Maritime History Article

History

Ancient Egypt

The Ancient Egyptians were first to carve detailed ship models. It was a common aspect of the Egyptian funeral practice to include highly accurate and detailed, painted, sycamore wood models of a ship, and crew, intended to transport the soul of the deceased to the next world or afterlife. These models, which may be almost 5000 years old, are truly remarkable in their state of preservation. Since the models usually show the crew, in their respective places, these models have been useful in understanding the actual duties of the crew members, what they wore, and how the ship would be steered. Much of what we know today about ancient seafaring has come to use from these models. The British Museum, The Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many museums, world-wide, display extensive public collections of these ritual boats.

Ship models created in more recent times

Some of the oldest ship models, still surviving, have been those of early craft such as Galleys, Galleons, and possibly Carracks, dating from the 12th through the 15th centuries and found occasionally mounted in churches, where they were used to bless the ships and those who sailed in them. Other rare and often very crudely built models of that time period have found their way into collections at various museums around the world.

Despite the fact that some fine artists painted and sculpted masterpieces of architecture and the human and animal form, it seems that no truly representative drawings of ships seems to have survived from this period. Most surviving pictures or engravings are apparently greatly out of scale, although like maps of that period, they were greatly decorated with drawings of real and imagined sea monsters, leaving the nautical historian very little to work with.

Through the earlier centuries, and even into the 18th century, virtually all small craft and many of the larger ships were built without any formal plans being drawn. Shipwrights were apprenticed to their craft at an early age and the art was passed down from father to son. Ship models were being built by designers of large ships primarily to show their prospective customers how the full size ship would appear, and also to introduce advanced building techniques. Few shipping merchants could read a construction draft, and still fewer individuals were sufficiently advanced in the art of drafting or the mathematics necessary to that art. Add to that the fairly primitive method of paper making, with its acidic product tending to discolor and disintegrate, and you will understand why so few ship's plans survived outside of the Royal Shipyard in England, which to this day is a major source of information on ships of the earlier centuries.

Ship models often referred to as Admiralty or Shipyard models were built either before or during construction of many 18th and 19th century warships. Although many of these models did not illustrate the actual construction timbering or framing, they did illustrate the form of the hull and usually had great detail of the deck furnishings, masts, spars, and general configuration. Some of these grand models were decorated with carvings of great beauty and were evidently constructed by teams of artisans. The labor they represent would have taken an individual many years to complete, providing you could ever find a competent ship modeler who was also capable of such fine carving. They served to educate the non-seafaring types who were involved in the financing or some other aspect of the ship, to avoid construction errors that might have evolved as the ship itself took form, and more importantly, to demonstrate what a thing of beauty the real ship would be.

During the several wars between France and England, seamen who were taken prisoner were confined, sometimes for many years, and in their boredom, sought relief by building ship models from scraps of wood and bone. This evolved into an art form and the models were sold to the public, which responded by supplying the prisoners with ivory so that the models would be all the more decorative. Rigging was made of human hair, horsehair, silk, or whatever other fine material could be obtained. For the most part, the models had carved wooden hulls covered with thin veneers of bone or ivory, and other parts of the model such as masts and spars were also carved from bone and ivory. To this day they remain highly sought after, valuable collectibles.

Ship modeling got off to a rather slow start in the United States. Many of the older models from the turn of the century, 1900 on, were models built by seamen who whiled away their off-duty hours whittle models of ships they were serving on. Few home craftsmen of the time attempted ship models because of lack of information other than an occasional sketch or photogravure in the local paper. In the mid 1920s, ship model kits were introduced to the public and cast lead parts such as anchors, deadeyes, and rigging blocks became available. Magazines carried advertisements for these items, and the home craftsmen of the U.S. began to respond.

The big modeling boost came early in the 1930s when Popular Science magazine began to publish a series of articles and plans of famous ships by E. Armitage McCann. This was the true beginning of ship modeling as a popular hobby. It was also the beginning of nautical research as we know it today, an attempt by model craftsman to upgrade their work by researching newly available documents to determine the historical correctness of the models they were building.

Today there exist national and international sources of ship's plans, information as to dimensions, construction techniques, types of wood and other materials to use in the building of models. There are numerous books and periodicals devoted to the craft, and ship model clubs are now found in many cities around the world.

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Ship Models

Ship Models