Internet Modeler : First Look : Ships RSS News Feed

Monogram's 1/132 USS Bon Homme Richard Warship

By Lars Opland

Historical Background

The former French East Indiaman Duc de Duras was refitted as a man o' war, renamed after the French version of Benjamin Franklin's famous "Poor Richard" pen name & presented to Continental Navy Captain John Paul Jones by King Louis the 16th in February of 1779. The subsequent epic night battle with the English convoy escort Serapis remains one of the iconic traditions of United States naval warfare, familiar to most & easy to find information about, so I won't recount it in detail here. Several good accounts can be found on the internet & this link leads to a site which includes both a short account & a detailed sail plan which makes for interesting comparison with the subject kit.

See also Shep Paine's awesome scratch-built diorama of the shattered & sinking Bon Homme Richard.

The Kit

Finding this big box of plastic unexpectedly on a local hobby shop shelf, I impulsively pulled out my wallet & brought the kit home. There were already warning signs in the photos on the kit box, chiefly a stern quarter gallery structure which didn't look right at all. In those photos, a dark wash gave the appearance that this might be a crude add-on which might be left off & replaced with something more suitable, but that was not the case. This feature is a molded-on part of the hull, & fixing it will be a major task for stout-hearted scratch-builders.

How bad is it? Well, it bears no resemblance to the best plans, models or illustrations of John Paul Jones' famous flagship. Specifically, the excrescence consists of totally non-scale gallery windows which give the appearance that the Captain's cabin has head room equal to about 2 and 1/2 gun decks. Beneath these, & the equally crude upper transom molding, is what appears to be the stern counter of a giant row boat nailed onto the hull above what should be a conventional round-tuck stern. All reliable sources show a fairly typical stern for this class & period of vessel, with 2 levels of stern gallery windows & an open balcony outside the upper row. In short, the entire stern & quarter gallery area of the kit hull moldings is buggered beyond belief.

When, oh when, will the major kit manufacturers wise up to the fact that, if new molds are as expensive to develop as it is claimed they are, a tiny fraction of that amount spent on some simple research could go a very long way to selling significantly larger numbers of the resulting kits (especially to an aging & increasingly fussy market...). Perhaps the one problem that would be most difficult to fix in this one, but also least noticeable from most angles, is that the hull cross-section is almost completely devoid of the characteristic known as "tumble-home", or inward sweep of the topsides between lower deck & rail. The real Bon Homme Richard surely had this feature, as did the vast majority of her contemporaries, but it might be easier to start your model from scratch than do anything about this with the kit moldings.

The problems hardly end there, of course. The bow & beak head appear relatively well-formed, but the female figurehead is oversized, rather awkwardly posed & has no connection to either of the ship's recorded names; very questionable. The beak head timbers are incomplete, only the middle pair extending down to the beak head, & none are substantial enough in appearance. Planking & wood grain detail is engraved a bit heavily, but this can be made to work in the builder's favor on a model of this type. Ship's armament details are the bad kind: blanked-off gun ports with little holes into which cannon muzzles are to be glued. There were no longitudinal bulkheads in these old ships, so daylight should be visible through the hull from many angles. You can't just glue the gun ports shut on this one, either, because most of them are molded flat open against the hull. Separate port lids are provided for the gun ports under the fore & main channels...where chain plates that might interfere are molded short so they can be glued to the tops of the open port lids! I have never seen such an absurd shortcut taken with a plastic sailing ship kit of any size before.

On deck, the nightmare continues. Decks are not cambered, no surprise there, but the main deck should be wide-open to the gun deck below, which it is not. There is no deck below & the main weather deck is an expanse of plank detail with a main hatch grating...onto which the longboat is to be glued upside-down because it has no interior detail. The ship's wheel is located far aft on the quarterdeck, almost directly above the rudder stock. It should be located under the front end of the quarterdeck in an alcove which is also not featured in this kit, since the quarterdeck bulkhead is molded as a continuous wall with some window detail & a door where there should be a wide opening. Untidy heaps of rope are molded here & there about the decks; unheard of unless the crew is engaged in replacing parts of the running rig. The ship's bell & belfry, molded as part of the fo'c'sl bulkhead, are hugely oversized. The crew figures must be molded in a smaller scale than the rest of the ship, since most of the railings come up to their chins or higher. Some the plastic pad-eyes which are supposed to be glued on deck will stand up to the crew figures' knees.

The rig is more of the same. The bottom ends of all 3 masts are about the same diameter & should not be. The main mast certainly appears too thin & the fore mast is likely also under specs. Each sail is molded in styrene as one piece with it's associated yard or boom; far from ideal, though this part of the kit could have been worse. At least all the yards & sails for each mast aren't molded as one-piece affairs! The spanker is molded as a triangular lateen sail, though a ship freshly overhauled in 1778-79 would no doubt have the more "modern" gaff spanker as shown in the above-mentioned sail plan. Having all these sails molded to their yards means that a lot of little holes must be drilled between yard & sail to properly rig clewlines, buntlines & lifts.

Speaking of proper rigging, the diagrams provided for this work in the instructions should be ignored in favor of other sources. Nothing should be tied to a mast between the topsail or topgallant yards & the mast doublings below them, since the yards themselves are raised & lowered to set & douse sail, yet the diagrams show clewlines & lifts secured immediately below these yards. The instructions don't attempt to name any of these lines or describe their purposes, which is just as well since many of them wouldn't serve those functions as shown, anyway. A length of chain is provided for the anchors, but ships in the late 18th Century used hempen anchor cables, not chain.

There is a decal sheet which includes what appears to be the wrong type of Continental Navy flag, plus some window glass detail for the stern windows & stern lanterns. The "lantern glass" framing is printed on a dark green background & the "window" framing is printed on a light blue background. I'm sure these would be more effective if they were the other way 'round, but a transparent part is best represented by a transparent part after all.

The kit's history notes include some interesting details of the action with Serapis & one apparent contradiction. One part says that the Duc de Duras was built in 1775, while elsewhere the ship is referred to as "worn-out" by 1779. 4 years is not a long service life for a vessel of this class.

So does this kit have any good points? It's big (22 & 7/8 inches long when finished, according to the box top), so would be fun to research & rig. Much conversion & scratchbuilding stands between the modeler & a presentable replica, but anything is possible if you want it bad enough. For some, fixing the problems with the hull may sound like more fun than the rigging....

Sources

A couple of hours among the Google image search results for "Bon Homme Richard" yielded all the visual information needed to write this review (...& could have made a much happier review out of this, had anyone at Revellogram bothered...). I even found a funky old mass-produced interior decorator's model there with stern gallery details exactly matching the fictional kit version.

For terminology & other technical details, I cite my own two-&-a-half years "before the mast", but can also recommend this book:

"Historic Ship Models" by Wolfram zu Mondfeld, Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., ISBN 0-8069-5733-6