Scale: 1:48. A contemporary block design model of the fifth rate ‘Phoenix’ (1759), a 44-gun, small two-decker. The name ‘Phoenix’ is on the stern. The gun ports are painted on the side of the hull in red. The figurehead has been carved approximately to shape out of a solid block.

The ‘Phoenix’ measured 141 feet along the gun deck by 37 feet in the beam, displacing 856 tons. Commissioned in 1759, it spent the next two decades sailing between Africa, North America and the Caribbean. It had its hull coppered in 1779 – a relatively new technique employed to protect the underwater hull from the attack of marine boring worms, molluscs and weed growth. In the same year it sailed to the West Indies in convoy. In 1780 it foundered in a hurricane off Cuba.