother buying the "brig of war" and the Golden Hind for me at the local drugstore when I was about eight years old.) 

On more than one occasion (most memorably involving the big, expensive Heller Soleil Royal - one of my un-favorite hobby products of all time) I've had the depressing experience of pouring a great deal of time and effort into a kit, only to discover afterward that it suffers from some sort of hideous inaccuracy that I didn't notice because I was so interested in the details.  Nowadays my first move is always to compare the kit with a reliable set of plans.  (One fairly common - and inexpensive - source we haven't mentioned yet is Alexander McGoun's The Frigate Constitution and Other Historic Ships.  It's an old classic from the 1920s, and contains a rather basic, but decent, set of plans for the Flying Cloud.  I've got a horrible feeling that they may resemble that little Pyro kit only in the vaguest sense.) 

Unfortunately the American clipper ships haven't fared at all well with the plastic kit manufacturers.  (By the standards of aircraft and tank kits, of course, no sailing ship has.)  The old Revell Flying Cloud, from 1957, was a nice kit and is still worth acquiring if it can be found.  (At all costs avoid its later, highly spurious incarnation in a box labeled "Stag Hound."  The Stag Hound didn't look like that.)  And many years ago ITC released a fairly decent model of the Sea Witch, which is currently being sold under the Lindberg label.  So far as I know, those are the only plastic kits that meet a reasonable definition of scale models of American clipper ships.  The situation is a little better on the wood kit front, where we have the Model Shipways Fllying Fish and the new Bluejacket Red Jacket (hmmm...I hadn't noticed the slight irony there before). Bluejacket, Marine Models, and A.J. Fisher used to produce some nice-looking, solid-hull clipper kits, but they're long gone.  And the HECEPOB (Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank On Bulkhead) manufacturers have treated that type of vessel with their usual blundering contempt.  It's really a shame.  The American clipper, in the public mind, represents the ultimate perception of the sailing ship, but it's remarkably badly represented in the world of scale model kits.

Thanks for the sanity check.  With all models, there comes a time when one has to ask, "Would this detail even be visible in this scale?" and, "Is this going to be worth what it's going to take?"  Being a little obsessive/compulsive, I tend to ask those questions *WAY* too late.  My original goal was to make this teeny model look more like a clipper ship, so I can give it to my grandson for his birthday.  He and I built it about 25 years ago.  There's no way I can fully rig it or even have all the deck fixtures on it.  Styrene just won't go that small, and even if it would, my eyes won't.  Plus, there's about a billion gallons of coffee and Mountian Dew making my fingers do all kinds of dances.

On the other hand (see the O/C coming in here?) it just gives me a HUGE kick in the pants to make something work.  With the sides of the hull a scale 7 feet thick, and the topmasts about two and half, this is going to end up as an exercise in excess. But I've got new yards turned down, and a bowsprit, and new tops with lubber holes - only about a foot scale thickness.  It has also been a kick in the pants for me to get back into thinking about ships; I've done nothing but aircraft for many, many years.  If I don't use what y'all have taught me on this project, there will be another one down the road.  Hopefully, all this isn't irritating y'all.  Maybe there's at least one or two other modellers lurking about who are learning as much as I am.

The project that wouldn't die!  I finally found something to rig this model with that is only about a scale 3/4" to 1" in diameter. The problem is that's light red, and darned nearly transparent.  Any reseblence to the hair on the head of my lovely daughter is purely...  umm.... very observant.  It comes in about 12" lengths, and there's enough of it around to knit another kid.  It takes coloring fairly well.  Paint just beads up on it, but I have some white india ink that works great, giving a very stark white.  I also have an ink marker in brown which, if applied after the ink, gives produces what I'd call a "dark hempen tan."  The tan is not quite as easy to see as the white.

Never having seen any rope from the 1850's, I'm wondering how light it would be bleached by the sun.  Would that stark white be too light for running rigging in such a small scale?  I remember that John said you should err on the side of too light. 

Whaddya think?

There's plenty of room for discussion about the colors of rigging line.  One point that needs to be born in mind is that such colors undoubtedly varied a lot - from time to time, nation to nation, and ship to ship.

The running rigging of a mid-nineteenth-century American merchant ship probably would be a dull, rather dark, greyish tan - about the color we normally associate with hemp rope.  (If you've got a dark hempen tan, you're probably on target.)  The standing rigging was normally coated with a concoction containing tar and lamp black, which, if it wasn't pure black, must have come pretty close. 

The two Golden Rules of Rigging are:  (1) When in doubt as to thickness, err on the light side; and (2) When in doubt as to color, err on the dark side.  (With apologies to Darth Vader.)

One other point:  lots of people over the years have tried human hair as a rigging material.  It has one big problem:  it's hydroscopic.  It tends to shrink and expand with changes in the humidity.  How serious a problem that is seems to vary.  I've read horror stories from people who've spent hours rigging a ship with hair and watched it all go terribly slack within a few days.  I've also read accounts by people who say they've had good luck with it, and don't know what the fuss is all about.  The old "prisoner of war" models from the Napoleonic Wars usually were rigged with hair.  Most of them no longer have their original rigging (asking any kind of fiber to last for 200 years is asking a lot), but some of them have survived in pretty good shape.  I suspect lots of variables are involved in determining the lifespan of a hair sample:  the climate in which it's displayed, the treatment (dye, paint, adhesive, etc.) it's been given, and even, I suppose, the dietary habits and DNA of the original owner.  (It's well known that hair samples vary a great deal from person to person.)  You might want to do a test run of some sort before commiting yourself to that material.

Good luck.

Thanks, John.  I've thought about the absorption bit, and here's what I'm hoping:  The longest running line on this model will be about 3",  and I'm coating the hair with two shades of dye, so I'm hoping it will hold up for a few years, at least.  I think I'll go with the brown-over-white.

OT Trivia about hair:  in '87 we exhumed the bodies of 33 Confederate soldiers who'd been killed in the battle of Glorieta Pass, NM.  About a half-dozen of the skulls had nearly full heads of hair; the rest had no hair, at all.  Genetics?  Their diets were pretty similar.