mr. Tilley: Golden Hind Revell

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 

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.

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.

I noticed that reference in Mr. Nelson's book too.  I think this is one more of the many questions about the period for which the only answer can be - nobody knows. 

Professor Kelsey casts considerable doubt on whether Drake's ship ever actually was known as the "Golden Hind"; he thinks the name "Pelican" stayed with her permanently.  If he's right, the Golden Hind referred to in Nelson's table must be another vessel.  But that line of logic is hardly decisive.

It's occurred to me more than once that the word "pinnace" might have fit Drake's ship (whatever her name was).  William Baker's book, The Mayflower and Other Colonial Vessels, includes a whole chapter on how the word "pinnace" was used; his conclusion, essentially, is that it was used extremely casually to refer to a great variety of ship and boat types.  I can't recall having encountered it (or "frigate," for that matter) applied to the Golden Hind/Pelican.  But that doesn't prove anything.

It does seem, logically, that if the ship in which Drake made his around-the-world voyage had also taken part in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, somebody would have mentioned it.  (Every English school kid is taught that Drake's 1588 flagship, the Revenge, was also the ship of Sir Richard Grenville in his heroic defense against the Spanish fleet in 1591.)  My inclination is to think that Drake's ship on the around-the-world cruise and the Golden Hind that took part in the Armada fight were two different ships.  But I'm certainly not certain of that - and I rather suspect nobody else is.

One other thing - Arthur Nelson's book on the Tudor Navy describes a pinnace named Golden Hind under the command of Captain Fleming in service during the Armada. Fleming was on the Hind when he sighted the Armada, reporting it to Drake at Plymouth, and subsequently on the vessel when working to tow the wreck of a Spanish ship which had blown up.

Is this the same Golden Hind of Drake's voyage? Nelson specifically mentons Drake's ship as Pelican earlier in his book, but I'm not sure if itys the same as Fleming's pinnace. Various definitions of pinnace in Nelson and Conway's could support Drakes Hind as a proto frigate (other definitions would not), but I'm not sure, any more than whether Golden Hind would have been left alone when the Armada presented a national emergancy.

Keeping the "carved" decorations on the Revell Hind makes a lot of sense, especially since its out of production - a way of appreciating the craftsmanship in the kit, and the vision Revell's designers had in mind. The same sounds very reasonable for the painted decorations as well.

In theory, ship painting at this time would seem to have been influenced by a number of factors: the styles of the time, the traditions of various shipwrights, regional practice, the traditions of the guilds that painters apprenticed in, house colors associated with individual owners or consortiums, and so on. If painters were employed on a contract basis, they may have moved from shipyard to shipyard as work required, carrying with them a given style or manner, modified as needed to suit the preferences of the builder or owners.

CapnMac82 wrote:

jtilley wrote: taking a break from grading some singularly unappetizing end-of-term essays. With all due apologies for this "hijack," isn't it still the case that the only thing less appetizing than writing EoT essays is the reading/grading of them?

My apologies too for following down this road, but as I'm right now stuck with such an activity, I have to admit that statement is actually fairly close, though every now and then one gets something to read that's quite enlightening.

Jorit

<>

jtilley wrote:

taking a break from grading some singularly unappetizing end-of-term essays.

With all due apologies for this "hijack," isn't it still the case that the only thing less appetizing than writing EoT essays is the reading/grading of them?

But, I may be jaded, what with 40,000 nearby examples of youth wasted, er, on the young, yeah, that's it <g>.

I can't, offhand, think of a plastic kit whose instructions call for a more elaborate paintjob than this one.  (Individual ship, aircraft, car, and railroad modelers, of course, have gone beyond the instruction sheets many, many times, but this one is surely among the most challenging any manufacturer has ever dreamed up.)  It's one more demonstration of what I've said more than once in this forum:  the people responsible for designing Revell sailing ship kits in the fifties and sixties were more interested in making products that were as good as they could be than in making them "buildable" by the average customer.  (This kit clearly was not designed for kids.) 

I think woodburner may well be right about the "carved" decorations - especially the "hind" figurehead and the elaborate coat of arms on the stern.  But they're so beautifully executed that I, for one, don't have the heart to remove them - especially in view of the kit's rarity.  I think the color scheme and the geometric patterns are as believable as anything else.  They appear to be based on the model built for the Science Museum, in London, back in the thirties; that model, in turn, is based on the contemporary colored drawings in the Matthew Baker Manuscript.  The latter has never been published in its entirety.  I've taken a close look at several color photos of the Baker pictures in various books.  They depict several different color schemes, and in some cases the colors are hard to make out, but I think Revell's interpretation of them is eminently believable. The green and white triangles certainly are right for the Armada period; they show up not only in the Baker pictures but in various other contemporary paintings.  I think green and white had some heraldic significance connected with the House of Tudor. 

