Earlier this week, the folks at Charter Books collaborated with IRYS for a showing of Master and Commander: The Far Side of The World at the Jane Pickens Theater. Will Sofrin, author of his new book, All Hands On Deck, was present and signed copies of the thrilling account of their restoration and sailing of HMS Rose from Newport to California, where she became the floating set for the Master and Commander film.
HMS Surprise is a modern tall ship built at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1970 as HMS Rose to a design based on the original 18th-century British Admiralty drawings of HMS Rose, a 20-gun sixth-rate post ship from 1757.
The ship was meant to be a close replica of the original Rose, but still fill a commercial function. She spent the first ten years of her life in Newport sailing in Newport Harbor and as a dockside attraction. She sailed among the tall ships during the bicentennial and then largely sat tied up, falling into disrepair.
In 1984, already in serious disrepair, she was purchased and brought to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and operated as a sail training vessel in the 1980s and 1990s, run by the HMS Rose Foundation. The ship was sold to the 20th Century Fox film studio in March 2001, and underwent extensive modifications to be used in the making of the film , in which she portrayed the Royal Navy frigate HMS Surprise with a story based on several of the books by Patrick O’Brian.
Sofrin was joined onstage for a panel discussion by “the happy band of misfits” as he called them, the crew that served to sail HMS Rose the 6,000 miles from Newport to San Diego. Most had not seen one another in the last 20 years. Sofrin talked about how he began his work on the ship and then gave a detailed account of their transit with a masterful video to reinforce his experience. A hurricane-force storm off Cape Hatteras nearly halted the journey as they were forced to dismast. One of the women stated that as a young person, she “didn’t know what she didn’t know” and put her stock and security in Captain Richard Bailey. His knowledge, confidence, and demeanor allowed for the crew to keep focus and achieve the mission even when facing disaster on the high seas.
The high point of the evening came when one of the women was asked by the crew to recount the details of that night when the film company had a party where Russell Crowe was present. He was reportedly being unkind and chided her: “Oh, you think you are a sailor” to which she responded, “Oh, you think you are an actor?” It went downhill from there. Things escalated after Crowe allegedly threw a man over the bar, and our heroine grabbed Crowe from behind, put him in a full nelson, and arrested him to the floor. The crew had various versions that they recalled. The 20 minutes spent before intermission was filled with memories and laughs. Following intermission, the showing of Master and Commander concluded the evening.
