Maritime history
Maritime history is the study of human interaction with and activity at sea. It covers a broad thematic element of history that often uses a global approach, although national and regional histories remain predominant. As an academic subject, it often crosses the boundaries of standard disciplines, focusing on understanding humankind's various relationships to the oceans, seas, and major waterways of the globe. Nautical history records and interprets past events involving ships, shipping, navigation, and seafarers.
Maritime history is the broad overarching subject that includes fishing, whaling, international maritime law, naval history, the history of ships, ship design, shipbuilding, the history of navigation, the history of the various maritime-related sciences, sea exploration, maritime economics and trade, shipping, yachting, seaside resorts, the history of lighthouses and aids to navigation, maritime themes in literature, maritime themes in art, the social history of sailors and passengers and sea-related communities. There are a number of approaches to the field, sometimes divided into two broad categories: Traditionalists, who seek to engage a small audience of other academics, and Utilitarians, who seek to influence policy makers and a wider audience.
Historiography
Historians from many lands have published monographs, popular and scholarly articles, and collections of archival resources. A leading journal is International Journal of Maritime History, a fully refereed scholarly journal published twice a year by the International Maritime Economic History Association. Based in Canada with an international editorial board, it explores the maritime dimensions of economic, social, cultural, and environmental history. For a broad overview, see the four-volume encyclopedia edited by John B. Hattendorf, Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History. It contains over 900 articles by 400 scholars and runs 2900 pages. Other major reference resources are Spencer Tucker, ed., Naval Warfare: An International Encyclopedia with 1500 articles in 1231, pages, and I. C. B. Dear and Peter Kemp, eds., Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea with 2600 articles in 688 pages.Typically, studies of merchant shipping and of defensive navies are seen as separate fields. Inland waterways are included within 'maritime history,' especially inland seas such as the Great Lakes of North America, and major navigable rivers and canals worldwide.
One approach to maritime history writing has been nicknamed 'rivet counting' because of a focus on the minutiae of the vessel. However, revisionist scholars are creating new turns in the study of maritime history. This includes a post-1980s turn towards the study of human users of ships ; and post-2000 turn towards seeing sea travel as part of the wider history of transport and mobilities. This move is sometimes associated with Marcus Rediker and Black Atlantic studies, but most recently has emerged from the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobilities.
Prehistoric times
such as rafts and boats have been used far into pre-historic times and possibly even by Homo erectus more than a million years ago crossing straits between landmasses.Little evidence remains that would pinpoint when the first seafarer made their journey. It is known, for instance, that a sea voyage had to have been made to reach Greater Australia or more years ago. Functional maritime technology was required to progress between the many islands of Wallacea before making this crossing. It is unknown what seafaring predated the milestone of the first settling of Australia. One of the oldest known boats to be found is the Pesse canoe, and carbon dating has estimated its construction from 8040 to 7510 BCE. The Pesse canoe is the oldest physical object that can date the use of watercraft, but the oldest depiction of a watercraft is from Norway. The rock art at Valle, Norway depicts a carving of a more than 4 meter long boat and it is dated to be 10,000 to 11,000 years old.
Ancient times
Throughout history sailing has been instrumental in the development of civilization, affording humanity greater mobility than travel over land, whether for trade, transport or warfare, and the capacity for fishing. The earliest depiction of a maritime sailing vessel is from the Ubaid period of Mesopotamia in the Persian Gulf, from around 3500 to 3000 BCE. These vessels were depicted in clay models and painted disks. They were made from bundled reeds encased in a lattice of ropes. Remains of barnacle-encrusted bituminous amalgams have also been recovered, which are interpreted to have been part of the water-proof coating applied on these vessels. The depictions lack details, but an image of a vessel on a shard of pottery shows evidence of what could be bipod masts and a sail, which would make it the earliest known evidence of the use of such technology. The location of the sites indicate that the Ubaid culture was engaging in maritime trade with Neolithic Arabian cultures along the coasts of the Persian Gulf for high-value goods. Pictorial representation of sails are also known from Ancient Egypt, dated to circa 3100 BCE. The earliest seaborne trading route, however, is known from the 7th millennium BCE in the Aegean Sea. It involved the seaborne movement of obsidian by an unknown Neolithic Europe seafaring people. The obsidian was mined from the volcanic island of Milos and then transported to various parts of the Balkans, Anatolia, and Cyprus, where they were refined into obsidian blades. However, the nature of the seafaring technologies involved have not been preserved.Austronesians started a dispersal from Taiwan across Maritime Southeast Asia around 3000 BCE. This started to spread into the islands of the Pacific, steadily advanced across the Pacific and culminated with the settlement of Hawaii, and New Zealand. Distinctive maritime technology was used for this, including the lashed-lug boatbuilding technique, the catamaran, and the crab claw sail, together with extensive navigation techniques. This allowed them to colonize a large part of the Indo-Pacific region during the Austronesian expansion. Prior to the 16th century Colonial Era, Austronesians were the most widespread ethnolinguistic group, spanning half the planet from Easter Island in the eastern Pacific Ocean to Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean.
The Ancient Egyptians had knowledge of sail construction. The Greek historian Herodotus states that Necho II sent out an expedition of Phoenicians, which in two and a half years sailed from the Red Sea around Africa to the mouth of the Nile. As they sailed south and then west, they observed that the mid-day sun was to the north. Their contemporaries did not believe them, but modern historians take this as evidence that they were south of the equator as crossing the equator changes the angle of the sun resulting in the change of season.
