Hail Caesar!

Once of the nice things about having a large collection of ships is that you can occasionally buy something for a specific scenario.  This post is about one of those specialty ships.

One of the scenarios that I like to run at conventions is the Battle of Cape Ortegal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cape_Ortegal).  If you leave out the British frigates, it's a nice 4 ships per side game, and can be pretty straightforward where victory conditions are concerned.  The ships are also pretty straightforward; 1 British 80 and 3 74's versus 1 French 80 and 3 74's.  What makes the scenario unique is that the British 80-gunner isn't a French prize, as one might expect.  Instead, she is a one-off design known as HMS Caesar.

Launched in 1793, Caesar was about as big as you could build a wooden warship at the time.  She measured 181 feet on the gundeck, compared to 168 feet for a Common class 74 gun ship of the line.  At Caesar's size, designers had to worry about the hull deforming due to the mere length of the vessel, even without the added weight of armaments.  USS Constitution is almost as long, at 175 feet on the gundeck.  Her designer, Joshua Humphreys, included diagonal braces called "riders" inside the hull that help prevent the hull from distorting.

Overall, Caesar's career was active but not particularly spectacular.  She was ordered in 1783, laid down in 1786, and launched in 1793.  She saw combat in 1794, 1801, 1805 and 1809 before being being converted to a depot ship in 1814 and finally broken up in 1821.  While she seems young to be taken out of service (21 years) compared to others (HMS Victory was already 28 years old when Caesar was launched), the numbers are a little misleading.  Caesar spent only two years out of service during her lifetime (1803-1805) whereas Victory was laid up several times (1765-1778, 1787-1792, 1799-1803, 1806-1808, 1813-1823) .  It's not exactly a fair comparison, as First Rates like Victory was expected to be taken out of service when the need for them wasn't pressing.  Still, even if you don't count anything before 1799, Victory spent about half of Caesar's active life in ordinary.

Given that she was active pretty continuously during the Napoleonic Wars, you'd think that there would be lots of paintings of her.  You'd also be wrong.  In searching for pictures to use as a painting guide, I found exactly two.  They are:

Listed as "Caesar engaging Mont Blanc"

"Strachan's Action After Trafalgar, Bringing Home the Prizes, HMS Caesar"

 Frankly, I don't think the top one is very helpful.  In the second one, the prize looks a lot like a three-decker and there weren't any of those at the engagement.  It does provide a good view of a British warship though, and the damage does correspond to what was reported for Caesar, which means that I am probably wrong on identifying the French ship.  So, I decided to go with this one.  Below are the pictures of my completed model.

Since there hasn't been a shot on here with the Quarter of Comparison in a while, I've also included one of those below.

To try and give you an idea of how much larger this ship is than other third rates, I've put some pictures of her with other British 74 gun ships of the line.  The first one has a British 74 Common class compared to Caesar.

74 Common on the left, Caesar on the right.  The difference between the white marks
is about 20-25 scale feet.

Next, a 74 Large class is compared to Caesar, and comes up short, albeit not as much.

74 Large on the left.  Remember that 1 millimeter in this scale is 4 feet.  That makes the difference
about 8 scale feet.  Not as short as the 74 Common, but still shorter than Caesar.

Finally, here's a shot of all three ships together.

L to R:  74 Common, 74 Large, HMS Caesar.

Just to be clear, the base is the same size (40 mm wide by 75 mm long) for all three ships.  Obviously, there's some variation as to just where I glue the ships on the bases!  That's why they are lined up by the blue lines on the stern.  The white lines mark where the ship's bow enters the water.