![]() ![]() The largest of the three ships, the cumbersome Santa Maria was a full-rigged ship that weighed about 100 tons and measured approximately 100 feet from stem to stern. Pinzón's younger brother Vicente Yanez Pinzón served as commander of the 24-man crew of the Niña, while yet another brother, Francisco Martin Pinzón, worked under Martín as pilot or first mate. Columbus commanded the flagship, the Santa Maria, while in the smaller Pinta, Pinzón captained his crew of 26 men. On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain his squadron of three ships contained 120 men. In addition, it was through his efforts that a crew of men with skills and temperament suitable for such an arduous voyage was secured. He also paid the Italian the sum of one-eighth of the anticipated expenses of the trip. Whatever his initial reason or motive, Pinzón became an enthusiastic backer of the voyage and when asked by Queen Isabella's advisors for his opinion regarding the proposed voyage he expressed confidence in Columbus. Curious, he examined charts in the possession of the Vatican that were drawn up by Norman explorers years earlier. Other historians argue that, while in Rome years before, Pinzón learned about a country named Vineland, and realized that there were land masses that had yet to be discovered. According to some sources, he became acquainted with Columbus through Franciscan Father Juan Perez, prior of the convent of La Rábida. Several years before meeting Columbus, Pinzón had retired from active life as a sailor, and set up shop as a shipbuilder. With expenses totaling more than Ferdinand and Isabella were willing to bestow, Columbus solicited additional backers, one of which was 51-year-old Pinzón, who fronted part of the money needed to purchase supplies for the voyage as well as a part-interest in both the Niña and the Pinta. After the Italian, French, and English crown refused to back him, Colón, or Columbus, as he is most widely known, traveled west across the Pyrenees to Spain, and, after much convincing, in April of 1492 gained the patronage of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. However, he needed funding for what would likely be a costly and uncertain voyage. In the mid-1470s Italian explorer Cristóbal Colón formulated a plan to reach India and the Orient by sailing around the circumference of the earth in the opposite direction. ![]() He also sailed in the Mediterranean and had traveled the Atlantic to the Canary Islands. ![]() There he and his crew followed that continent to the southwest, where they discovered the mouth of a large river. In the prime of his career, under Cousin, a navigator from Dieppe, Pinzón sailed to the eastern coast of Africa. He was the eldest son of a wealthy family of seafarers and shipowners, and he became a strong, capable sailor and skillful pilot himself. Heller, of course, was notorious for such stunts.Pinzón was born in 1441 in Palos de Moguer, a seaport town in the Spanish province of Andalusia. Incidentally, Heller re-used that Santa Maria hull several times as the basis of other kits, each of them more ridiculous looking than the last. My impression is that the Heller kit isn't significantly better - or worse - than the Revell version. I built the grand old Revell Santa Maria (vintage 1957) when it was brand new - and several times later. My general impression is that it's on about the same standard as the other two. I haven't built or bought the Heller Santa Maria kit, but I've looked at it - though not recently. We don't know much about Columbus's ships, but it's a safe assumption that two of them didn't have identical hull lines. I'm not sure, though, that I'd be comfortable displaying the two of them side-by-side, thereby making the identical hulls obvious. Since we know so little about the real ships, either one of the Heller kits, considered individually, looks pretty believable. The Nina and Pinta kits use the same hull, with different upper bulwark components to make the finished models look different from each other. I remember being pretty happy with the Pinta I built - after I dressed it up a bit with aftermarket deadeyes, crew figures, etc. ![]() The "wood grain" detail is indeed pretty coarse Heller in those early days wasn't trying to reproduce actual wood grain (with knots, etc.), but simply making scratches in the molds to keep the parts from looking smooth. These kits obviously can't be expected to come up to modern standards. I think the terms "fair" and "quite decent" are pretty accurate. I bought the Nina and Pinta, and built the latter, quite a long time ago - when Heller ship kits were being sold for the first time in the U.S., under the Minicraft label (the mid- to late sixties, I think). ![]()
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