Visitors to maritime museums can’t help but be mesmerized by the cavalcade of encased model ships.
They are finished with such scrupulous precision that a clever photographer could impart the illusion of reality
merely by snapping a close-up against a seashore background.
Even the hopelessly seasick can delight in the model shipwright’s handiwork. Ship models are exemplary teaching aides, conceived to impart the allure and mystique of the sea to the land-bound spectator. Many a toddler’s early learning school lesson is enlivened by a “show and tell” day. It’s a special occasion when the student brings in a cherished artifact that helps the teacher and class understand something of his or her personal background – the student’s “history” so to speak. This is not a bad thing. “Material culture” is the higher education jargon for this practice.
This article is my “show and tell” day. As a one-time (and recidivist) short-attention-spanner, I hope to convey the charm and intrinsic merits of my own particular stimulus for the pursuit of naval and maritime history -- the model ship.
My enchantment with model ships is best summed up in a marvelous childrens’ book.: How I Hunted the Little Fellows, written and illustrated by Boris Zhitkov. For whatever reason, little Boris was obliged to spend a summer living with his elderly grandmother in one of early 20th century Russia’s Baltic seaports. He slept on a couch in the parlor where his inquisitive boy’s eye fixed upon a wondrous model of a steamship resting high on a mantel. His grandmother, noticing little Boris’s fascination, warned him that he might look at the model ship as long as he wanted, but he must under no circumstances take it down and play with it, for it’s an heirloom not a toy.
Well, each night Boris tossed about restlessly on his couch, his gaze fixed upon that marvelous ship. By and by he ventured to investigate what manner of small-scale mariners man the vessel. Peering through the eyelet-sized portholes revealed nothing. Ah, they must all be lying flat on their bunks, hence out of sight, he suspected. He left traces of food on the deck and kept watch on the forbidden freighter, trusting that the hungry tars would venture forth. Of course landlubber mice snatched the morsels while Boris slept, but this convinced him all the more that the tiny crewmen were stirring.
Eventually Boris’s preoccupation moved him to pry open the little deckhouse to pursue his elusive sailors. All this did was provoke his grandmother’s sorrowful disappointment – a fate much worse than if she had simply whacked his behind with a stiff board. I can connect with Zhitkov’s story.
In my grandmother’s home, an exquisite replica of an old Spanish or English galleon beckoned me from atop a high ledge since I was little Boris’s age. Like the storybook grandma, mine also appreciated the danger inherent in my infantile attraction to the model. She wisely promised me that if I abstained from tampering with it, I’d inherit the galleon one day. So I was satisfied to occasionally pull the kitchen chair alongside the mantel and peer over the top. I prudently left the miniscule crewmen alone so they could attend to their duties.
Sure enough, I did fall heir to this fine facsimile when I was 10. It didn’t outlast my childhood, succumbing to the ravages of dust, decay and a young cousin’s destructive curiosity. But I can still see it: perfectly tapered fore and stern castles, the little ladders leading up to the ornately red, white and gold painted bulwarks, the trim diminutive bronze cannon poking their muzzles through the gunports, the elaborate latticework of the rigging and the defiant swell of the lacquered sails, emblems ablaze. Along with the model, grandma left me a few books, among them Treasure Island and Mutiny on the Bounty. With the ship model as an incentive I eagerly read through the fascinating salty yarns and found my way to C.S. Forester’s incomparable Hornblower tales.
History in Miniature
For me the ship model is a work of art as well as a kind of talisman. The aspect of a miniature steamship or
sailing vessel energizes my imagination and inspires inquiry into all manner of nautical lore, fancied journeys to
terra incognita, and other recondite ruminations. The hobby of building, collecting and admiring the model
ship enjoys a respectable heritage.
My own odyssey into the realm of maritime modeling did not founder along with the hulk of my cherished galleon. As soon as I had saved enough paper route pennies to purchase an imposing two-foot rendition of the USS Missouri (I estimate that this was around 1953), I became hooked on history. After I had opened the box and sorted its contents, along with my paints, brushes, tweezers, Xacto knife and tube of glue, I pored over the instructions to see whether everything was in order.
There was a wonderful surprise amidst the folding papers inside! The diagram sheet included a few paragraphs giving the specifications and historical significance of the original.
Fascinating stuff!
So much so, that I have stored some of these instructions from 50 years ago in ziplock bags. I am still awed by their ability to convey a sense of history in a few well-crafted paragraphs. The gripping capsule review of the ship’s history motivated me to conquer the complexities of assembly and painting.
More importantly, through the kit-maker’s historical precis and the models they portrayed, the dry passages from my American History text were brought to life. When I at last docked the finished model on my student desk ‘s bookshelf and removed all traces of spilt glue and paint from the hardwood floor, I re-read the instruction sheet’s historical snapshot. I decided to learn more about this specimen of American naval heritage.
A search among the town library’s musty stacks uncovered a copy of the learned but engaging US Naval Academy text Sea Power by Annapolis professor E. B. Potter and his squad of Academy profs. A further search disclosed Samuel Elliot Morison’s lively volumes -- History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (a 15 volume set) -- explaining how the battered American Navy recovered from the mauling at Pearl Harbor and went on to rule the waves. By the time I entered high school, I estimate that I knew more naval lore than an Annapolis middy.
