Replica of Columbus’s Nina was made using techniques, tools of the 1400s.

This summer, set off on a voyage of discovery without ever leaving Maine.

Replicas of two of Christopher Columbus’ ships, the Nina and the Pinta – names seared into grade-school memories, along with that mnemonic rhyme beginning “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two . . .” – will spend a month in Maine this summer.

Together, the ships are an “interactive floating museum” offering a hands-on experience of life during the “Age of Discovery.” They’ll be in Maine starting next week, visiting Kittery, Harpswell, Camden and then Portland. (See related info box for more details.)

The ships are examples of caravels, a vessel of Portuguese design used by many world explorers during the 15th and 16th centuries. Not only Columbus, but also Ferdinand Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci, Juan Ponce de Leon, Vasco de Gama and others familiar to world history class preferred the vessels, which were essentially a modified version of Scandinavian longships, but built taller and steered with a rudder instead of oars.

Though Columbus never set foot in Maine, or even the United States, caravels could be seen along the Maine coast during the 16th century. British explorer John Cabot and Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano, under the banner of France, both sailed caravels in and around the state, laying claims to land for their respective crowns.

The ships gained favor during this era because they were small, light, quick and agile, making them ideal for zipping around shallow coastlines, into estuaries, and even up rivers. Morgan Sanger, who captained the Nina replica for more than two decades before his son Stephen took the helm, has described caravels as the “spacecraft of their era.”

Built between 1988 and 1991, the Nina replica is 65 feet long, 18 feet wide, has a sail area of 1,919 square feet, and requires a depth of only seven feet of water. She was the brainchild of sailor, engineer and history buff John Patrick Sarsfield, who had a fascination with traditional boat building. Sarsfield had served in the Peace Corps in Brazil, where he discovered shipwrights that still worked using 500-year-old methods.

Around the same time, the Columbus Foundation formed with the goal of raising the funds needed to build replicas of Columbus’ fleet in time for the 500th anniversary of the explorer’s first voyage. The organization hired Sarsfield to oversee the construction of the Nina in Brazil using only technology that would have been available during the 1400s: axes, adzes, handsaws and chisels.

Sarsfield never saw the Nina’s completion: He died in a car accident in 1990 while on a trip to select the ship’s main mast, and others took over his work.

Though the Nina was commissioned in 1991, with a year to spare, the 1992 quincentennial turned out to be a disappointment for the foundation. Public opinion about Columbus — who had come to be seen by some as a cruel plunderer, whose contributions to geographical and navigational knowledge were overstated by history — had shifted, and few were interested in celebrating the man or the myth.

Still, the Nina itself was a wonder of art and science, and crowds flocked onto its hand-hewn deck to have a look wherever it made port. It is said to be an exact replica — as close as builders could come to the original based on Columbus’s journals.

A decade after the Nina first set sail, construction began on its companion, the Pinta. Completed in 2005, the Pinta was built at the same Brazilian boatyard as the Nina, but using slightly more contemporary methods. At 85 feet long, 23 feet wide and with a sail area of 3,800 square feet, it was designed to be larger than its namesake in order to accommodate more people for tours and special events.

While the Columbus Foundation’s original goal was to build floating replicas of all three ships in Columbus’ original fleet, the organization has no immediate plans to get started on the Santa Maria, which was a completely different type of vessel, called a nao, or what today we would call a freighter. Its size and draft – the depth of water required to sail it – makes it unsuitable for much of the travel the Nina and Pinta do each year, including ports along inland rivers.

Similarly, though Columbus chose the Santa Maria as the flagship of his fleet because it was the biggest and most impressive, the explorer eventually came to decry the ship’s poor sailing quality in his journals, noting it was not well suited for discovery. Larger, slower, less maneuverable and requiring deeper seas than the Nina or Pinta, upon arriving in the New World on Christmas Eve 1492, the Santa Maria proved Columbus right by sinking off the coast of Hispaniola, the island that is now home to both Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Columbus returned to Spain on the Nina, which quickly became the admiral’s favorite vessel. He took her out again on his second voyage, and many others, logging 25,000 miles with the ship over about a decade. The new Nina has sailed much farther than that: 300,000 miles in a little over two decades, most of it in the United States.

The ships sail for about 10 months each year, stopping at an average of 40 ports. Admission fees cover the cost not only of sailing from place to place, but also support a combined crew that averages 10 to 14 members.

In addition to bringing history to life for thousands of visitors each year, the present-day Nina has appeared on film. In 1992, the ship sailed more than 4,000 miles over open water to Puntarenas, Costa Rica, to serve as a set piece in the historical drama “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” directed by Ridley Scott. A recent documentary about Columbus, filmed in Honduras, also featured the ships.

Captain Stephen Sanger has been sailing the replicas for the last six years, serving as first mate under his father, Morgan, for most of those.

Though the ships are outfitted with few modern conveniences – there are bathrooms and electricity — crew members sleep in cramped World War II-style berths. Just the same, Sanger enjoys his life at sea.

“I love to travel; see new places, meet new people. Not everyone has that opportunity,” he said.

