Model by Franco Fusco
The Felucca is a traditional, small wooden sailing boat, with one or two lateen rigged masts, benches for the oars and a pointed bow; its origins date back to ancient Egypt and from there its use spread throughout the Mediterranean.
Feluccas were used for fishing, transport, but also for patrolling coastal waters and by Barbary pirates. The spread of the felucca didn’t limit to the Mediterranean as around 1860, Italian fishermen who settled in San Francisco built and used feluccas for fishing salmon, crabs, shrimp, and oysters, and they became an icon of Fisherman's Wharf.
Compared to Mediterranean feluccas, the ones of the Nile, to be able to navigate through constantly shifting sandbanks and in shallow waters, had a shallower draft, a wider beam, flat bottom and a shallow but very long rudder to compensate for its reduced depth.
Originally, these boats, like the Mediterranean ones, had a raked (pointed) stern, but with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798) and the subsequent arrival of the English, arrived on the Nile also small boats with a plain flat transom, which evidently must have gained the favour of the local populations so that it was introduced into the construction of the felucca and until the end of the 1960s, one could encounter on the Nile feluccas with either a transom or a pointed stern.
The Bundle will allow you to have on your table a 20 feet and a 38 feet Felucca and her crew, wonderfully illustrated by Peter Dennis. The models are intended to accommodate troops offered in the Mahdist “Sand of the Prophet” bundle and a dedicated “deck” base paper is included in the bundle.
Notes
The troops shown in pictures are not comprised in this bundle which includes the crews only.
The bundle consists of eleven sheets, to be printed on 100 g/sm and light paper, and eleven sheets for the instructions. Once downloaded, the sheets can be printed as often as you like, which means you can build any number of Feluccas very cheaply.
- To make the small model you will need to print 2 single face A4 sheets and 4 for the larger one.
- You will need 1 A4 1mm card (I recommend finnboard/wood pulp board), for the base, the deck etc.
- 1 x 3mm dowel or round wooden BBQ skewer for the mast.
- A roll of 0,5-0,7mm (or so) hemp cord.
You will also need scissors, a craft knife, a metal ruler, glue, cereal box type card, light card, cocktail sticks and brush pens of various colours (sepia, grey, etc…) to touch up the parts. Fast drying, strong PVA glue, slow setting repositionable liquid glue or glue stick.
The sheets are laid down in A4 format. Print your sheets at “fit to page” setting (Adobe Acrobat) onto A4 paper and US legal sized paper, on US letter size will print at 93%.
The sheets are laid down in A4 format. Print your sheets at “fit to page” setting (Adobe Acrobat) onto A4 paper and US legal sized paper, on US letter size will print at 93%.
You can, of course, print the Nile Felucca and its crew in any scale you choose, making it extremely flexible in this respect.
Don't forget to join our, very active, group on facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/peterspaperboys
Our Motto is Paper Feluccas, Proper Feluccas!
Enjoy