Scale: 1:48. A full hull model of a cutter (circa 1763). The model is decked, equipped and rigged. The vessel measures 53 feet on the main deck by 20 feet in the beam and is armed with twelve 3-pounders. The model was donated unfinished and was completed in the Museum in 1960.

Cutters were fast, easily handled craft. Large numbers of them were used by the revenue services for patrolling the coastline in search of smugglers. The Royal Navy used few cutters in peacetime, but in wartime hired or purchased them in great numbers. They were ideal to hunt down the privateers that swarmed in the Channel and North Sea, for they were fast, with a shallow draught that permitted them to work close inshore and in creeks and estuaries. The early cutter rig consisted of a large mainsail with gaff and boom, a square topsail, a foresail on the forestay and a jib at the end of the bowsprit.