Greetings Professor, I’d like to ask what is the true scale of Revell’s Charles W. Morgan whaler. I saw two different scales in two different posts at the forum (1/110 and 1/159) which one is correct ?
cheers
I’m afraid I can’t answer that question. I haven’t seen that kit in years - though I have extremely positive memories of it.
Dr. Thomas Graham’s book, Remembering Revell Model Kits, gives the original release date of the kit (numbered H-346) as 1968; he says it stayed in the company catalog until 1971, and was reissued in 1972 (as H-330) and 1979 (as 2653). The scale is listed as 1/160. I have the deepest possible respect for Dr. Graham’s research, but I have encountered a few minor mistakes in it regarding scales of sailing ship kits - and I think this may be one of them. My recollection is that the Morgan kit was packaged in a standard-sized box (and sold for a standardized price) in the same series as the Santa Maria, Flying Cloud, Bounty, “Beagle,” Eagle, Victory, etc. Those models were about 16" or 18" long. I’m pretty sure the Morgan kit was just about the same size. That would make its scale significantly larger than 1/160. (The Morgan is not a big ship.) That figure of 1/110 (which I know for a fact is the scale of the Revell Bounty - though the book lists it as being on 1/170) sounds about right. But I don’t know for sure.
It was one of the nicest sailing ship kits Revell produced - and one of the last. (Assuming Dr. Graham’s dates are right - as I think they are - Revell only released two more genuinely new sailing ships after that: the yacht America in 1969 and the Viking ship in 1977.) The detail of the Morgan kit was, within the limitations of the injection-molding process, outstanding. All the planks on the hull and deck, including the structural work inside the bulwarks, were beautifully represented (with “wood grain” that was actually pretty close to scale), the tryworks had individual bricks, and the lines of the little whaleboats were captured to perfection. It did have one feature that I didn’t like: only two of the seven whaleboat hulls had detail in their interiors. The others were hollow shells. For the two that were to be stowed upside down on top of the after deckhouse that wasn’t a problem, but the kit included vac-formed “boat covers” to be glued on three of the boats that were to be hung on the davits. That just wasn’t acceptable. (Whaleboats were almost invariably kept ready to swing out at a moment’s notice, and the oars, masts, steering oar, and other gear sticking out of them would have made canvas covers impracticable.) I remember sending Revell a letter asking for three more internally-detailed whaleboat hulls (and the associated thwart pieces), and offering to pay for them. I got back a letter politely informing me that the company couldn’t sell parts like that - but they did send me a floppy plastic LP record of “whaling sounds” and sea chanteys. I have to confess that the sound of somebody yelling “Thar she blows” didn’t compensate for the absence of the whaleboats.
This kit is high on the list of those I wish Revell would reissue (instead of inflicting that infernal “Beagle” on yet another generation of gullible consumers). If the kit does get reincarnated, I want three - two of them to provide whaleboats.
In the book “Whale Ships and Whaling”, Morgan is listed as: Bark 314 tons displacement, 105.6 feet length, 27.7 feet beam, and 17.6 feet depth. You should be able to get a scale from the beam dimension. I’m not sure if the length is “overall”, on deck, between perpendiculars, or waterline. 27.7’ = 332.5 inches. 332.5/measured beam of model = scale, 1:160 scale would be a model beam of 2.078125". There should be enough photos of the Morgan, online, to get all the details you want of the prototype. She’s back in the water now, at Mystic Seaport.
Model Expo sell a wood ship kit of the Morgan made by Model Shipways. Their kits are very good for the most part and the plans are very well researched. Their Morgan kit was meticulousy researched at Mystic Seaport Museum and should yield a very accurate set of plans for the ship.
With that in mind, their kit, at 1/64 scale, measures 30 3/4" overall. This includes the bowsprit and everything. 30 3/4" x 64 =1,968 inches overall length. So, take 1,968 inches and divide that by your kit’s overall rigged length and you should get the scale denominator for your kit. Given that Revell was usually very good with their dimensions, that should work out very close to the actual scale of the kit. Hopefully. 
