Prompte-ly Stalled

My ideas about building Prompte are stalling out, purely because I can't fit my idea into the setting.

The fact is, even is Prompte's frame just sat there in Montreal moldering it got broken up for firewood (which it could have - I still don't know) if it had been finished, the Royal Navy would have taken it and ex-Provincial Marine men wouldn't have set foot on her.

There's a little room for "woops another frigate was built on the lakes and has slipped through history", because frankly everyone involved did a lot of lying, but if there had been another frigate, then the fact is it never did anything.

So without doing an alternate history scenario, which I'm neither prepared to do or knowledgeable enough to make good enough, there's no real way to squeeze this fantasy Canadian ship of mine in.

(An alternate history WOULD be fun, though. Yeo was to be replaced by Edward Owen, an altogether better officer from what I can gather. And while Owen was certainly not rash, I doubt he would have been so useless as Yeo was, and would have made a proper war of Lake Ontario - or at least helped Drummond.

That's another thing - Yeo rarely ever helped the rest of the war. I don't see Drummond as being, shall we say, responsive, to sending some of his militiamen to serve as Marines on this fantasy ship.

But then, Owen definitely wouldn't have given a ship to a Provincial Marine man. Yeo might have, if only out of spite. Though I still highly doubt that.)

So the fact is, while I still love Prince Regent and Princess Charlotte, and while Pysche's plans are ripe for building Prompte, I'm just not sure that that is a direction I want to go, anymore.

It might be better to just make up a ship for the Atlantic theatre. There were privateers there, lots in fact, but I would probably rather have it a Royal Navy ship, with a Canadian-born captain.

If I do that, then I have a few more pieces of information I need, and a few decisions to make. Would I rather a captured ship, or one built in Canada? (That is, fictionally built in Canada.) If it's built in Canada, it obviously can't have been built in Upper Canada, since you couldn't get out of the Lakes in those days. So, where did the British build ships in North Amercia? Halifax seems a likely candidate, though I haven't yet found any evidence of shipbuilding going on there during the War of 1812. But then, since the ship I intend to build wouldn't have really existed, that's fine, isn't it?

Well, the North American station headquarters had left Halifax for Bermuda long before the War, so that may be a better birthplace for the ship... even though it's not Canadian. :'(

Bermuda seems to have had several naming schemes. Fish, then women, then flowers... and never built anything with more than 18 guns. Then again, Bermuda sloops were impressive little ships, for their purpose. No shame in commanding one.

But you know what, I might just make this fictional ship a captured Dutch ship built in Rotterdam.

Okay, now that my loggerhea is at an end, I guess I'll go look for plans of Dutch ships?