A while ago, I read Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass, and, while overall a very good book, the naval (so to speak) battles stuck in my head. After that I got into some "flintlock fantasy" - what if Napoleon had wizards, essentially - and then in my need for more naval battles, the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. And boy, ships are neat!
But, being the proud Canadian I am, I wanted to go looking for Canadian ships.
Turns out they pretty much stopped making ships like that by the time we were a country.
Still, some were BUILT here, at least. Unfortunately, no models exist of them - that is, no gaming-scale models. There's a few in museums.
I recalled having seen Age of Sail gaming, and so I went looking for custom ships. I came across Vol's Miniature's excellent work, and got inspired. Unfortunately, the ships I had in mind did not have complete deckplans available.
Enter the Psyche.
There ARE complete plans for this ship, which means I can build it. (Or try to, anyway.) Psyche missed the War of 1812, and only sailed in the Great Lakes. But what's of interest to me is her sister, Prompte, which never sailed at all.
During the War of 1812, the Admiralty eventually decided Canada couldn't/wasn't building ships very well, and indeed they weren't. There just wasn't the proper, dry lumber available. (Funny to think of Canada not having enough lumber, right?)
To remedy this, the Royal Navy built ship "kits" out of fir in Britain, where of course there was an abundance of ship-building industry. Unfortunately, the news didn't reach the colony, and Kingston set to work on several more ships of their own. Two ingenious frigates and then a first-rate ship of the line.
Despite these ships being incredibly clever, they were poorly built from inferior materials, and the general feeling was they would only have a short life. The frigates, Prince Regent and Princess Charlotte, only engaged in one action, and the first-rate, St Lawrence, never fired her guns in anger.
But, the kits from Britain, two frigates and two smaller ships, had reached Montreal by then. That was as far as they could go, and no plans had been made to take them overland. Eventually, though, one of the frigate kits reached Kingston, about the time St Lawrence was finished, and she was assembled.
HMS Psyche was laid on Halloween, launched on Christmas, and missed the war entirely.
As to her sister, the ironically named Prompte, I can find no information after the kit reached Montreal.
To that end, I intend to make a model, using Psyche's plans since the two ships were of a like, of the Prompte. The little bit of story behind it will be that a Canadian in the Royal Navy, following the War of 1812, purchased the kit, saw it finished, crewed it with men from the defunct Provincial Marine (a colonial navy that existed on the Great Lakes from about the 1790s to the War of 1812, whenupon it was replaced by the Royal navy), and sailed as a privateer for Britain.
Not altogether realistic, but not entirely impossible, either.
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