mr. Tilley: Golden Hind Revell

Modeling Subjects Ships
21

That makes sense - the common use of the prefix “golden” in ship names of the time, and lack of references to Drake’s ship in service during the Armada does seem to support two different ships, or maybe even a vessel named in honor of the famous one, if it actually had that name.

The logic of Drake’s crew continuing to call her Pelican during the voyage also makes sense, as it would have been the familiar name. So much of her is a mystery, but a fascinating one. She passed off the coast of where I live, which helps make it all the more compelling.

When I first read of a Golden Hind as a pinnace I was really struck - it seemed to make sense, or at least subjectively was a neat idea - but the fluidity of the term would definitely confound any absolutes in classification. It does seem that the ship was somewhere between a merchantman and warship, which is an interesting niche.

I hope your weather improves.

22

For what its worth, I was able to download a good copy of the Armada painting to PDF format and explore it a bit in detail. It cant be taken as an absolute, but according to the National Maritime Museum, it was painted by an English artist (avoiding some of the regional features Brian Lavery attributes to Dutch artists who depicted English ships) and not too long after the event - ca. 1590 according to the NMM. The grain of salt here is that the artist was using a warm spectrum of color, with very little blue, and only a bit of green, but the naive elements are an advantage, since naive artist tend to focus on details which more accomplished artists pass on it search of better compositions.

Two things stood out that might be helpful for anyone building Revell’s Golden Hind - or other ships of this time:

First, the coat of arms on the flat of the stern is shown on either black or red grounds, with black being more common

Secondly, the interior of the hull (bulwarks?) is clearly shown to be either a dark brown, presumably tarred wood, or painted red. Bulkheads are shown as painted and decorated in patterns and colors separately from the bulwarks.

A few other details came clear, although these would not be so germaine to the Revell model - the windows/lights at the sterns of some ships had red molding, while red, gold or ochre picked out the knees supporting the flat of the stern, for example. The area where the windows and door to the gallery were was shown as painted rather than tarred wood - usually black. Galleries are all shown as red, some with gold or ochre stiles, with one exception - an English ship with galleries on the sides only (there’s an example of this in Brian Lavery’s book on Susan Constant) and that ship had the galleries in black or some very dark color, picked out in gold or ochre. Rails are gold or ochre on the better ships, and red or dark colors on others.

The lower hulls are dark brown on all vessels, representing tarred wood, with the wales painted black, and some - but not all - have black transoms as well, which appears to be intentional. The hulls below the waterline are black, which I think was a northern alternate to hull whiting. The blacking extends up to the lower wale.

Geometric designs are visible in many ships, along side designs we today would consider Jacobean, showing that the transition to more ornate designs was well under way by this period. Only one English ship shows anything like an entire geometric scheme - the others are mixtures more like Matthew Baker’s “fish drawing” with repetitive arches. Several vessels have dark chevrons on white or yellow grounds, running along the lowest line of decoration - pointing forward on the English ships, aft on the Spanish ships. Several ships have very striking red/black/red/black divisions along the hulls, with the red lowest, then black above that, then red and so on, with decorations on each, but the ships are too far in the background to have much detail beyond that.

One English ship has shields lined up in rows along the main deck, while another English ship has shields further aft - the red cross and the national coat of arms, sucessively. They look like they were placed on the ship for the fight. Smaller shields are mounted on the crowsnests of ships of both sides. Its interesting to see this old tradition represented in the painting.

23

I find this to be a very interesting thread, all the more so as I happen to have a Golden Hind lying around awaiting restoration.

One question that has bothered me for quite some time is whether there is any edition of Matthew Baker’s Fragments extant. Having searched for some time now, I have been unable to find one.

Perhaps someone knows more? It would seem to be rather extraordinary to me that these documents have not been edited properly; then of course there is always the possibility of an old and obscure edition.

Jorit

24

Matthew Baker’s work is held at the Pepysian Library at Cambridge, and might be on restricted access for the sake of its long term preservation. A photocopy is at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, although I do not know if this is color or black and white. Brian Lavery remarks that it “has still not been published in full” and that he used the NMM copy for the majority of his work with the manuscripts, although he went to Cambridge to see the originals for clarity on occasion. He remarks that Frank Howard’s book Sailing Ships of War reproduces several illustrations ( I just ordered a copy) and I’m dearly hoping they are in color.

The big problem is that scholarly works usually publish in black and white, while popular works publish in color, and the color images are usually as graphic design elements, making it difficult to see them clearly. Professor Tilley described the same problem I’ve had with the Baker drawings - when published in color, they are often just too small to really make out any real detail! I’ve gone back and forth between the drawings and photos of models in museums that are obviously based on the drawings, just to see whats there - its helpful, but it does take time.

The best book on the subject is Hans Soop’s The Power and the Glory, describing the decorations of the warship Vasa. Its beyond my budget, but describes all the really important things that are inherent to the subject - the whys (warships need to project the wealth and glory of their nations, which is copied to a lesser extent by merchantmen as purse and tradition allows) the whats - (carvings and painting work) and the whens (in this case, Dutch and Swedish ships in the 1620s). It also underscores the importance of keeping an open mind to revision, since Vasa was initially thought to have been painted in blue, but subsequently discovered to have actually been red.

