Ship (3m).
L/B/D:
269.5 × 51 × 22 (82.1m × 15.5m × 6.7m). Tons:
4,100 disp. Hull:
steel. Comp.:
450. Mach.:
diesel electric, 1,900 hp, 1 screw; 10.5 kts. Built:
Royal Shipyard, Castellamare di Stabia, Italy; 1930.
In the late 1920s, the Italian navy began construction of two ships for training their officer cadets at sea, Cristoforo Colombo and Amerigo Vespucci. The design chosen was that of a seventy-four-gun frigate, though they had steel hulls and carried double topgallants, auxiliary power, and other modern devices. Amerigo Vespucci was named for the Florentine explorer for whom the sixteenth-century German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller named the newly discovered landmasses to the west. Amerigo Vespucci's full lines are in sharp contrast to the majority of sail-training vessels, which generally follow the finer model adapted from nineteenth-century merchant ship design. Harold Underhill records a letter from a Norwegian submarine commander about an encounter with the two ships in the 1930s:
I dived on a northerly course about mid waters of the Skagerrak and went deep for about an hour in order to keep the lunch on the tables. On breaking surface again with the periscope, I took a quick look all round and got a shock. I had gone down in the 20th century and come up again in the 18th, for there, some miles away, were two majestic men-of-war, under a press of canvas and sailing proudly in line-astern.
Following World War II, Cristoforo Colombo was acquired by the Soviet Union. Amerigo Vespucci resumed her sail-training mission for the Italian navy well into the 1990s.
Underhill, Sail Training and Cadet Ships.
