The HMS Surprise: Dedicated to discussion of all things related to the Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian.

The group is also dedicated to the H.M.S. Surprise replica. The former H.M.S. Rose, a replica of a mid-eighteenth century Royal Navy frigate, was built in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia in 1970 by Newport Historian John Fitzhugh Millar, using original construction drawings from 1757, which were obtained from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. Though replicating a British ship she is documented and registered as an American ship. She spent the first ten years of her existence in Newport, Rhode Island, after which she was purchased by Kaye Williams and brought to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Mr. Williams formed the H.M.S. Rose Foundation, a nonprofit group that restored the ship to sailing condition. In 1990 she toured the Great Lakes and in 1991 sailed the East Coast while displaying Rhode Island's original draft of the Bill of Rights. She was purchased for Peter Weir’s production of the film Master and Commander, which starred Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey. Subsequently the re-named H.M.S. Surprise was sold to the to the Maritime Museum of San Diego as a display vessel (with an option that she be made available to 20th Century Fox if a sequel is ever made).

Topics: Napoleonic wars, history, naval history and fiction, British Navy.