Queen Anne's Revenge

[zaknesbitt]

What about the queen anne's revenge, it is of the period.

can we do it?

[Marion vanGhent]

Got plans?

[zaknesbitt]

nope

we need to find some

[Oneyed Willy]

I can't actually find what kind of ship it is exactly. I could find what it used to be called and who it used to belong to, but not what it was. I know Blackbeard added more guns when he captured it, but how many guns were there in the first place? If they make this it would be a pirate SOL lol

[zaknesbitt]

It was a french frigate merchantman, 20 guns, blackbeard added 20 making it a 40 gunner

[Oneyed Willy]

Originally Posted by zaknesbitt It was a french frigate merchantman, 20 guns, blackbeard added 20 making it a 40 gunner

Nice, so you are hoping for the plans for the modified frigate, not nessecarily the frigate merchantman itself?

[Shane1701]

Well the merchantman would be a start....

[Marion vanGhent]

I've never seen any reconstructed plans of QAR. I've seen representations based on erroneous interpretations of the description of La Concorde as being outfitted en flûte -- i.e. depicting her as a fluyt, which she was not

I do know of the best extant resource for learning about period French merchant ships: Jean Boudriot's Le Navire Marchand, Ancien Régime. It's not been translated into English yet, but the book is worth its (considerable!) weight in gold to francophones studying French naval architecture. The Oliphant was designed from scratch based primarily on information from this book.

The centrepiece of Le Navire Marchand is the hypothetical merchant Mercure, a nominally 20-gun ship that would be suited to the West Indies trade. She's smaller than the QAR by a handful of metres, but Boudriot himself has said that the QAR would have looked and been constructed very much like Le Mercure. (Sorry that I don't remember where I read that quote, but it was on a ship model building forum; EDIT: Possibly quoted from an issue of Mariner's Mirror or a similar periodical, come to think of it.)

Le Mercure herself is too small to be fitted with a 2nd tier of guns: though pierced with 20 gunports, in reality she would normally carry no more than 16 6-pdrs. Because of her size, the lower deck is a bit too close to the waterline to make a 2nd tier feasible. Scaling her up would probably not solve the problem and would distort her proportions, so any QAR based off Le Mercure would need to be designed basically from the keel up.

That's the best I know of, and Le Mercure should be used as a gold standard for anyone searching for ready-made QAR plans. As someone who owns a copy of the book I'm happy to help clarify anything I can for those borrowing it from a library or purchasing it for themselves, but as it is I'm a bit overbooked with existing ship projects to even think of designing my own Concorde/Queen Anne's Revenge. Should anyone else wish to try, I'm more than happy to vet your preliminary plans, so long as you've done your homework and done your best to understand the myriad drawings and sometimes labyrinthine technical French used in the book

[KrisWood]

To simplify what Marion said into lubberish, the QAR was a french guineaman - that is, a small west indiaman designed for the african slave trade. They were superficially identical to an indiaman but typically small and built to carry a lot of human cargo and the necessary supplies.

The difficulty in reconstructing the Concorde is that there are very limited resources for french merchant ship construction of the early 18th century. She would have been much lighter built than navy frigates of her day (less armour, less frame timbers, less guns), and built along different lines.

That's about all I can really add to Marion's excellent post. Le Mercure is the only french merchant vessel I've seen plans for in the game's time period.

[sbzsat1]

4. Queen Anne's Revenge: Ship (Fluyt?); Length: 31.4m; Beam: 7.5m; Depth of hold: 4.1m; 200 tons; Comp.: 125; Armament: 36 guns?; England; 1710

Originally called La Concorde, she was captured in 1717 by the Bahamian pirate Edward Teach a.k.a. Blackbeard who re-named her Queen Anne's Revenge. The Queen Anne's Revenge was lost when she ran (intentionally?) aground on a sandbar near Topsail-Inlet off the North Carolina coast and was possibly re-discovered in 1997.


From this thread: http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33637