Sultanah is a top rate museum standard ship model made by the
Portuguese ship model maker Carlos Montalvão for the permanent collection of
The National Museum – Sultanate of Oman.
The hull, masting and fittings are made of Swiss
steamed pear wood and African ebony.
No paint is used, just natural wood. The hull is
coopered under the waterline. The metal fittings are made of brass, the
canons were casted in an light metal alloy and the rigging is made of
cotton.
The real ship was built in India in 1833 at the
Bombay Dockyards by order of Sultan Sayyid Said. She took the first Omani
ambassador, Ahmed bin Na’aman al Ka’abi, to the United States in 1840, leaving
Muscat on 23 December 1839 on a commercial and diplomatic journey. She made a
swift voyage of 87 days round the Cape of Good Hope loaded with several goods
like dates, Persian carpets, coffee, ivory and gifts to the American president
Van Buren. She left New York on the early August of 1840, back to Oman.
Sultanah was the pride of Sultan Sayyid Said bin
Sultan al Busaidi, Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar ’s fleet. She is still
very famous in the Sultanate and considered by the Omanis as national
symbol, an icon of the friendship between Oman and the United States.
Sultanah’s dimensions were approx. 37
metres for extreme length and 8,50 m for extreme breadth. Fully rigged
she had around 54 meters long and 37 meters height. The model has
2,15 meters long and 1,70 meters high.
Sultanah is a master piece, a prominent achievement in terms of
technical and historical accuracy. Every detail was carefully designed and
manufactured to be aesthetically pleasant and to reproduce at scale the
information found in epochal documentation. She is currently on display at the
"Oman and the World Gallery" of The National Museum -
Sultanate of Oman.
The National Museum of Oman is the Sultanate's
flagship cultural institution. It is located in the heart of Muscat and showcases the Sultanate’s heritage from the earliest human
settlement in the Oman Peninsula some two million years ago through to the
present day.
While working on Sultanah, for the last four years,
I’ve been encouraged by the trust of Dr. Jamal Hassan Al-Mossawi (Director of
The National Museum - Sultanate of Oman) and supported by the patience of
my dearest wife,and my three children. I have a great debt of gratitude
to the all them.
I'm also deeply grateful to the Ministry of
Heritage and Culture of the Sultanate of Oman for having commissioned me to
this project, which gave the honour of bringing back Sultanah to the
place and to the people she belongs to. (The Omani are the most
kind, friendly and welcoming people I have ever met).
Sultanah is a
master piece, a prominent achievement in terms of technical and
historical accuracy. Every detail was carefully designed and manufactured to be
aesthetically pleasant and to reproduce at scale the information found in
epochal documentation.
The geometrical design of Sultanah was based on
a half hull model of a similar ship from the same type and period. The
hull has two layers of different species of timber ( Swiss steamed pear wood
and pure ebony) fixed upon a maritime plywood structure which guaranties
the stability of the planking for centuries. The model is fully coppered under
the water line and has more than 1100 scaled down
copper sheets. The copper was coated with a varnish used in the automobile
industry to prevent oxidation. The canons are scaled down replicas of XIX'
12 pounders Bloumefield pattern casted in light metal. Metal fittings
are made of brass and darkened with acid. The masts are of pear wood
and the yards are of ebony. They both were turned in a precision lathe machine.
The blocks are functional and the ropes were made in a home maid
precision rope walk in order to have the rigging precisely at scale. The figure
head was 3D milled and hand carved in wood.
It took me four years and a half to complete Sultanah.
The model's dimensions are the following:
Extreme length ( from the taffrail to the neck of the figure head) 1,51 m
Length with rigging: 2,15 m
Maximum height: 1,70 m
Extreme breadth: 0,35 m
Length of the main yard: 0,85 m
Scale: 1/24
SULTANAH IS WAITING
FOR YOU AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM - SULTANATE OF OMAN
READ MORE ABOUT SULTANAH at https://carlosmontalvao.wixsite.com/sultanah
