Bart Bear's Blog

No, I am not ancient. I certainly don't rule the seas either, but way back in the last centuries BC ships like this did. This is a model of a Carthagenian warship that Dad and I have just finished making. The real ship was 72 times bigger, just over 150 feet long. Up to the time that the Romans destroyed Carthage, these ships ruled the Mediterranean sea. Actually, the Romans only won after they had captured a Carthagenian ship and made hundreds of copies of it. Roman ships had one addition that gave them the edge in battle. The ships of Cathage used sailing skill to ram enemy ships and sink them. The Romans added a "Corvus", a sort of a drawbridge with a spike on it that they would drop onto a Carthagenian ship, locking the two ships together, and then send soldiers across to take the Carthagenian vessel. The Carthagenians were much better sailors, but the Romans were superior soldiers. The old ships of the Mediterranean, be they Carthagenian, Greek or Roman, mostly used oars to move them. The one the model is based on had 116 oars and around 400 oarsmen; the biggest oars sometimes had up to 5 rowers pulling them. Sails were used only when the wind was right because these ships couldn't tack into wind like modern sailboats do. It took Dad and I ages to build this model, because it is the first time we have tried to rig anything. Rigging is hard. As soon as you add another line, all of the ones you have put in before go too slack or too tight and you have to fiddle a lot to get everything right. Still, I reckon we didn't do too bad a job of it. I particularly like the little sailors we put on deck. Do you know that nobody can agree on what colour Carthagenians were? We took a guess and made ours a light coffee colour like the people that the Oldies saw in Egypt. Now it's back to aeroplanes, where only the old ones have rigging and in 1/72 scale you can mostly forget it.

Labels: boats, models