Russ
Thank you for your help Professor ! I fully share your idea that it’s one of the finest plastic ships ever produced. I bought one in mint condition for a very cheap price from e-bay a couple of years ago. Yet the size of the individual planks make me think that it’s somewhat a little smaller than 1/110. Perhaps 1/120 ? in any way she will make a good couple with airfix Cutty Sark as the two last wooden merchant sailers.
Cheers.
If this is the same kit they had back in the 1970s, then it was said to be 16" long overall. That’s what my old 1976 Revell catalogue says.
If that’s the case, then the scale of the Revell kit would be 1/123, using the overall length on the Model Shipways Morgan plans as a reference.
Russ
It’s easy enough (in the United States, at any rate; I have no idea what the situation may be in Turkey) to find accurate plans of the Morgan. Though I haven’t seen the Model Shipways plans, I’m sure they’re excellent. Mystic Seaport itself has commissioned a set, the most important of which are reproduced in the book Mystic Seaport Watercraft, by Maynard Bray et al. (It’s been through several editions; I’m pretty sure all of them contain the Morgan plans. Here’s a link to a dealer. Note that used copies of an earlier edition are available for as little as $2.00: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=Mystic+Seaport+Watercraft .) I believe the same Mystic plans also appear in John Leavitt’s book about the ship, used, paperback copies of which are also available for reasonable prices: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Charles-W-Morgan/John-F-Leavitt/e/9780913372104/?itm=7 . Again, though, I don’t know how difficult it may be to get copies of any of these books in Turkey. The shipping expenses may be problematic.
But we can’t resolve Kapudan’s original question without having a set of plans and the Revell kit in hand - which I don’t. On the basis of my highly unreliable memory, though, 1/123 certainly sounds reasonable.
Kapudan - if you have one of those kits, for heaven’s sake take good care of it. Apparently it’s pretty rare these days. I do wish Revell would reissue it.
Sumpter and Russ, thank you very much for your assistance. I also think that a scale around 1/120-130 is most certain for this extraordinary kit.
If I can find a clean, almost mint, used copy for just $2.00 I won’t miss it by any chance. I always need such good anthologies of ships.
In fact, to my opinion, any modeler intending to build a serious plastic sailer in scales 1/150 and above ought to acquire an accurate set of plans of the ship in hand. The rigging instructions provided by almost all plastic sailing ship producers are abysmal and ridiculously simplified; making the use of accurate plans a necessity. Of course the ambitious modeler can attempt to reproduce an accurate rigging in smaller scales, like 1/192 and 1/200 but personally I know full well that I will never even slightly approach to such skill [:)] Oh, and besides, well drawn plans are themselves a beautiful piece of art and artisanship as professor is used to say often [;)]
Don’t worry professor, I don’t have ANY intention to touch it until I’ll feel my skills are sharpened enough to build it as a worthy model [;)]
If that was the case with me, I would never get anything built! Well, I guess some of my models are worthy of the trash can.
Kapudan - Maybe you already know all of what follows, but just in case the literature available to you doesn’t cover them, here are a few important points for modelers of the Morgan to remember.
The Revell kit represents her quite accurately as she appeared in 1968; the designers obviously studied the real ship carefully and got excellent cooperation from the people at Mystic Seaport. At that time Mystic was presenting her to the public as they thought she had looked when she was built: as a full-rigged ship. She also had a row of false gunports painted on her hull. That was how generations of American ship lovers and tourists had come to think of her.
The researchers at Mystic found out, though, that the false ports had been painted on her sometime after her active whaling career ended. (As I understand it, nobody’s quite sure why they were added. She was used in the making of a silent movie, “Down to the Sea in Ships;” -one theory is that the moviemakers were responsible for the color scheme.) “Port-painting” was a common practice among American whalers, but research has established that the Morgan never had painted ports during her active career.
