Looking for a kit for Magellan's Victoria...

Welcome to the forum! I think you'll find lots of interesting stuff here - and lots of interesting people. We're a rather strange lot, but most of us seem to be relatively harmless.

I don't claim to follow the wood ship kit market closely. Most such kits are made by continental European manufacturers, and frankly I don't have a high opinion of them. We've batted this subject around in this forum several times, and some members disagree with me, but my opinion is that the vast majority of those companies' products don't fit any reasonable definition of the term "scale model." I know of three companies that make scale model ship kits in wood: Bluejacket, Model Shipways, and CalderCraft (otherwise known as Jotika). The former two only make American subjects, and Calder only makes British ones.

I do get catalogs from the other companies frequently, and I have to say I can't recall ever having bumped into a model of Magellan's Victoria. On the one hand, that seems odd: few ships can top this one in terms of historical importance. On the other hand, the absence of models of her is understandable because historians know almost nothing about her.

Reliable information about ships from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is almost non-existent. There are no authenticated ship plans from the period - probably because the shipbuilders didn't use plans in the modern sense. About the only firm piece of contemporary evidence is the "Mataro Ship," a fairly large but crude model that used to hang in a church in the town of Mataro, Spain. It's highly simplified and the shape of its hull is probably distorted considerably from reality. And it's just about all we've got.

Historians and ship modelers have spent a great deal of time trying to reconstruct Christopher Columbus's ships, but for some reason or other Magellan's haven't attracted as much attention. Some years ago I stumbled across a nice little booklet published by the British Museum called The First Ships to Sail Around the World. It contains some nicely-rendered sketches and watercolors representing what modern researchers think Magellan's ships probably looked like - but the author is perfectly honest in admitting that most of the book is pure guesswork. A couple of good biographies of Magellan have appeared in recent years, but they don't say much about the ships.

Actually, the available information is so sketchy that if you built one of the numerous Santa Maria kits and put a nameplate reading Victoria on the base, I suspect few people would argue with you. But I'm unaware of a wood Santa Maria kit that I could honestly recommend.

I'm afraid this has all been rather depressing. Good luck. A model of the Victoria would be a most interesting and worthwhile project.

Thanks for the advice, I've been building wood aircraft models for years and this would be my first boat, I tried to pick the boat that most interested me. My no. 2 is the Bluenose, as I'm a Canadian, and I'll have no problem getting a kit for it so it looks like I might just do that.

The Bluenose makes a beautiful model - and is an excellent subject for a first effort. There are quite a few wood Bluenose kits out there. For what it's worth, I recommend the one by Model Shipways. The plans and details of it have recently been revised by Ben Lankford, one of the best in the business. Model Shipways kits don't have some of the exotic-looking woods and fittings that the imported kits have, but are genuine scale models. This is the most realistic representation of the Bluenoseavailable - and it's just about within your budget. The current price is $159.95 (U.S.).

Model Shipways kits are distributed by Model Expo, which has an excellent website: www.modelexpoonline.com . On the home page, go to the "Featured Kit Manufacturers" frame at the upper right and click on "Model Shipways." Then click on "Bluenose."

Good luck. It's a great hobby.