| home | the unicorn | contact me |

---

This site aims to provide information on the service history of the actual HMS Unicorn, whose naval drawings in F H Chapman’s Architectura Navalis Mercatoria ( 1768 ) were used by Corel of Milan to produce the wooden kit model of the frigate Unicorn.

The company Corel has no knowledge of the ship beyond what they state on the box and in the instruction booklet. ( personal correspondence with Corel, 2005). They based the design of their model kit on the lines of the naval drawing entitled Unicorn, on p.58 of Chapman’s groundbreaking book. Beyond that things become very confused. They say the ship was designed by Chapman in 1700, but Chapman was not born until 1725. Then they say that Chapman actually made the naval drawings that appear in his great collection of ship designs, the Architectura, when, in fact, these were copies of a British Admiralty drawing that may have been stolen by Chapman, when he was an young apprentice in the naval dockyards at Chatham in the 1740s – when, incidentally, he was briefly arrested as a foreign spy.

As to the actual ship that corresponded to the drawings that appear in Architectura, since the drawings are actually called Unicorn in Chapman’s collection, they must refer to a naval vessel by that name actually or very recently in commission at the time of publication, 1768. This rules out the Unicorn launched in 1776 ( too small anyway) and the Unicorn launched in 1794 ( I have no idea why they put the date 1790 on the model kit box itself). There were two ships commissioned as Unicorn in the 17th century English navy, but that is much too early. The most likely candidate seems to be the Unicorn launched in 1748 and in commission until 1771, when it was broken up. The significance of this ship is that it represented the first true frigate design in the Royal Navy.

In order to make a full service record of this particular Unicorn, which for the reasons given above I believe to be the actual ship corresponding to Corel’s model kit, I am visiting the National Archives in London, England, in order to photograph the captains’ logs for that ship. I will then convert these into an electronic record that can be transmitted by email.

If you would like to be part of a group of interested individuals who would ‘translate’ the handwritten journals into a typed record, please contact me and I will be in touch with you in order to transmit some part of the logs for you to work on.. Then we will put all the parts together to have a complete service record of the actual ship that corresponds to this beautiful model.