Hats of the American Revolution

[doowopapocalypse]

I'm going back and forth on picking up a few Napoleonic naval figures, hoping to work them as late AWI sailors. However, two I'm looking at have top hats, which don't seem a particularly period headdress. However, my weak google-fu turns up this image

in an article about armed whaleboat raiders off Long Island.

Can I make the top hats work? Or are they hopeless?

[TheWeasel]

Hello,

I have not seen much precedence for top hats pre 1790s based on contemporary depictions, but you could probably get away with the odd top hat. A good resource I follow is this blog: http://britishtars.blogspot.com/

More commonly, they would wear simple knit caps, or else a tarred hat with a shorter crown (such as the standing oarsman is wearing in your image) . In fact., you could fairly easily cut down top hatted models to represent tarred hats. Heck, as tarred hats, they'd even look good if they're somewhat rough looking...

Hope this is helpful, and please do post images as you work on this!

[doowopapocalypse]

Thanks Weasel, very helpful!

[rumacara]

Galloping major launched a pre order of 18th century sailors that work fine for the AWI.
There are images here in LAF and his web page.
Might be usefull to see.