Some years after the Revell kit was released, during one of her numerous overhauls (she’s been stripped down to her bare frames at least four times in the forty years I’ve been visiting her), the management of Mystic Seaport decided to “reinterpret” the Morgan. The researchers had never been completely confident about all the details of her 1840s configuration; the documentation wasn’t good enough, for instance, to establish all the details of the rigging. They decided to restore her to the way she’d looked in the 1870s, toward the end of her career. They picked that period because they had a lot of photographs of her that had been taken at about that time.
She was removed from the solid bed of mud and cement where she’d been sitting for several decades, and hauled out of the water on Mystic’s “lift dock.” Virtually all of her hull and deck planking was replaced, and when she went back on public display, in 1983 she looked quite different from what people were accustomed to seeing. The painted ports were gone; the hull was painted black overall with white moldings. And she was rigged as a bark, with double topsails. The excellent Model Shipways kit shows her in that configuration: http://www.modelexpo-online.com/cgi-bin/sgin0101.exe?FNM=00&T1=MS2140&UID=2008050810092002&UREQA=1&TRAN85=N&GENP=
The good folks at ModelExpo have been nice enough to make the instruction book for the kit available for free download. It contains all sorts of information that would be valuable to anybody undertaking any sort of model of the Morgan.
How to build the Revell kit is, of course, entirely up to the individual modeler. There’s no denying that the ship looked great with painted ports - and the modeler would be fully justified in claiming that scheme is “authentic,” since she actually was painted like that for many years (after she retired from chasing whales). But the overall black scheme would a lot simpler. With an all-black hull and the spars provided in the kit, the model presumably would look about like the real ship did early in her career. Changing the kit’s single-topsail ship rig to the double-topsail bark rig she has now would be more challenging, but certainly practical - and would in some ways make the rigging job easier. The newer configuration also would help with those pieces of rigging that strike terror into the hearts of so many newcomers to sailing ship modeling: the ratlines. In the latter years of her career the ratlines on the Morgan’s lower masts took the form of wood battens, as they do today. They’d be relatively easy to represent with wire. (The ratlines on the topmast shrouds are still rope.)
I confess I am not among those purists who think antique plastic kits should be left in their boxes (preferably with the shrink-wrapping intact) and never built. If I had a Revell Morgan I wouldn’t hesitate to build it - though, like Kapudan, I’d be nervous that my modeling skills wouldn’t match the workmanship of those 1960s artisans who designed the kit and made the masters for it. I think future generations of modelers will look back on the first few years of the twenty-first century as a “golden age” of modeling. But the best of the Revell sailing ships from the 1950s and 1960s deserve just as much respect as the latest creations from Tamiya, Dragon, Trumpeter, Edouard, and their competitors.
Photos of the Morgan, in “Whale Ships and Whaling”, Albert Cook Church, Bonanza Books . New York, show her much as she looks, paint and rig, in the Model Expo pic. The exception is only one whaleboat on the starboard side(aft), and three on the port side. Not to discount that she may have carried her boats differently at some point in time.
Professor, thank you very much for the info ! I downloaded not only Morgan’s instruction sheet but those of others which are produced also in plastic, like Constitution, Bluenose etc. They will be invalubale help when I’ll build their kits. Thank you very much again!
Somewhat off topic, I just returned from a Maui vacation, wherein I find that their little port town of Lahaina is touted as the one-time whaling capital of the world, evidently due to the fact that humpbacks migrate through there. Being an ex-East Coast fella I thought that was a bit presumptuous- wouldn’t the title more fairly go to Nantucket or New Bedford?
I always take statements like that with a large grain of salt. The people making them are usually more interested in tourism than history.
In this particular case I guess the answer depends on how one defines “whaling capital.” Lahaina was, I believe, a regular port of call for whalers of all virtually all the whaling countries - not just the U.S. (The American whaling industry was the biggest in the world, but not the only one.) New Bedford and Nantucket presumably had shipyard facilities that Hawaii didn’t at that time. (I’m no expert on the nineteenth-century whaling industry, but I’ve never heard of a whaleship built in Hawaii.)
