The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich houses the largest collection of scale ship models in the world, many of which are official, contemporary artifacts made by the craftsmen of the Royal Navy or by the shipbuilders themselves. They range from the mid-seventeenth-century to the present day and represent a three-dimensional archive of unique importance and authority. Treated as historical evidence, these models offer more detail than even the most detailed plans, and demonstrate exactly what the ships looked like in a way that the finest marine painter could not.

This book takes a...