ROCHEFORT, France -- Aug. 5 turns out to be the hottest day of the year in this river port linked to the Atlantic Ocean in France's Charente-Maritime region, but Cornell alumna Margaret (Peggy) Bratley Mamet, Class of '59, and her family don't let it deter their tour of L'Hermione, the life-size replica of the Marquis de Lafayette's (1757-1834) 18th-century fighting frigate.

A team of about a dozen workers is painstakingly constructing the ship in a plan to help revive Rochefort as a tourist attraction. A bustling shipbuilding center when ships had sails, the city declined after France closed its arsenal here in the 1920s, and much of its port was destroyed by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Mamet and her husband, Bernard, have traveled about 110 miles from their home in the Vienne River Valley near Chinon for a guided tour of the ship's progress. It is their third such visit. The air is heavy with the smells of sun-baked woodchips and tar. Donning yellow hardhats, the group, which includes several more family members and about a dozen others, gamely descends a rudimentary staircase leading to the interior of the ship's hull. It is cooler below but also darker, almost otherworldly, with supporting beams of wood resembling the vertebrae and ribs of a whale.

When finished in about 2011, the 145-foot, three-masted, 32-gunned sailing ship will follow in the wake of Lafayette's 1780 voyage aboard the first L'Hermione to Boston to inform Gen. George Washington's army that France would be sending more ships and soldiers to support their revolutionary war against the British. "France was anti-English and wanted revenge for past attacks," explains Bernard Mamet.

The estimated cost of the replica is about $22 million. Unlike the original Hermione, which Louis XVI paid for, this ship depends mostly on private donations, which have been slow in coming. But The New York Times recently ran a feature story about the ship and its most illustrious passenger, Lafayette, whom it dubbed "the founding father of French-American friendship."

Now the project is beginning to attract interest outside France, and hopefully, donations will follow, says a buoyant Peggy Mamet. She joined the Hermione-Lafayette Association soon after retiring to central France in 1999, after a career in the sciences at the University of Montreal.

"I thought the project was very interesting," she reports. "I told them I wanted to be on the boat here in Rochefort and then be in Boston to greet it."

To replicate the frigate exactly, the team involved in the project looked at the remains of the actual Hermione, which sank off the coast of Brittany in 1793 and was recovered in 1992, the ship's log books and blueprints of a sister ship, drawn by Britain's Royal Navy after that ship's capture.

Lafayette was not the captain of L'Hermione, explains the Aug. 5 tour guide in French. Rather he was a privileged passenger who wined and dined with the captain and officers during the 38-day voyage. The crew, apparently, had to content themselves with sea-weevil-infested biscuits.

According to the online guide to the Lafayette Collection in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, the Marquis de Lafayette, a young French aristocrat from the rural Auvergne region, made his first trip to the American colonies in 1777 in another ship, La Victoire, in hopes of gaining the king's favor for his exploits. He served in the Continental Army, was wounded in the battle of Brandywine and survived the winter at Valley Forge alongside Washington. Initially viewed as a hero in France when he returned, he advocated for the rights of man early in the French Revolution. But his sympathy toward the king and later support for the monarchy brought criticism from ordinary Parisians.

"While Lafayette was not a major figure in French history, he is certainly important to Americans," comments Peggy Mamet. "He played a particular role in U.S. history and led the French to support the American cause."

She plans to return to campus for her 50th reunion in June 2009 and hopes to spread the word among her classmates and others about L'Hermione. "I want to let Americans know about this huge French initiative and that it would be wonderful if they can help financially, be involved and be there to welcome it," she says. After its maiden voyage to Boston, L'Hermione II will sail back to Rochefort and remain there as a tourist attraction.

Freelancer Linda Myers is a former writer for the Cornell Chronicle.