Some models of the Mayflower have similar color schemes; I have my doubts about that.  It seems reasonable that the preference for green and white went out of fashion with the passing of the Tudors. Mr. Lavery, in his book about the Susan Constant, notes (p. 19) that, as of 1607, "... the triangular style of decoration was being superseded in the latest warships, by a rather floriated style.  Again, merchant ships would probably be a little behind warships in this respect, but less so in the case of painting than with carvings...." 

The bottom line - as Mr. Lavery freely acknowledges - is that we know scarcely anything about the decoration of such ships.  Unless I see some hard evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to think Revell's Golden Hind color scheme is as likely as any.  But I do have my doubts about the "carvings."

My model hasn't made much (well, actually any) progress lately.  The combination of the start of the semester and the miserable (by North Carolina standards) weather has kept me out of the workshop.  Maybe this week....

Hi all,

painting the patterns of the Golden Hind is a time-consuming task. Tell me about it... But it's easier than it looks, because thee are these little raised lines between the fields that are to be painted in different colors. That makes it much easier - if the brush has just the right amount of paint - not too much, not too less - it helps the paint to flow into the corners and give straight edges. However, the red-blue diamond-shaped line that goes from stern to bow is much more difficult - no raised lines here!

 

SD 

A thought about painting the upperworks -

Colored pencils and felt tip pens are one way, since there is no rule that paint must be used for a model. Both are tricky and pencils have a greasy residue, but they allow control and some tightness in the shape. A cream or off-white painted ground is helpful, too, since it allows the colors to be true and also downplays the brightness, necessary for any scale model.

Another option are decals - geometric patterns in various colors and sizes are available in hobby shops catering to race car and railroad modelers. They come in white, yellow and maybe red. Yellow stripes on a mineral red ground will get a red/yellow effect. Green, blue or any other ground color would get other effects - yellow/blue, etc. When sealed and weathered, the color mutes down and looks good, and the decals went on with no trouble at all. The only drawback is that unless you are only using stripes and chevrons, the patterns of right triangles, etc. for ships of this era would have to be cut individually.

Hope this helps.

I dont envy anyone painting the upperwork on the Hind!

Revell's Hind has what looks to be a beautifully sculpted the coat of arms of England, while the Airfix version has a sculpted hind, within a naturalistic setting. It seems unlikely that either one was on Drake's Hind while on the voyage - a painted pelican would seem more reasonable!

All of the usual caveats apply about source, interpretation, etc. It would be great to hear any other information that could help give a better picture.

That one looks familiar; I think it's available on a website somewhere - but I don't remember where.

It does indeed seem to have the look of a Franco Gay plan.  At first I thought it might have come from the Mamoli kit (note the perspective view of the pre-painted panel being attached to the hull), but the deck configuration doesn't match.  And I don't think companies like Mamoli are in the habit of including detailed cross-sections of the prototype.

Interesting stuff.  A lengthy article could be written about the various reconstructions of this ship that have apppeared over the decades.

Here another plan, apparently based on Franco Gay (has nothing to do with Hoekel's version).

Detaillierter Schiffsmodell/Bauplan der "Golden Hind" Artikelnummer: 290059816803

http://cgi.ebay.de/Detaillierter-Schiffsmodell-Bauplan-der-Golden-Hind_W0QQitemZ290059816803QQihZ019QQcategoryZ9145QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Well, if Hoeckel was active in the 1940s he may indeed have been the originator of our rather standardized Golden Hind interpretation.  I think Stanley Rogers and Clive Millward may have been working at that time; I don't believe Franco Gay was.

The "bottom line," in terms of modeling, is that the reconstruction, to my eye at least, is basically a good one.  Quite a bit of research on Drake has been done in the past few decades, but so far as I can tell none of it voids any major part of that kit.  I think the armament probably is a little light, but the evidence on that point seems to be extremely sketchy.  The old notion that the ship was built by the Spanish seems to have been discarded.  Professor Kelsey argues pretty convincingly that her original name, Pelican, may in fact have been retained throughout the around-the-world voyage.  That would seem to render Revell's figurehead unlikely.  And I have my doubts about that beautifully-sculpted coat of arms on the transom; it may be too well-done for such a ship.  But I've found little else to criticize in the kit. 

