Four Masted Sailing Ship
This model was acquired by Bahrs’ a number of years ago and little is known of its origins. It is not of recent manufacture. It appears to be scratch built with a solid hull and is rather well rigged for its small scale and in quality is somewhere between a tourist model and a fine craft model.
It is typical of a late 1800s sailing merchant vessel. After the opening of the Suez Canal (and later the Panama Canal) the economics of shipping were such that large sailing ships were only economically viable for low value long distance cargo trades such as grains, ores and guano (bird poop that had accumulated on bird nesting islands and was used as fertilizer). These ships were very much optimized for efficiency and carried much smaller crews than earlier large sailing vessels such as the clippers, but ultimately steam and diesel-powered ships turned out to be more economical on these trades so that by World War II large commercial sailing vessel had pretty much disappeared.
Some of these vessels have survived and Wavertree, at South Street Seaport, is one such example. The model has sometimes been described as the Wavertree, but Wavertree is three masted.