I think that when you start to compare images, you can start to see commonalities which point to probabilities. The Armada painting has a lot of caveats, but several things actually also show up on the Baker drawings, and help us understand the Baker drawings better in turn. For example, Baker’s drawing of the big four masted galleon appears to show black below the lower of the main wales - so do ships in the Armada painting. I thought the former was maybe an artistic device for shadow, since I had interpreted the white lower hull in Baker’s drawing as whiting. Now I think he just did not paint in the lower hull (and he obviously did not paint in the rudder) and what we might actually be seeing is a use of black below the lowest main wale on English ships in the late 16th century, or at least between the mid 1580s and say, 1600. I read somewhere (and cant remember, though) that whiting was used for southern climates and seas, while blacking was used for northern seas and climes. Arther Nelson remarks that the largest English capitol ships stayed close to home, in fact most often in ordanary, so the blacking would make sense. Brian Lavery appears to support this by remarking that ships bound for the tropical West Indies were treated with whiting. I’d guess that Pelican/Golden Hind, bound for Africa and beyond, probably had whiting.

I’m starting to make a list of all the contemporary images which show geometric paintwork, just to see how they compare to the Baker drawings, and museum models based on them. Since all the plastic models of Golden Hind and similar ships show this detail, it seems like a worthwhile effort. I’ve started to see a number of examples, and surprisingly, there is a full fledged example with rows of diagonal stripes and right triangles in a sketch of a Spanish ship in a sketch known to be dated to 1611! Its in the Osprey New Vanguard series on the Spanish galleon, which is good for the reproductions of contemporary pictures. Hope this helps.

25

Color reproductions of the drawings in the Matthew Baker manuscript appear in quite a few places. Two others come to mind immediately. Bjorn Landstrom did his own color copies of several of them in his comprehensive masterpiece The Ship back in the fifties, and The Armada, a volume in the Time-Life Books series The Seafarers, contains at least one color photo.

The relevant volume in the Conway’s History of the Ship series, Cogs, Caravels, and Galleons: The Sailing Ship 1000-1650, contains an interesting chapter called “Treatises on Shipbuilding Before 1650” by John E. Dotson. He has the following to say (p. 167) about the Matthew Baker manuscript: “At the other extreme [from the Portuguese works he discusses earlier in the paragraph] is the manuscript of Matthew Baker, now usually known as Fragments of ancient English shipwrightry. This manuscript was continued into the early seventeenth century by another hand. Baker was a master shipbuilder for the English royal navy during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and therefore well-placed and extemely knowledgeable about the design techniques of his day. He appears to have been influential in English shipbuilding circles. His notebook consists largely of the drawings which have been frequently reproduced, but contains little analysis of the way in which the moulds of hulls were developed. While the draughts are spectacular and informative in the ways that draughts and plans can be, the lack of text limits Baker’s usefulness.”

That probably explains, to some extent, why there apparently is no twentieth-century published edition of the Baker ms. But if some company were to publish a good-sized reproduction of the illustrations, with high-quality reproduction and scholarly commentary by somebody who knew what he or she was doing, I’d scrape up the money to buy a copy.

Another basic source on this sort of thing is Old Ship Figure-Heads and Sterns, by L.G. Carr Laughton. It was originally published, I believe, in the 1920s; it’s one of the earlier examples of really serious, reliable research into the history of ship technology. Despite the title, the book contains lots of information about color schemes and decorative carving other than at the ends of the ship. (It contains, for instance, some interesting drawings of entry port ornamentation.) For many years the book was out of print, and the ship modeler who could find - and afford - a copy was an extremely lucky one. Fortunately, though, a nice, cheap paperback reprint has recently become available from Dover Books. Highly recommended.

Later edit: I just spent a few minutes trying to find the Dover edition of Carr Laughton on the web. No luck. Maybe that means it was unusually popular and the publisher sold out. I don’t think I imagined it - but stranger things have happened.

I did, however, find another edition at, of all places, Lee Valley Tools. Here’s the link: http://www.leevalley.com/wood/page.aspx?c=2&p=55449&cat=1,46096,46117

The price, for a hardbound book with color illustrations, is outstanding.

I’m not sure how the folks at Lee Valley got interested in publishing nautical books, but the company offers quite a few of them - all in high-quality editions at extremely reasonable prices. (The Lee Valley edition of Lever’s Young Officer’s Sheet Anchor gets my vote as the best I’ve seen.) For that matter, the entire Lee Valley site is worth careful study by any ship modeler. Take a look at the variety of woodworking tools - including dozens that are extremely useful for ship modeling.

Still later edit: I wasn’t imagining things. Here’s the link to the Dover Books edition of Carr Laughton: http://store.doverpublications.com/0486415333.html

Note that the price of the Dover paperback is actually a little higher than that of the Lee Valley hardback - but both are extremely reasonable.

The Dover Books maritime category is another wishbook for ship modelers. Love those prices.

26

Thanks for the links and information on the other books - its especially good to know Dover is reprinting them. I’d scrape up the money for a good color set of Baker’s draughts as well.

Professor, I owe you an apology for my comments on Revell’s painting instructions for the Golden Hind - I finally saw the original box art and indeed, the colors are correct to the spirit of Baker’s manuscripts. Revell got it right.

27

Woodburner, I’ve scrolled back through this thread pretty thoroughly and I cannot for the life of me find anything for which you have any reason whatsoever to apologize. I must say it feels a little odd - and more than a little refreshing - to be in the position of defending a Revell kit. I’ve said so many nasty things about various sailing ship kits in this forum (and ruffled so many feathers by doing so) that I was starting to feel like the forum’s resident curmudgeon.

28

Thats a relief.

The only recommendations I can reliably recommend for both versions is to paint the gallery in colors, and the Revell model’s flat of the stern in a color such as red or black as a ground for the coat of arms. And it seems that the gold griffin was an official style of Elizabeth I (it was red under her Tudor predecessors, and the white unicorn, a symbol of Scotland, came in under James).