HMS Rose

The Frigate HMS ROSE reproduction (courtesy of Fine Model Ships)

In 1969, shortly after our honeymoon in Mexico, my wife and I traveled with our 1967 Volvo from Central Illinois to Nova Scotia, Canada, on an extended vacation.  We had our 1949 Grumman aluminum canoe mounted on the car's roof rack and traveled the full extent of Nova Scotia from the Cape Bretton Highlands Provincial Park in the North, through most of the coastal ocean communities on the Southeastern side of the peninsula, through Halifax, where the Commonwealth Games were being celebrated, and then further Southeast through Lunenburg and out to Oak Island, and then over to the Port-Royal National Historic Site on the Bay of Fundy and many other places in between.

It was while we were in Lunenburg that we first encountered the construction of the reproduction of the Frigate HMS Rose at the Smith and Rhuland shipyard located there.  The original HMS Rose was a 20 gun frigate of the British Navy, built in Hull, England in 1757. She served in the Channel, the Caribbean, and in North America.  Her activities in suppressing smuggling in the colony of Rhode Island provoked the formation of what became the Continental Navy, the precursor of the modern United States Navy. She was based at the North American station in the West Indies and then used by the British in the American Revolutionary War. She was scuttled in the harbor of Savannah, Georgia in 1779.

The replica of the HMS Rose we saw under construction in 1969 was built based upon the original British Admiralty plans with some modifications to make her handle better, and she launched from Lunenberg in 1970. She was used for display and sail training until about 1984. Thereafter, she was sold and her homeport was moved to Captain's Cove in Bridgeport, CT, in anticipation of her use in the Operation Tall Ships as part of the 1976 United States Bicentennial Celebration, and displayed as a museum ship and used for sail training. I encountered her again at her Captain's Cove berth and toured her for the first time shortly after she arrived at Captain's Cove.  In 2001 she was purchased by 20th Century Fox Studios and sailed to San Diego, CA, where she was refitted as a reproduction of the HMS Surprise and was used to make two movies: “Master and Commander: Far Side of the World” starring Russell Crowe, and "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"

In 2007, she was sold to the San Diego Maritime Museum and reconstructed and used for sailing.