I have to confess that whaling has never been one of my favorite topics in maritime history. Even setting aside the environmental issues we know about today (which weren’t part of the thinking of whalers in the nineteenth century), it was a brutal, monotonous, dirty way to make a living. But there’s no denying its importance to the economy of the U.S. (and other places), and whaleships and whaleboats do make fascinating models.
My impression is that Hawaii was the wintering spot for whalers back in the day. It was a fairly easy sail from Alaskan and west coast whaling grounds to Hawaii. Specially before whalers started getting steam auxilary engines. Don’t quote me on this though. I lived in Sitka AK for 28 yrs. and picked that info up somewhere.
Interesting subject, not to go too far OT so I’ll keep it short. Whether on not is was the “whaling capital of the world” would be hard to say, though Wiki claims so. It functioned from the 1820s to the 1860s as a provisioning port, and has a really fine Roads, as it is sheltered by three islands. But activities there were primarily provisioning, there was no large onshore industrial presence, extensive wharfs or transhipping of oil that I’ve come across.
I spent a lot of time there in the 1960- 70’s when it was not something you would recognize today- still a sleepy little Hawaiin town.
My vote apropos of not much would be Nantucket and New Bedford. My family, through marriage goes back 15 generations on the island, and my surname is one that figures a bit in the Globe mutiny, although I hope there is no connection.
There were a couple of fake “whalers” in Lahaina over the years, both named the “Carthaginian”. The first, a wooden hulled Baltic ship which is the one I knew, was used in the movie “Hawaii” and shortly thereafter ran aground and was destroyed. The second was a steel hulled ship that was recently sunk to form an artificial reef.
Here are some 257 pictures of the C.W. Morgan
http://www.webshots.com/search?query=charles+w.+morgan+whaler&new=1&source=chromeheader
Also I was able to pick up a copy of “Down to the Sea in Ships” with Richard Widmark. About 90% of the movie is shot on a “boat” / Soundstage and in the water, a ton of detail shots. No one is releasing new versions of the movie, but you can go to eBay and do a search many folks dub copies to DVD from Video, that’s how I got mine. It was a very well dubbed copy, no problems.
Jake
Charles W. Morgan# # Late in 1840, Quaker whaling merchant Charles W. Morgan ordered a new whaleship from shipbuilders Jethro and Zachariah Hillman of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The American whaling industry was then approaching the peak of its prosperity, and New Bedford was the greatest whaling port in the world. Built at a cost of $48,849.85, the new ship was launched on 21 July 1841 and shortly thereafter was named for her owner. Her dimensions, as registered in 1867, are: length 105.6 feet, beam 27.7 feet, depth of hold 17.6 feet, gross tonnage 313.75. The ship’s length overall is 133 feet. Now, a century and a half after her launch, the whaleship Charles W. Morgan is the last survivor of a fleet that in 1846 numbered 736 vessels.# In the 1800s whaling was an essential industry, producing oil for lighting and for lubrication of machinery, spermaceti for candles, and flexible baleen from the mouths of toothless whales - called whalebone by whalermen - that was used in ways we would use plastic today. With the development and refinement of petroleum products as well as spring steel and plastic, however, the demand for whale oil and baleen decreased and the traditional American industry declined rapidly, coming to an end in the 1920s. More mechanized twentieth-century whaling methods used by other maritime nations so decimated the world’s whale population that, since 31 December 1971, whaling and the importation of whale products by U.S. firms hae been prohibited.# The Morgan is typical of the vessels built or adapted for use inthe American whaling industry. Her service was typical too. On her maiden voyage, which began 6 September 1841, she rounded Cape Horn and cruised the Pacific Ocean. Three years and four months later, laden with 2,400 barrels of oil and 10,000 pounds of whalebone (baleen) worth $56,068, she returned to New Bedford. During 80 years whaling she would make 37 voyages, ranging in length from nine months to five years. In all she brought home 54,483 barrels of oil and 152,934 pounds of whalebone. She cruised the length and breadth of the pacific, Indian and South Atlantic Oceans, surviving storms, ice and even a cannibal attack in the South Pacific.