I agree completely about the color scheme:  it must surely be one of the most demanding ones in plastic modeling.  I've sweated over it for several long evenings, and I'm not satisfied with the results yet.  Interestingly, one of the bragging points in the Model Expo ad for the Mamoli wood kit is that the hull components in question are pre-painted.  Those HECEPOB kits do indeed require more skill than plastic ones - don't they?

Forums like this really are great for communicating across international boundaries and oceans - and time zones.  Here in North Carolina it's 1:35 in the morning; I'm taking a break from grading some singularly unappetizing end-of-term essays.

Papillon - many thanks for the offer of translation.  I'll see if my extremely rusty (and never more than barely-competent) German, with help from a dictionary, is up to the task; if not, you'll hear from me.   

mr Tilley, you can ask me for German translation: I'm Dutch & grown up with German language as I live near the border, good people those Germans!! Indeed there is a lot going on in old Europe, especially in France, Russia and my own country (diorama Texel, Batavia, Zeven Provincien etc). On the other hand, we Europeans don't look to the other side of the Ocean and I'm pretty much impressed with the high standard shipmodelling has reached in the US, for both kits & scratch! Internet opens up possibilities we only could dream about during old analog times, again & on the other hand, I miss the intens pleasure that a little kit could give me when I was 12 years old but that applies to almost everything in life!

Max.

Error 2: ....the notorious Heller & Revell kits, should be .....the notorious Heller & Revell tricks. For both brands certainly have a number of good ship kits as we know.

ERROR: (1979, 12 years old) should be 1970

Max.

Both Hoekel books were published in the 40's ( Risse von Kriegschiffe des 17. Jahrhunderts certainly) and are reprinted x times. My copies are from the 70's and plans are unchanged. Several publishers have copied these plans at larger scales and sold them under their own name; I was lured in that trap and quickly discovered that the new Revenge & Dutch Galleon plan was exactly the same as in Hoekel's book but at a larger scale. Again a proof of what a snakepit the ship modellers world is!! Luckily, from beginning I had a very scrutinous, critical vieuw on kits and very early (1979, 12 years old) I already was aware of the notorious Heller & Revell kits! The same applies to wooden kits a few years later. I built the Golden Hind in 1971 and still remember that odd poopdeck feature, through ebay I started recollecting those kits that I considered as good. If I open a box of a kit that I built in the past, 'archaic memories' come up and I indulge in childhood for a while!

I remember the Golden Hind is a gruesome daunting painting job which (to me) was and still is impossible to do crisply, what I did back in 1971: make a cigarette-paper pattern of the strakes that have colored patterns > lay them on the appropriate strake and rub with a fingernail over it so the pattern becomes slightly visible in the paper > draw the pattern with a fine pencil and then draw the colors in the patterns with lead pencils (you can even use a ruler & other tools) > then glue the patterns on the hull, the result is just perfect!!!! Why lead pencils?? Because, provided you don't press too hard, their color is less 'harsh' than filt-pens or ink.

Max.

My monitor isn't big enough to let me study those plans in much detail, but they do seem to be identical to the Revell kit.

That does not, however, resolve the question of just how the ancestry of the kit - or the drawings - worked.  Those drawings, from what I can tell, have a distinctively modern look to them - and the website doesn't provide any information whatsoever about their origin.  They certainly look like they might have been drawn after 1965 (the date when the Revell kit was released).  I also don't know when the Mamoli kit was originally released, but I think it's post-1965.  It certainly looks like the Revell version.

The Revell artisans obviously worked on the basis of a set of drawings from somewhere.  What it was - and how old it was - I continue to wonder.  Either the Revell kit was based on the plans that appear on the website, or vice versa - or both were based on some third, older source.

Papillon - do you know the date of publication of the German book you mentioned earlier?  I haven't been able to find a copy of it on any of the used book websites I normally check, and it doesn't seem to appear in the bibliography of any of the books on the subject I have.  A Google search on the name "Rolf Hoeckels" (and one on "Rolf Hockels") came up empty.  The title suggests that it's a pretty important, and wide-ranging, book - and if Mr. Hoeckels did indeed draw the plans on which that kit was based he obviously knew what he was doing.  If a copy of the book can be had for a reasonable price, I'd like to buy it.  [See below.]

I really wish model companies would be straightforward about the sources on which they base their kits.  Model Shipways, Bluejacket, and Calder usually do a pretty good job of citing sources; plastic kit companies apparently want their customers to accept everything on faith.  And the HECEPOB companies would rather we just didn't think about the question.