In due course the wonderful warship mock-ups created by such purveyors of maritime verisimilitude as Revell, Aurora, Life-Like, Monogram, Pyro and Lindberg encouraged me to explore more diverse facets of nautical scholarship. A personal favorite was my five-inch model of Drake’s Golden Hind, which tempted me to delve into the “discoverers” volumes by Professor Morison -- the same garrulous raconteur who had introduced me to the US Navy’s triumph in the Pacific. Soon my little bedroom was swarming with mini-armadas, much like my home office nowadays.
From that point on I was a naval and military history addict. More worrisome to my clutter-phobic mother, I became a model ship devotee. However, the fact that half the shelf space was taken up with college-level history books helped mitigate the dismal impression conveyed by my disorderly cubicle.
Maritime History Alive With Buttons
Instead of rationalizing the educational merits of my model ship obsession with more hyperbole, I’ll provide a concrete example. Consider the decisive naval battle of the Chesapeake or Virginia Capes, wherein a British naval relief squadron tried to prevent the independent-minded American colonials from prevailing at Yorktown.
This naval action is likely to be unfamiliar to other than naval history aficionados. Yet it was the determining factor in sealing the fate of Cornwallis, the British commanding general at the Revolution’s ultimate battle. Shoving a textual explication of that historical tidbit under the nose of a media-saturated teenager will induce sleep faster than a 10-mg Ambien tablet. So how does one impart the significance of the battle to young know-nothings?
I maintain that if you take this apathetic youth to the Smithsonian’s American Museum of Technology and History and go to the fourth floor exhibit on that battle and you might have a whole different experience.
There is (or at least used to be) a table display case, about ten feet square encompassing a large glass-covered relief model of the channel at the Virginia Capes entrance to the Chesapeake Bay, done in about a scale of 1:1500, making for a tableau simulation of 12 square miles or so.
Precisely executed miniatures, each about an inch long, represent every ship in its exact position for each of the several phases of the action. There are also larger scale “strategic level” a map on display to put the battle in context, but the focus is on the progress of the bantam squadrons. The diminutive armada portrays the entire fleets of, respectively, the British Admirals Graves and Hood and the French Admiral De Grasse.
By pressing buttons at the base of the glass case, the viewer can activate lights illuminating each situation in the battle, including little flickers simulating gunfire emanating from the miniscule warships. There are about two or three paragraphs of text accompanying each diorama explaining just what is happening during the scene illuminated by the spectator. The button also activates a recorded narration. I have seen third and fourth graders who have to be coaxed to leave the exhibit by impatient parents. The tiny model ships with their flashes of cannon fire, maneuvering to bring their broadsides to bear impel the observer to study the brief explanatory passages.
It isn’t unreasonable to expect that some youthful spectators might want to travel to their library afterwards to explore the battle in greater depth. Some may even want to stop at the museum shop to purchase plastic kits of several of the warships involved in that naval engagement as well as some engaging texts covering the episode.
Other Uses for Models
Ship models have had other symbolic or utilitarian uses. The ancient Egyptians built funerary models so that the smaller scale ships might function as metaphorical harbingers of the interred aristocrat’s journey to the Egyptian equivalent of paradise.
In the seventeenth century the model was employed to illustrate naval design developments to the Admiralty Board. In modern times specialized scale models were employed to resolve such contemporary naval architecture issues as tank testing, stability simulation and wardamage control. These latter models are not really all that detailed since it is primarily the hull contour that requires replication. Similarly, duplicates of some key portion of the ship’s anatomy were fabricated in order to train naval cadets in the art of rigging, anchor management, or the operation of other deck equipment. Since only a small segment of the ship need be replicated, these models could often be as large as half or 2/3 scale.
For more than three thousand years ship model building has been a totemic act symbolizing upcoming great voyages in the unexplored afterlife or amidst dangerous uncharted realms of earthly domains. Our oldest surviving examples of the ship model date from 2000 BCE. We first discern this ancient skill from evidence left by the early Egyptian Dynasties but it may have in fact predated that epoch. The Egyptian models took two forms, votive effigies and trifles for a child’s amusement.
Votive or funerary models appear to have been conscientiously built to scale with the specific purpose of enhancing the ceremonial burial of the dead. They were carefully crafted to emulate the originals since they might ostensibly serve as a pattern from which a divine shipwright could build a life-sized vessel so that the deceased might continue his journey.
Toy models obviously served the same function then as now. They were only made with enough care to satisfy child seafarers at play on the banks of the river Thebes. These might be considered to comprise the first “pond models”, the sailing ship replicas meant to harness breezes on small lakes to imitate the actions of their full-sized counterparts.
There are also remnants of toy model boats surviving from the epoch of the ancient Romans and the Vikings. Wherever seafaring cultures have evolved, their men imbued their sons with the spirit and traditions of the fathers by presenting them with “little ships”.
Model ships often played an integral part in religious ceremonies of coastal fishing villages. The villagers would gather around a primitive yet seaworthy model and take the model to the shore, launching it on the ebb tide of a spring full moon. The processional ritual beckoned the fishing fleet to return with a bountiful first catch. On the island of Sark, England, it was also a liturgical rite to sail toy boats in the rock pools on Good Friday. This was a seasonal custom, a vestige of the pagan offering to sea gods of small representations of their most precious possessions, their boats.
In time, more sophisticated – more accurate -- models were developed and used in religious rituals into the 15th century in England. The English maintained these rituals into the 20th Century. The last procession of ships took place in 1902 from Stonehouse to Plymouth.
The Lure and Lore of Model Ships
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© Copyright 2002 by David W. Tschanz.
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