Medieval and renaissance sailing ships..Confessions of a non-modeller!

Modeling Subjects Ships
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Well, the previous thread regarding galleons has forced me to reveal my model list of the sailing ships that I have intended to use for painting historical seascapes at some point in the future. While I have not yet done all of the reading and research on each of these ship types, they are waiting to be put together at some point in the future to represent generic ships of various eras in broader seascapes or generic harbor scenes. I thought that I would “bite the bullet” and see which of these should be trashed, which should be put way off into the distance of the painting, and which were reasonably accurate for the era or should be changed on the canvas.

Academy- Roman Warship…sounds as if this model would be too short.

Heller -William the Conqueror…I understand that the bow is not correct and that the ship is too short.

Trumpeter- Zheng Ho Treasure Ship…I knew that this would be speculative but there is no documentation regarding the architecture or size or the various ships of the Zheng Ho fleets and it would be something to at least represent one type of ship and to see the basic perspectives first hand. Its hard to reconstruct an entire fleet of ships from just a 39 foot long rudder and traditional building practices alone.

Zvezda- Crusader Cog…Just got this one and understand that it could have had transverse decking.

Heller- Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria…I dont’ care if Columbus actually used ships like these. I just bought them for representative period ships (all three are caravels and the Santa Maria was a nao), not for “Columbus ships” per se.

Airfix - Mayflower

Revell - Man of War

Heller- Golden Hind

Heller -Spanish Galleon

Lindberg - Sir Henry Morgan Pirate Ship…I’m not concerned with Morgan or pirates, just wanted a ship of the era.

I haven’t researched or done anything with the last five as I am still working on the medieval ships but have spent many hours studying the caravels in particular and trying to find reliable info about the Zheng Ho fleets . I also have many 18th and 19th C sailing vessels as well as some pre-dreadnoughts and sailing steam ships, early 19th C English locomotives and a couple of WWI biplane bombers, but there are too many to list here for now. In the past, I have tried to pick up models before they went out of production so that I know that I would have at least something to start with, albeit not always as historically accurate as I would want. I am now researching much more before buying, but it may be too late in many cases.

What attracts me to all of the models and the real life objects is their representation of historical technologies still in their infancy. I find their often “primitive” apprearance fascinating to me and reading about them brings me to an intriguing and wonderous, undiscovered country that no longer exists except in the imagination or occaisionally on canvas.

Any thoughts on the ship models?

Thank you,

Richard

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You’re certainly right about the Academy “Roman Warship.” It is, in fact, a reissue of an old kit by the late, lamented, excellent Japanese company Imai. It’s beautifully detailed and engineered, but, as you noted, too short for reality - and the arrangement of the oars doesn’t make sense. (It has the “sponson” arrangement of a bireme, but only one bank of oars.)

At this time there is no reasonably accurate ancient galley kit on the market. To be fair, a big part of the reason for that is that the scholarly community has done a lot of rethinking about such ships in the past few decades - largely due to the information gathered in the course of the building and operating of a full-scale replica trireme, the Olympias. (Oh, for a kit that was a genuine scale model of that ship!) Recommendation: enjoy, but take it with a grain of salt. For the current scholarly thinking about what ancient warships did look like, an excellent place to start is The Age of the Galley in the Conway’s History of the Ship series.

Heller’s “William the Conqueror” is utter nonsense. It’s a slightly modified reissue of Heller’s miserably misproportioned “Oseberg ship” kit. There’s no way the ships of William the Conqueror were shaped like that. Unfortunately nobody knows much about what they did look like. The only contemporary representations are those in the Bayeux Tapestry, which don’t help a lot. I talked this one over sometime back with our university’s resident expert on medieval ships, Dr. Tim Runyan. He confirmed my impression that a French ship of 1066 almost undoubtedly would have been beamier, and had a great deal more freeboard, than the traditional concept of the “Viking longship” - which is what Heller apparently was trying (with little success) to reproduce with the kit on which its “William the Conqueror” was based. Recommendation: avoid.

Trumpeter Zheng Ho Treasure Ship - I know absolutely nothing about East Asian vessels and can’t help with this one.

Zvezda cogs - You got it. I don’t know much about the subject, but people who know more than I do have commented about the deck planks. They also acknowledge that, since the cog was such a common ship type in so many places for so long, it’s entirely possible that not all of them were configured identically. Recommendation: build it and trust it, but change the deck plank configuration when you paint it.

Heller Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria - nobody knows much about the real things, and the Heller versions are probably about as good as any of the other reconstructions. Recommendation: they’re ok - but do note that two of them use the same hull.