# During her career, the ship was home to more than 1,000 whalemen of all races and many nationalities. her crews averaged 33 men per voyage. Like many other whaleships, the Morgan sometimes served as home to the captain’s family. At least five of her 21 masters brought their wives and even children to sea with them.# After her whaling days ended, the Morgan was preserved by Whaling Enshrined Inc. under the leadership of Harry Neyland and Colonel E.H.R. Green, son of multi-millionairess Hetty Green. She was exhibited at Colonel Green’s estate, Round Hill, South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, until 1941. In November of that year the Morgan came to Mystic Seaport.# At Mystic Seaport, the Morgan was embedded in a sand berth. Then, late in 1973 she was removed from the sand, hauled on the Museum’s lift dock for bottom restoration, and moored afloat at Chub’s Wharf in the spring of 1974. Portions of the ship were rebuilt during her working years and the Museum continues this effort, replacing deteriorated sections using the same materials and methods. Over the years, almost all of the Morgan from the waterline up has been replaced. Below the waterline, much of the vessel is original. Relying largely on photographic evidence, the Seaport’s restoration shipyard has restored the Charles W. Morgan to the way she appeared ca. 1905.# The Charles W. Morgan’s hull, deck arrangement, and rig reflect the industry for which she was built. A whaleship had three functions. First, it was a mother ship to a fleet of six-man whaleboats, carried in davits along the rail, from which whales were chased, harpooned, killed and towed back to the ship. Second, it served as a factory ship, with a tryworks - furnace - for rendering oil from whale blubber. Third, a whaleship acted as an oil tanker, carrying home thousands of gallons of whale oil accumulated during the voyage.# The tryworks, located aft of the foremast, is the most distinguishing feature of a whaleship. In two cast-iron trypots set into this furnace of brick, iron and wood, oil was rendered from the blubber of whales, much as grease is rendered from frying bacon.# On the Morgan’s starboard (right) side is a removable section of the ship’s bulwarks and rail. When a whale was killed, it was lashed alongside, tail forward. On a platform called the cutting stage, suspended outboard of the opening in the bulwarks, the ship’s officers stood to cut away the whale’s blubber in one continuous strip called the blanker piece. Using the power of the windlass, a man-powered winch, and the mechanical advantage of the cutting tackles - pulleys - hanging from the mainmast, the crew peeled the blanket piece from the whale, brought it aboard, and lowered it into the blubber room.# Amidships is the mainmast, with a fife rail encircling the mast and bilge pumpsenditalid. Aft of the mainmast and steerage hatch is a slatted vegetable bin and a small deckhouse with a built-in bunk, added in 1875 by Captain John Tinkham for his young wife, who was prone to seasickness.# Bridging over the deckhouse and vegetable bin is the boat skid deck, for the storage of spare whaleboats and whaling gear. AFt of the deckhouse and the mizzen mast, a large skylight provides light and air for the officers’ quarters below.# At the sterm, enclosing the ship’s wheel, is the hurricane house, sometimes called the round house. The galley (kitchen) and bosun’s locker to starboard and the officers’ water closet and companionway (stairway) to port make up the “rooms” of the hurricane house.# The steering wheel, mounted on the tiller, controls the ship’s rudder with an arrangement of ropes and blocks. When the wheel is turned the tiller rope pulls the tiller, and wheel, to one side or the other; consequently, this simple, easily repaired steering system was called a “shincracker wheel.” The helmsman stood alongside the wheel facing forward, watching the compass int he after end of the skylight and the sails to follow the course given him.# The captain and the ship’s three mates had relatively comfortable quarters int he sterm of the ship. In the central room - the officers’ mess - the officers’ meals were served, usually in two shifts. The dining table is built around the mizzen mast. Aft of the mess is the captain’s day cabin, which served as the captain’s office and private living room.