POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Notes

This ship model was probably made by a Napoleonic prisoner-of-war, c.1800. From 1792 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the British were almost continuously at war with France (D. Moss "Fortunes of War" in Women's Journal, October 1985; p.208). During the drawn-out campaigns against Napoleon, about 100,000 French were captured. They were initially locked into the hulks of old ships moored at naval bases like Chatham and Portsmouth in England, but when these became overcrowded, many were moved to castles as far afield as Porchester and Edinburgh in Scotland (ibid. p.208). Eventually, special prisons had to be built. Among these were the Norman Cross near Peterborough and the Princeton on Dartmoor. Many of these prisoners were not 'ordinary', in the sense that they included artisans who would have almost undoubtedly been responsible for making ship models such as this one. The prisoner-of-war models (which also included decorative trinket boxes, toys and buttons) were produced from scratch under extremely difficult conditions. They did not use the aids of official draughts or plans and constructed the models out of either bone or wood. A common feature among prisoner-of-war models is the 'over engineering' of the vessel designs. In other words, elements such as studding sail booms were added onto the model, even though they were not necessarily present on the real thing. The process of construction of the bone ship models was intricate and complex. The prisoners obtained the bone from their staple meal of mutton stew (which came served with the bone) and made it pliable by submerging it in wet clay for prolonged periods. Bone models were usually constructed on the basis of a shaped hull or matrix, hollowed out down to main or orlop deck level and covered over with exquisitely formed little planks of bone secured with tiny copper rivets. Planking rivets and such features as mast-hoops, rudder-pintles and gudgeons and stunsail-boom 'irons' were made from gold beaten out (the gold would have come from the prisoner's earrings or finger rings) and fashioned to the correct shape. The rigging was made from fine silk and 'laid' into miniature rope with horsehair and human hair pressed into service. Despite the sheer craftsmanship and skill involved with the bone ship models, they still feature some inaccuracies. Apart from their 'over engineering', the underwater lines of the vessel were also usually misrepresented (appearing too fine); head timbers were distorted and compressed to an extraordinary degree; gun decks were occasionally compressed down too far and they were sometimes also overmasted. Other differentiations between ship models can be attributed to the involvement of many prisoners on one individual model. For instance, it was common that one man produced the hull, while another was responsible for the rigging and so forth. Thus, variations in the quality and level of detail could possibly be seen as a result of that individual's ability and knowledge.