" ITVx is currently streaming the old Hornblower series. It provides a handy backdrop for my painting, as my usual poison, Turkish TV, requires me to read the subtitles. It's a cracking series, first shown in 1998. They used three actual sailing ships and eleven scale models for the bigger battle scenes. It inspired me to start a book that has been languishing on my to-read pile for some time, which I picked up in a second-hand bookshop. This is Tom Wareham's study of frigate command in the Napoleonic Wars.
I read a lot of books about the Royal Navy, particularly frigates, while researching my book on HMS Ambuscade. The first British-built HMS Ambuscade, a 32-gun frigate, fought in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It had a mixed war, being captured and then recaptured. The frigate in the age of sail was the Royal Navy's glamour ship, big enough to carry significant firepower but fast enough to evade larger enemies. They were the light cavalry of the seas, patrolling, scouting and above all, fighting. As Admiral Nelson said, they were ‘the eyes of the fleet'.
There are many books about frigates, but most understandably focus on the frigate actions. Individual frigate-versus-frigate actions were actually rare; more typically, they were involved in capturing smaller ships and merchantmen. Battles between frigate squadrons were even rarer, one exception being the Battle of Lissa, which I covered in my book on the Napoleonic Wars in the Adriatic…"
Balkan Wargamer
link
Armand
shares his techniques for painting, rigging and basing Age of Sail warships.
