Model of a War Galley

Entry

Rigged wooden frame model of a flat-bottomed war galley with sails and twenty-eight oars mounted on a stand.

The model has one deck and a raised afterdeck with a gun emplacement. The beakhead is very low and one heavy gun is placed in the bow. Four small guns are in the sides. The stern has a square tuck with two gun ports, a hollow counter and a small closed taffrail. The model has a broad rudder with a tiller going underneath the cannon slide on the afterdeck. The sheer rises towards both ends, one wale is indicated and the ship has four leeboards. The oars are kept in forked pillars outside the railing. The rigging is a three-masted lugger rig with dipping lug sails on the fore and mainmast, with triangular fore topsails and gaff topsails behind the mast, and a jib on the bowsprit. The small mizzen has a lug sail with an outrigger.

Two almost models identical of this vessel exist, both in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.³ The model mentioned by Jochem Pietersz Asmus (1755-1837) as belonging to his private collection in 1807 is the one that probably ended up in the Navy Model Room.⁴

The 5- to 7-gun war galley Zeeduivel, 91 feet long, was a flat-bottomed lugger bought by the Navy in Amsterdam in 1799 and transformed by Asmus into a war galley. The ship is both described as a gunboat, oared gunboat or war galley. It patrolled the Waddenzee until 1807 when the ship was broken up.

Scale (derived) approx. 1:44.