"HMS" Surprise is a modern tall ship, built at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada as Rose in 1970 to a Phil Bolger design based on the original 18th-century British Admiralty drawings. She is based on, a 20 gun sixth-rate frigate built in 1757.Rose was built at the Smith and Rhuland shipyard in Lunenburg, a yard which had established a reputation for large and successful replicas such as HMS Bounty in 1960 and Bluenose II in 1963.The ship was inspected and certified by the United States Coast Guard. She spent the first ten years of her life in Newport, Rhode Island sailing in Newport Harbor and as a dockside attraction. In 1985, already in serious disrepair, she was purchased by Kaye Williams and brought to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and operated as a sail training vessel in the 1980s and 1990s, run by the HMS Rose Foundation based in Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States. Although she is known by the prefix HMS, meaning Her (or His) Majesty's Ship, she is not, and had never been, commissioned in the Royal Navy and therefore had no right to use this prefix.