Airfix Mayflower - a nice, believeable kit. Recommendation: trust either it, the Revell version, or both.

Revell “Man-of-War” - Revell has sold two kits under that label. The big one, labeled “Elizabethan Man-of-War” (about two feet long) is junk; it doesn’t meet any reasonable definition of the term “scale model.” The smaller one, labeled “English Man-of-War” (about 18" long) is a modified reissue of the Revell Mayflower. It’s a bit hard to swallow as a genuine warship, but I suppose it’s possible that a ship like that could have existed. Recommendation: avoid the big one at all costs. Regard the little one as an alternative, eminently believable model of a small, late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century merchant ship with lots of guns.

Heller Golden Hind - It’s a reissue of the Revell kit, which I personally regard as one of the best plastic sailing ship kits ever. The most recent research suggests that it may not have quite enough guns, but otherwise it is, in my opinion, an excellent interpretation of a ship about which almost nothing is known for certain. Recommendation: build and enjoy, but if you want to make a painting of Drake’s fleet you need to do some reading. (Harry Kelsey’s Sir Francis Drake: The King’s Pirate is the best place to start.

Heller “Spanish Galleon” - Heller put that tag on several of its kits, most of which have interchangeable hulls and various other parts with different decorations on them. I don’t have much faith in any of those kits, but with some careful work they might be made into believable models. Again, so little is known for sure about this ship type that it’s tough to pronounce any model “right” or “wrong.” There’s general consensus, I think, that the best “Spanish galleon” kit on the market is the one from the late-lamented Imai. Unfortunately it’s hard to find.

Lindberg “Sir Henry Morgan” - like most other Lindberg sailing ships, this one is a marketing ploy. It is in fact a reissue of the old Pyro seventeenth-century French warship St. Louis. As such it generally resembles the real ship, but it’s a pretty basic kit. Recommendation: if you’re looking for a representation of a large French seventeenth-century warship, it will probably do. But Airfix and Heller both make better St. Louis kits.

In researching stuff like this, an excellent place to start is the 12-volume Conway’s History of the Ship series. It contains up-to-date articles by eminent scholars, lots of illustrations, and useful glossaries. In its original, hardback form the entire series was quite expensive, but it’s been reprinted in paperback. Used copies of the individual volumes can also be found, for somewhat more affordable prices, on the web. There are, of course, dozens (if not hundreds) of other books that take up the individual ship types, but the Conway series would be an excellent starter.

Hope that helps a little. Good luck.

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Thanks for your review, John For picture painting purposes, could the Revell Elizabethan Man of War be used for anything? What are the biggest problems with its structure?

At present, I now own or have recently ordered, Cogs, Caravels and Galleons, Columbus’ Ships, Vanguard of Empire, The Age of the Galley and The Ships of Christopher Colummbus by Franco Gay. Some of these have been purchased just this last week. The scary part of this is that I cannot seem to limit my interest to medieval ships alone and will need to do the same for all of the other models that I own and eras represented by them. Each of these areas requires hundreds of hours of reading, model assembly, etc as I have done in the past… too much history for one person to comprehend and not enough time to both research and paint it.

Thanks,

Richard

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hstry wrote: “For picture painting purposes, could the Revell Elizabethan Man of War be used for anything?”

In my opinion - no. It’s a merchandising stunt, not a scale model.

“What are the biggest problems with its structure?”

The shape of the bow is pretty unbelievable, the cantilevered stern overhang is ludicrous, and the spar dimensions are wrong for the period. (In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, each yard typically was almost exactly half the length of the one below it. The upper yards of the Revell kit are way too long.) At least one other modeler has argued that it looks more like a seventeenth-century ship than a sixteenth-century one. I guess that’s true, but it doesn’t look much like any actual, documented ship to my eye.

It should be emphasized again that scholarly knowledge of ships from that period is extremely meager, so it’s probably not reasonable to pronounce any reconstruction completely implausible. It this case, though, what we’re talking about is a (mainly) recycled kit (the hull and most of the other parts are identical to those of the “Spanish Galleon” that appeared a year or so earlier), and the kit from which it was copied was lousy in the first place. The basic shapes of those two plastic kits are utterly distinctive; to my knowledge no other source contains anything that looks even remotely like them. For that reason, any knowledgeable viewer looking at a painting based on them would almost immediately figure out what the artist was looking at - and such a viewer probably would then turn his back.

If you want to find out what the typical Spanish or English galleon looked like, good places to start are Cogs, Caravels, and Galleons, which is on your list already, and The Galleon, by Peter Kirsch. A quick look at either of those books will establish what nonsense those two Revell kits are.

Good luck.