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Famous
Italian training ship. Ship (3m). L/B/D: 269.5 × 51 × 22 (82.1m × 15.5m
× 6.7m). Tons: 4,100 disp. Hull: steel. Comp.: 450. Mach.: diesel electric,
1,900 hp, 1 screw; 10.5 kts. Built: Royal Shipyard, Castellamare di Stabia, Italy; 1930.
In the late 1920s, the Italian navy began construction of two ships for
training their officer cadets at sea, Cristoforo Colombo and Amerigo
Vespucci. The design chosen was that of a seventy-four-gun frigate, though they
had steel hulls and carried double topgallants, auxiliary power, and other
modern devices. Amerigo Vespucci was named for the Florentine explorer for
whom the sixteenth-century German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller named the
newly discovered landmasses to the west. Amerigo Vespucci's full lines are in
sharp contrast to the majority of sail-training vessels, which generally
follow the finer model adapted from nineteenth-century merchant ship design. Harold Underhill records a letter from a Norwegian submarine commander about an encounter
with the two ships in the 1930s:
I dived on a northerly course about mid waters of the Skagerrak and went deep
for about an hour in order to keep the lunch on the tables. On breaking
surface again with the periscope, I took a quick look all round and got a
shock. I had gone down in the 20th century and come up again in the 18th, for
there, some miles away, were two majestic men-of-war, under a press of canvas
and sailing proudly in line-astern.
Following World War II, Cristoforo Colombo was acquired by the Soviet Union . Amerigo Vespucci resumed her sail-training mission for the Italian navy
well into the 1990s..
1/100
SCALE
3 –
SHEETS + INSTR. BOOK W/PHOTOS & DRAWINGS
AEP-102
PRICE:
$ 80.00
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