Among the first things one learns when one goes to graduate school in history (or, for that matter, any other subject) are (1) that books are written by human beings, and (2) that human beings make mistakes. Mr. Marquardt’s book about the Constitution contains quite a few of them. Most are relatively minor, but some are difficult to understand or excuse.
One of the first responsibilities of a professional scholar undertaking a research project is to become thoroughly familiar with the literature on the subject that already exists. He demonstrates that familiarity by listing the sources he consulted in his bibliography. Mr. Marquardt consulted some excellent sources. He also, inexplicably, missed some extremely important ones. Most notably, his bibliography does not include the standard scholarly history of the ship, A Most Fortunate Ship, by Capt. Tyrone Martin. And Mr. Marquardt, as has been noted, makes no reference to the Hull model.
I don’t have as low an opinion of Mr. Marquardt’s book as some people do. But I get the impression that he did all, or most, of his research in Europe. I find no evidence in the book that he actually looked at the ship herself. That is, to say the least, remarkable.
The most disturbing mistake in the book concerns the drawing labeled “Frame Dispositions,” on pp. 60-61. It shows a fairly standard British-style arrangement, with most of the frames arranged in pairs. The gaps between them are indicated by diagonal cross-hatching. On several occasions the Constitution has been replanked, and photos have been taken while her frames were exposed. Even a quick glance at any of those photos (e.g., the ones taken in 1873, and reproduced in Thomas Gillmer’s Old Ironsides: The Rise, Decline, and Resurrection of the U.S.S. Constitution - another important book that’s missing from Mr. Marquardt’s bibliography) is enough to establish that she just plain isn’t built like that. (I wouldn’t want to try to reconstruct the actual framing disposition on the basis of those two photos, but they aren’t the only evidence available. Her hull planking has been removed, and her frames have been extensively measured and photographed, at least twice in my lifetime.)
I’ll repeat an observation I’ve made a couple of times before. One of the other books in the Conway Anatomy of the Ship series, the one about H.M.S. Victory, originally contained some clear mistakes (though nothing as serious as that one). At least one magazine reviewer caught them; he praised the work of the author/draftsman, John McKay, lavishly on artistic grounds, but was pretty scathing about the research he’d done. Mr. McKay, much to his (and Conway’s) credit, corrected the drawings and a revised edition of the book was published. Something similar really needs to be done with Mr. Marquardt’s book. The Constitution clearly belongs in that series, and historians, modelers, and other enthusiasts are surely entitled to expect that the drawings in it are not only well-rendered (which they are) but historically reliable.
As for the “Hull model” - it is indeed, in many respects, pretty crude. It doesn’t have a steering wheel, the guns are downright primitive (the carriages have no trucks, and each is held to the deck by a huge nail with a protruding head), the paintwork is over-simplified, and in general the hull and deck furniture look like they were made by somebody who’d never built a ship model before and/or was working in a great hurry. The rigging, on the other hand, is excellent - obviously the work of somebody who knew exactly what he was doing. I’ve wondered more than once whether several individuals worked on that model. That’s one more reason why I wish the museum would pay some more attention to it.
If I remember correctly (as I may not; it happens with increasing frequency these days) the model has three colors of paint on it: black, white, and green. I suspect the green below the waterline was an attempt to represent weathered copper sheathing. The absence of gunport lids, if we believe Captain Martin (as I think we can), is in fact correct. Captain Martin is convinced that, from the time she was built until well after the War of 1812, she had no hinged gunport lids; the ports were closed with removable wood “shutters.”
Marcus - I guess the best observation regarding the last point in your last post is the one with which I started this one: books are written by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. That assumption that anything in print is to be taken as gospel is, however, by no means uniquely German. I remember some years back getting into a discussion with one of our grad students about a grammatical error that, much to his surprise, he’d found in a published book. I said, “well, Barney, some of the best prose and some of the worst prose ever written in the English language has been written by professional historians.” He was utterly astonished to hear somebody say such a thing. But it happens to be true.