Whaling Ship Clipper 1846 Wood Model Brass Plaque Three Masted Nautical Display For Sale
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Whaling Ship Clipper 1846 Wood Model Brass Plaque Three Masted Nautical Display:
$109.95
A wooden model of a three masted whaling ship on a shaped wooden base, the hull painted green with a crackled finish over black, with a brass plaque on the base reading Whaling Ship, CLIPPER 1846. The masts carry full standing and running rigging in fine cord with yards crossed and furled and set sails in a stiffened cloth. Davits, deck houses, a ship's wheel and whaleboats are fitted along the deck.
The whaler and the clipper are two different ships and the plaque names both, which is worth knowing before anyone sells this as one or the other. A clipper was built to be fast and carry little, for tea and for the California run, with a sharp bow and a vast spread of canvas. A whaler was built to be slow, strong and enormously capacious, because its job was to stay at sea for three years and come home full of oil, and the boats hanging from the davits are the reason it exists at all: the ship was a factory and a warehouse, and the hunting was done from twenty eight foot rowing boats launched off the side. New Bedford was the richest city per head in America in the 1850s on exactly that trade, and the whole thing collapsed inside a generation when rock oil came out of the ground in Pennsylvania in 1859.
The model is complete and stands on its base. The rigging is largely intact with full standing rigging present, and several of the finer running lines are slack or detached, visible in the photographs. The sails are present, stiff and discoloured to a cream, with fraying at a few edges. The masts are straight with no breaks. The hull is sound, and the painted finish on the base and hull is crackled and worn, which is the original decorative finish rather than damage, with genuine chipping along the base edge. Dust throughout the rigging. The brass plaque is secure and legible.
About eighteen inches long and sixteen inches to the masthead, taken against the tape in the photographs. One model on its base.
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