Ancient Rome had a variety of ships that played crucial roles in its military, trade, and transportation activities. Rome was preceded in the use of the sea by other ancient, seafaring civilizations of the Mediterranean. The galley was a long, narrow, highly maneuverable ship powered by oarsmen, sometimes stacked in multiple levels such as biremes or triremes, and many of which also had sails. Initial efforts of the Romans to construct a war fleet were based on copies of Carthaginian warships. In the Punic wars in the mid-third century BCE, the Romans were at first outclassed by Carthage at sea, but by 256 BCE had drawn even and fought the wars to a stalemate. In 55 BCE Julius Caesar used warships and transport ships to invade Britain. Numerous types of transport ships were used to carry foodstuffs or other trade goods around the Mediterranean, many of which did double duty and were pressed into service as warships or troop transports in time of war. Roman ships are named in different ways, often in compound expressions with the word. These are found in many ancient Roman texts, and named in different ways, such as by the appearance of the ship: for example, navis tecta ; or by its function, for example: navis mercatoria, or navis praedatoria. Others, like navis frumentaria, navis lapidaria, and navis vivaria, are about the cargo. The Althiburos mosaic in Tunisia lists many types of ships. The expression naves longae is the plural of the noun phrase navis longa, following the rules for pluralization of feminine, third declension nouns in Latin, and inflectional agreement of the adjective longus to match.
Age of navigation
By 1000 BCE, Austronesians in Island Southeast Asia were already engaging in regular maritime trade with China, South Asia, and the Middle East, introducing sailing technologies to these regions. They also facilitated an exchange of cultivated crop plants, introducing Pacific coconuts, bananas, and sugarcane to the Indian subcontinent, some of which eventually reached Europe via overland Persian and Arab traders. A Chinese record in 200 AD describes one of the Austronesian ships, called kunlun bo or k'unlun po. It may also have been the "kolandiaphonta" known by the Greeks. It has 4–7 masts and is able to sail against the wind due to the usage of tanja sails. These ships reached as far as Madagascar by ca. 50–500 AD and Ghana in the eighth century AD.File:Austronesian maritime trade network in the Indian Ocean.png|left|thumb|Austronesian proto-historic and historic maritime trade network in the Indian Ocean
Northern European Vikings also developed oceangoing vessels and depended heavily upon them for travel and population movements prior to 1000 AD, with the oldest known examples being longships dated to around 190 AD from the Nydam Boat site. In early modern India and Arabia the lateen-sail ship known as the dhow was used on the waters of the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Persian Gulf.
File:Nydamboat.2.jpg|thumb|The Nydam boat, one of the precursors of the Viking longships
China started building sea-going ships in the 10th century during the Song dynasty. Chinese seagoing ship is based on Austronesian ship designs which have been trading with the Eastern Han dynasty since the second century AD. They purportedly reached massive sizes by the Yuan dynasty in the 14th century, and by the Ming dynasty, they were used by Zheng He to send expeditions to the Indian Ocean.
Water was the cheapest and usually the only way to transport goods in bulk over long distances. In addition, it was the safest way to transport commodities. The long trade routes created popular trading ports called Entrepôts. There were three popular Entrepôts in Southeast Asia: the Malaka in southwestern Malaya, Hoi An in Vietnam, and Ayuthaya in Thailand. These super centers for trade were ethnically diverse, because ports served as a midpoint of voyages and trade rather than a destination. The Entrepôts helped link the coastal cities to the "hempispheric trade nexus". The increase in sea trade initiated a cultural exchange among traders. From 1400 to 1600 the Chinese population doubled from 75 million to 150 million as a result of imported goods, this was known as the "age of commerce".
The mariner's astrolabe was the chief tool of Celestial navigation in early modern maritime history. This scaled down version of the instrument used by astronomers served as a navigational aid to measure latitude at sea, and was employed by Portuguese sailors no later than 1481.
The precise date of the discovery of the magnetic needle compass is undetermined, but the earliest attestation of the device for navigation was in the Dream Pool Essays by Shen Kuo. Kuo was also the first to document the concept of true north to discern a compass' magnetic declination from the physical North Magnetic Pole. The earliest iterations of the compass consisted of a floating, magnetized lodestone needle that spun around in a water-filled bowl until it reached alignment with Earth's magnetic poles. Chinese sailors were using the "wet" compass to determine the southern cardinal direction no later than 1117. The first use of a magnetized needle for seafaring navigation in Europe was written of by Alexander Neckham, circa 1190 AD. Around 1300 AD, the pivot-needle dry-box compass was invented in Europe; it pointed north, similar to the modern-day mariner's compass. In Europe the device also included a compass-card, which was later adopted by the Chinese through contact with Japanese pirates in the 16th century.
The oldest known map is dated back to 12,000 BC; it was discovered in a Spanish cave by Pilar Utrilla. The early maps were oriented with east at the top. This is believed to have begun in the Middle East. Religion played a role in the drawing of maps. Countries that were predominantly Christian during the Middle Ages placed east at the top of the maps, in part due to Genesis, "the Lord God planted a garden toward the east in Eden". This led to maps containing the image of Jesus Christ, and the garden of Eden at the top of maps. The latitude and longitude coordinate tables were made with the sole purpose of praying towards Mecca. The next progression of maps came with the portolan chart. This was the first type of map that labeled North at the top and was drawn proportionate to size. Landmarks were drawn in great detail.