Existing comment:
Ship Models from the Age of Sail:
From about 1600 until the end of the Age of Sail in the 1830s, English shipwright-modelers built large numbers of scale-model ships known today as dockyard models. Not only are they beautiful works of art, but because they were built at the same time and place as the ships they depict, dockyard models also serve as invaluable sources of information about how sailing men-of-war were designed, fitted out, and decorated. Only a handful of the actual ships remain, but more than four hundred contemporary English models have survived, fifty of them here at Annapolis. Taken together, they reliably illustrate virtually every facet of the shipwright's trade in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries.
All but one of the dockyard models and most of the French prisoner-of-war models on exhibit came to the Naval Academy in 1938 as a bequest of Colonel Henry H Rogers of Southampton, New York. They are organized to held illuminate numerous facets of daily life in England's Royal Navy, both at sea and in the Royal Dockyards where the King's ships were built and maintained.
Colonel Rogers:
Most of the models in this gallery came to the Naval Academy in 1938 as a bequest from Colonel Henry Huddleston Rogers (1879-1935). A prominent American industrialist, he also pursued a distinguished military career as an artillery officer in the New York National Guard.
Rogers developed his passionate interest in historic ship models during the First World War. He steadily enlarged his collection in the 1920s through purchases from private families and antique dealers on both sides of the Atlantic. Chief among his possessions were his nearly fifty dockyard models, along with nine rare William and Mary display cases from c 1700. However, he also collected outstanding examples of 18th-century clipper ships, whalers, and merchantmen, plus twenty wood and bone models from the Napoleonic Era.
This gallery is a tribute to Colonel Rogers' achievement, displaying his models as he would have wished, "for the public benefit."
Ship Building Manuals:
The Naval Academy Museum is fortunate to have in its collection a number of rare books published in the 1600s and 1700s on the subject of shipbuilding. These include examples written not only in English, but in French and Dutch as well. As these examples show, many of the early texts were lavishly illustrated, and all are full of complex mathematical calculations. |