OcCre Golden Hind

Summary

Golden Hind was a galleon captained by Francis Drake in his circumnavigation of the world between 1577 and 1580. She was originally known as Pelican, but Drake renamed her mid-voyage in 1578, in honour of his patron, Sir Christopher Hatton, whose crest was a golden hind.

Being my second wooden ship model, I opted for this kit for a couple of reasons. Chiefly, OcCre classified the difficulty as “Easy”, so I believed it to be within my skill level. Second, the Golden Hind is an iconic ship for any fan of history, and I learned quite a lot about the period and shipbuilding of this era while completing the kit. The build took roughly 4 1/2 months, which was roughly what OcCre had estimated.

This being my second OcCre ship, I had a rough idea of what to expect this time, and set some goals to help guide me through. The instructions were more difficult to interpret than the Polaris, with less “hand-holding”, but I did take some inspiration from some other builders’ logs.

My goals for this ship were three-fold:

1. Deck Planking: after the Polaris, I resolved to do the deck planking more realistically. Instead of the OcCre method using long planks, I cut them into 60mm strips, and lined the sides using a pencil to simulate the caulking. This produced a great effect, and overall I was very happy with the result.
2. Hull Planking: I resolved to correctly learn how to plank, and apply the techniques to the Golden Hind. This was an abject failure, the bluff shape of the bow defeated my approach. Not all was lost, as I did learn quite a lot about the process as a while, and excited to try those techniques on future builds.
3. Rigging: lastly, I resolved to learning how to correctly rig the ship. Not only how to tie the lines, but learning the language as well. My knots were not as crisp as they could have been, but I felt like it was a great foundation to future builds.

Alongside the build, I found some inspiration from reading up on the great voyage of the Golden Hind, in the book “In Search of a Kingdom“. Also, to help me with the rigging and understanding of how all the masts were built, I picked up “The Rigging of Ships: in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast, 1600-1720“. This book was instrumental in figuring out how some of the knots worked, where the instructions didn’t detail exactly how they should be done.

As far as the build log was concerned, I kept up with it for a while, but eventually just headed for the finish line without detailing my progress.