# Opening off the dya cabin on the starboard side is the captain’s stateroom. This cabin is furnished with a gimballed bed, which pivots to remain level when the vessel heels, added by Captain Thomas Landers for his wife in 1864. A telltale compass fastened on the overhead allowed the captain to check on the ship’s course even when in his bunk.# On the port (left) side of the officers’ mess two small staterooms houses the three mates. The first mate’s stateroom includes a small writing desk where the mate kept the chip’s official logbook.# On the starboard side forward of the officers’ mess is the pantry, which was used by the steward to serve out the officers’ food after it was cooked in the galley. Here also, officers’ crockery and utensils were stored along with staple foods and goods.# Forward of the mizzen mast, a bulkhead (wall) separates the officres’ area from the steerage, which contains the living quarters for the men with specialized duties or skills. These men included the fourth mate, the four or five boatsteerers (harpooners), and the cooper (barrel maker), carpenter, cook and steward.# Forward of the steerage is the blubber room, where the “blanket pieces” were cut into smaller “horse pieces.” After the horse pieces were slashed into “books” on the deck, they were ready for rendering in the trypots.# Forward of the blubber room, int he very bows of the ship, is the crew’s living quarters in the fo’c’sle (forecastle). Here, “before the mast,” lived from 22 to 25 sailors. With access and ventilation only through the companionway just aft of the foremast, the fo’c’sle was a dank, dark, smelly hole.# In the bottom of the ship is the lower hold, where the oil was stowed in wooden casks (barrels) of various sizes. The largest casks, called the “ground tier,” carried fresh water for the trip out to the whaling grounds, providing the ballast and drinking water. Once the hunt had begun, casks were filled with shale oil until the hold was full of tightly-wedged barrels of oil.# The Morgan was originally a full-rigged ship, with square sails on all three masts. In 1867, for the sake of economy, the square sails were removed from her mizzen mast, making her a bark. This rig, which she now carries, was typical of new Bedford whalers of the last half of the nineteenth century.# The Charles W. Morgan is the last survivor of her kind; a veteran of 80 years of hard service in an era of great change. Yet, through her half century on exhibit at Mystic Seaport, she has become more than a simple maritime artifact from the last century. She is an icon that serves to remind us of the sea’s elemental place in /American life, of maritime endeavors both brutal and courageous, and of the cooperative human spirit that could forge a shipboard community despite differences in race, background and language. The Morgan is not simply the last American whaler, she is an embodiment of many of the important elements of American social, economic and technological history in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.# The Charles W. Morgan was formally designated a National Historic Landmark by order of the Secretary of the Interior on 21 July 1967.
Have they ever sailed her, as was done with Constitution?
I agree with Prof Tilley on this one. While Lahaina and other Hawaiian ports were THE major reprovisioning port in the Pacific for the whalers, the ships, the oil, and more importantly, the money all went back to New Bedford (Nantucket faded out of the whaling business fairly early, as the harbor is too shallow for large whalers and it’s a pain to get ship-building materials there). Whalers of other nationalities would also stop off there from time to time, but as the Yankees had already sewed up all the markets, chandlery, etc, the prices for outsiders was pretty steep! A very large proportion of the white inhabitants on Hawaii were either whalers originally from New England, or missionaries from New England, which is why a lot of the very old houses there look so much like they belong in Salem, or Mystic, or some other New England seaport, and why there are so many Methodist and Congregational churches there as well. Of course, the common sailors on the whalers were not too keen on the missionaries arriving in force, as it tended to ruin ‘the local color’ of the place!
‘Rolling down to old Maui me boys, rollin’ down to old Maui… we’re homeward bound, from the Arctic ground, rollin’ down to old Maui!’