1/200 Flore Américaine 1784 (Lindberg)
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by Dave Busch |
1/200 Flore Américaine 1784 (Lindberg)
Rather than refer to this great Lindberg model kit as the "Jolly Roger (it's most recent name) I would prefer to refer to this ship as either how it was originally marketed by Lindberg: "the French Ship La Flore"… or as "Flore Américaine" or even by it's original name when it was built; "Vestale": a Blonde-class 30-gun frigate of the French Navy built in 1756.I have chosen to portray her as Flore Américaine. A French Navy frigate of 1784 … flying the tricolor ensign, the Banner of France on the foremast and a French Navy pennant on the main. (To be honest, I'm not sure I can even claim that the Flore Américaine looked exactly like this … but for my simple-minded purposes, it did! I could probably say it was the Flore of 1789!)
The cool thing is, because of this ship's fascinating history, modelers can portray, or simply imagine, this ship as being French, British or even as a privately owned privateer.
So… why Flore Américaine? And not La Flore or even Vestale? Well, it's complicated.
A lot of discussion on the history of this ship can be found on the web… but I think the general consensus is this: The French ship Vestale was captured by the British frigate HMS Unicorn in January 1761. Vestale was then recommissioned as HMS Flora. She served in the Royal Navy under Captain John Brisbane and was scuttled in Newport Rhode Island in August of 1778 to avoid French recapture. She was then salvaged by the Americans in 1780, re-fitted, sold back to the French Navy in July 1784, where she was known as Flore Américaine, to distinguish her from Flore, another French ship that had been built since.
The French Navy refitted her between January and May 1786. Which apparently, helped improve her fine sailing qualities. While cruising off Africa between 1787 and 1789, her captain reported, "she steered well and heeled less than any warship in Europe".
In 1787 Flore Americaine was renamed Flore. The next year the Navy re-rated her as a corvette, and rearmed her with 8-pounder guns. The French Navy struck her from the lists and hulked her at Rochefort in May 1789, disarming her some two years later, and then selling her on 4 July 1792 to Sieur Faure de Rochefort for use as a privateer out of Bordeaux. Her new, private owners, renamed her Cityonne Française in April 1793.
The French Navy requisitioned her in August, but then returned her again… to her former owners in December 1795. Her owners again deployed her as a privateer.
On September 8, 1798, Captain Robert Stopford of the HMS Phaeton, along with HMS Anson, captured her after a 20-hour chase. She was eight days out of Boulogne on a cruise. Soon after, she was sold in Admiralty Court and broken up.
There are four paintings of her in British service by Francis Holman in the Peabody Museum in Salem, Ma. and there are two wooden models of her, one at "the Musee de la Marine" in Paris and one which was given to President John F. Kennedy by the French Minister of Culture when President and Mrs. Kennedy Visited France in the early 1960's. The second model is in the collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
I believe the Lindberg Jolly Roger was, as were most of their ship kits, an old Pyro kit.
On a side note, this ship is very similar to the French ship Hermione; a recently constructed exact replica of the Concorde class frigate of the French Navy that ferried General Lafayette to the United States in 1780 for support to the rebels in the American Revolutionary War… and which just recently toured the east coast of the US in summer 2015.