Sanger also enjoys meeting the enthusiastic crowds that visit his small fleet and offering them a window into the past.

“People always expect (the ships) to be a lot bigger than they are. That’s the first thing that catches their attention. Then they want to know where the crew slept and why the hulls are black,” said Sanger.

Because the area below deck was needed for livestock and other cargo, crewmates during Columbus’ time slept out in the open on the hard wood of the deck. After Columbus made contact with the West Indian natives, his Spanish crew learned about hammocks. These could be tied right to the masts, allowing crew members to sleep more comfortably.

And the distinctive black color of the Nina and Pinta comes from the pine tar pitch used to seal the hulls, making them water tight. This was customary in the 15th century, before other forms of waterproofing were invented.

Interpretive signs on both vessels offer insight into these facts and other slices of life aboard a 15th-century caravel. Crew members are also available to answer questions about the ships or talk about their lives at sea.

Columbus. Colombo. Colon.

C.C., we hardly knew ye . . . until now

Think you know all there is to know about the man credited with discovering America? Try these facts on for size:

• Americans all know him as Christopher Columbus, but that wasn’t his real name. Columbus was Italian, and his name there was Cristoforo Colombo. We’re not the only ones to butcher the explorer’s name, though. His Spanish benefactors called him Cristobal Colon.

• Despite getting credit in all of our history textbooks for “discovering America” – a claim that the millions of people who lived here before Europeans arrived would find curious – Columbus never actually set foot in what is now the United States. His voyages focused on the West Indian islands — such as Cuba and Hispaniola, which today is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic — as well as Central America and the northern tip of South America.

• Columbus wasn’t even the first European to stumble on the lands of the western hemisphere. That honor is thought to belong to the Norse explorer Leif Erikson, who navigated to the shores of North America from Greenland 500 years before Columbus lived.

• Also in contrast to what many of us learned in grade school, Columbus did not set out to prove the Earth was round. The ancient Greeks were the first to theorize that the Earth was a sphere, and this was an accepted fact among educated people during Columbus’ lifetime.

• The Nina and the Pinta weren’t those vessels’ real names. All of the ships in Columbus’ fleet were named after saints. The Nina was originally named Santa Clara, but came to be known as Nina, or “the little girl,” as a pun on the name of its owner, Juan Nino. The Pinta’s real name has been lost in the mists of time. Her nickname means “the painted one,” a Spanish figure of speech for a prostitute.

• After the Santa Maria, the largest ship in his fleet, struck a coral reef off the coast of Haiti and sank on Christmas Eve of 1492, Columbus didn’t have the capacity to return to Spain with his entire crew. He left 40 men behind to look for gold and create a settlement, La Navidad, in present-day Haiti. When he returned on his second voyage in 1493, all of the crew members had perished.

• When Columbus failed to find the gold, jewels, textiles and spices he set out in search of, he settled on another commodity: slaves. The admiral captured many of the native people in the lands he discovered and sold them in Europe. Queen Isabella eventually declared the inhabitants of the New World her subjects, protecting them from future enslavement, though their conditions under Spanish rule involved forced labor that was hardly discernible from slavery.

• As a show of gratitude for claiming new lands for Spain, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella made Columbus governor of Santo Domingo, a settlement in what is now the Dominican Republic and that country’s current capitol. Columbus proved to be disastrous as governor, though, and was eventually hauled back to Spain in chains for his cruelty toward his subjects, both native and Spanish. This was a minor setback for the explorer, who not only did not go to prison, but was able to make a fourth, and final, voyage two years later, in 1502.

• In what sounds like a plot twist in an adventure movie, a quick mind and a lunar eclipse saved Columbus from ruin. During his fourth voyage, Columbus became stranded in what is now Jamaica. Running low on food, he tried in vain to convince the island’s native inhabitants to feed him and his crew. Noticing in his almanac that a lunar eclipse was on the way, Columbus told the island’s people that, as a display of anger at them for denying him food, his god would darken the moon. When this “prophecy” came true, the frightened Jamaican islanders gave Columbus all he needed to survive.

• As most of us learned in school, Columbus originally believed he’d landed in India or China – his original destination – which is why he called the inhabitants of the lands he found “Indians.” What is less known is that Columbus continued to believe, until his dying day, that he’d found an alternative route to Asia. His conviction in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary made Columbus a laughing stock among those who knew better.

Climb aboard!

The Nina and Pinta arrive in Kittery this week and spend a month in Maine, stopping off at four ports:

June 12-17: Badgers Island Marina, 4 Island Ave., Kittery

June 20-22: Dolphin Marina & Restaurant, 515 Basin Point Road, Harpswell

June 25-30: Wayfarer Marine, 59 Sea St., Camden

July 3-10: South Port Marine, 14 Ocean St., South Portland

Both ships are open for self-guided tours 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily while in port. Adults are $8, seniors (60 and older) are $7, and children between the ages of 5-16 are $6. Age 4 and under are free. For more information or to schedule a guided group tour, call 1-787-672-2152 or visit www.thenina.com.