One way or another I'll certainly close up any openings in that railing that actually would admit water under the poop.   The stanchions inside the bulwarks alter the character of the inboard works of the ship quite a bit.  (I'm also adding some hanging knees under the breaks of the quarterdeck and forecastle.  One more detail that the kit doesn't have - and the Revell Mayflower does.)  They also suggest that whoever drew the plans didn't pay quite enough attention to how such a ship would actually be constructed.  As I was laying out the frame stations I quickly discovered that I had to choose between spacing them evenly or putting one frame on each side of each gunport.  By the standards of later centuries it should, of course, be possible to do both.  But we know so little about shipbuilding practices during the Tudor period that I wouldn't want to pronounce the kit "wrong" in that respect - or any other.

Edit, fifteen minutes later - I figured out the problem with finding the German book:  the author's name is not Hoeckels but Hoeckel.  (Papillon - your English is excellent; as usual, I'm embarrassed by my own ineptitude in foreign languages.  But in English a possessive noun, with few exceptions, requires an apostrophe before the s.)  A couple of searches for books by Rolf Hoeckel produced some interesting results.  Apparently Mr. Hoeckel has published quite a number of books, including several on ship modeling.  (As I've noted more than once in this Forum, the English-speaking ship modeling world would do well to pay more attention to what goes on in Germany and Holland - and, for that matter, Russia.)  I ordered one from Barnes and Noble called Modellbau von Schiffen Des 16. Und 17 Jahrhunderts.  The price was only $21.00; it should be here in a few days.  I hope my primitive undergraduate German will be up to it. 

At www.bookfinder.com I found several copies of Risse von Kriegschiffe des 17. Jahrhunderts.  They had several different publication dates; apparently the book has been reprinted.  The date of the earliest copy listed on that particular site is 1970.  Perhaps there was an earlier edition.  If not, though, it seems the Revell kit (which was originally issued in 1965) could not have been based on that source.  (There is the fascinating possibility that Mr. Hoeckel based his drawings on the Revell kit - but I think it more likely that both he and Revell worked from some third source that we haven't identified yet.) 

Papillon - do you have a copy of that book with a publication date prior to 1965?

Dear mr. Tilley,

Here you can see the plan on which the Golden Hind Revellis based

http://www.all-model.com/list1/Golden%20Hind/Golden_Hind.html

I also think you better can close the railings of the poopdeck as it looks really stupid, a deck that crosses an open railing! Adding framing extensions above the deck enhances the model and you can add woodgrain with soft sandpaper.

Max.

I noticed that detail too.  It strikes me as odd, but not impossible.  The thickness of the deck planking is such that the edge of the deck component just about does seal up all the openings formed by the spaces between the rail stanchions, so water wouldn't get into the interior.  That sort of irregular collision between the aesthetic and practical components of a ship wasn't unknown in those days - or later.  My intention is to leave it as-is - but to make absolotely sure all those interstices in the railing are closed in one way or another.

I'm glad to hear about Mr. Hoeckel's book, which is new to me.  That it and the Revell kit both have that same odd feature at the break of the poop does suggest pretty definitively that one was copied from the other - or that both were copied from a third source.  As I noted in one of my earlier posts, a sort of generalized consensus about what the Golden Hind looked like seems to have developed among modelers during the past sixty years or so.  I'd be curious to know just how the branches on the "family tree" involving the Stanley Rogers, Franco Gay, Clive Millward, Rolf Hoeckels, Revell, Mamoli, and Scientific renditions of the ship are connected to each other.  There's an obvious family resemblance.

My biggest criticism of the Revell kit involves the bulwarks, which are too thin.  There's just no way those parts could contain the hull frames and two layers of planking.  (The big Revell Constitution and the Heller Victory have the same problem.  Styrene plastic just can't be molded that thick; if the manufacturer tries it, he gets horrible sink marks where the styrene shrinks.  The geniuses at Imai solved the problem by using some different form of plastic that could be molded in thicker cross-sections.) 

My solution is to assume the bulwarks of the real ship were "unceiled" - that the hull frames, in the form of stanchions, were visible inside the bulwarks.  I've made them out of styrene strip.  Revell and Airfix did the same thing in their Mayflower kits.  That's one of several instances in which the Revell Mayflower is just that little bit superior to the Golden Hind.  (Another example:  the Mayflower has "wood grain" detail on the hull planks; the Golden Hind doesn't.)  I suspect it's no coincidence that the Mayflower was released a year later.  In the 1960s it was safe to assume that each Revell ship kit would be better than the last.  Those were the days....