This post is particularly exciting to me, as it means I am coming close to finishing part of the Trafalgar Project. Now that these two are built, I only need to finish two Montañes class ships of the line for the Spanish fleet to be completed. After those are done, I will wrap up the French fleet (4 ships to build) and then the British (8 left to build).
Like some of my other recent builds, there's not a lot to say about these ships. Good old 74 gun ships of the line, the backbones of almost every fleet in the Age of Sail. One ship of the two is "at quarters," so is a bit more bristly than its companion. What really sets the two ships apart are their paint jobs, and I'll talk about that after the photos.
Like I said, the two ships are basically identical. The ship at quarters is at fighting sail, but other than that and the upper stern decoration, they are the same. In fact, their catalog numbers are NS3 and NS4. What I find interesting is how much different they look due to the paint job. The ship with the single yellow stripe appears to be smaller than the other one, even though this isn't so. Given the side-by-side photos of these two paint schemes, it's easy to see how someone on another ship several miles away, looking through a telescope or the naked eye, might mistake the ship on the right of the photo as being all black. I tried to take a picture from 15 feet away (3 scale miles), but my current phone camera isn't up to the task, unfortunately.
The single-striper will stand in for the San Justo, as I think she was one of the ships mentioned as being "black" by some British observers. I remember reading it somewhere, but can't find the source now. There is, however, a model at the Greenwich museum that support the idea that she was all black. It comes from a diorama of the battle that was originally built in the 1840's. The diorama was disassembled in 1978 and all that is left are the model ships. The models are not on display in the museum, but there are pictures of them on the museum website. This is the San Justo:
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| You can find this photo online at: https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/539417.html |
This was not a standard paint job for the models, as this photo of San Ildefonso shows:
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| This photo is located at: https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/539239.html |
Pictures of the diorama taken before its disassembly are at: https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/68704.html . Overall, I'm pretty confident that the paint scheme on my San Justo will pass inspection.
This is the last post for 2019. When I post the finished Montañes ships we will be in a new decade! In that post, I'll point out some interesting differences between those ships and these. Those differences are a cause of some brow furrowing for me where Langton miniatures are concerned. What is it, you ask? Well, I will only drop you a hint by saying that Vol Williams already knows what I'm going to talk about. 🤔 Tune in next time!
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