Ship
A ship is a large watercraft designed for travel across the surface of a body of water, carrying cargo or passengers, or in support of specialized tasks such as warfare, oceanography and fishing. Ships are generally distinguished from boats, based on size, shape, load capacity and purpose. Ships have supported exploration, trade, warfare, migration, colonization, and science. Ship transport is responsible for the largest portion of world commerce.
The word ship has meant, depending on era and context, either simply a large vessel or specifically a full-rigged ship with three or more masts, each of which is square rigged.
The earliest historical evidence of boats is found in Egypt during the 4th millennium BC. In 2024, ships had a global cargo capacity of 2.4 billion tons, with the three largest classes being ships carrying dry bulk, oil tankers and container ships.
Nomenclature
Ships are typically larger than boats, but there is no universally accepted distinction between the two. Ships generally can remain at sea for longer periods of time than boats. A legal definition of ship from Indian case law is a vessel that carries goods by sea. A common notion is that a ship can carry a boat, but not vice versa. A ship is likely to have a full-time crew assigned. A US Navy rule of thumb is that ships heel towards the outside of a sharp turn, whereas boats heel towards the inside because of the relative location of the center of mass versus the center of buoyancy. American and British 19th century maritime law distinguished "vessels" from other watercraft; ships and boats fall in one legal category, whereas open boats and rafts are not considered vessels.Starting around the middle of the 18th century, sailing vessels started to be categorised by their type of rig. Alongside the other rig types such as schooner and brig, the term "ship" referred to the rig type. In this sense, a ship is a vessel with three or more masts, all of which are square-rigged. For clarity, this may be referred to as a full-rigged ship or a vessel may be described as "ship-rigged". Alongside this rig-specific usage, "ship" continued to have the more general meaning of a large sea-going vessel. Often the meaning can only be determined by the context.
Some large vessels are traditionally called boats, notably submarines. Others include Great Lakes freighters, riverboats, and ferryboats, which may be designed for operation on inland or protected coastal waters.
In most maritime traditions ships have individual names, and modern ships may belong to a ship class often named after its first ship.
In many documents the ship name is introduced with a ship prefix being an abbreviation of the ship class, for example "MS" or "SV", making it easier to distinguish a ship name from other individual names in a text.
"Ship" is an English word that has retained a female grammatical gender in some usages, which allows it sometimes to be referred to as a "she" without being of female natural gender. The Imperial War Museum stated that this may have originated from "far more ancient traditions" which included using a female grammatical gender for ships, and that there is a tradition that "relates to the idea of a female figure such as a mother or goddess guiding and protecting a ship and crew." By 2019, the Lloyd's Register of Shipping switched to referring to ships as "it".
History
For most of history, transport by shipprovided there is a feasible route has generally been cheaper, safer and faster than making the same journey on land. Only the coming of railways in the middle of the 19th century and the growth of commercial aviation in the second half of the 20th century have changed this principle. This applied equally to sea crossings, coastal voyages and use of rivers and lakes.Examples of the consequences of this include the large grain trade in the Mediterranean during the classical period. Cities such as Rome were totally reliant on the delivery by sailing and human powered ships of the large amounts of grain needed. It has been estimated that it cost less for a sailing ship of the Roman Empire to carry grain the length of the Mediterranean than to move the same amount 15 miles by road. Rome consumed about 150,000 tons of Egyptian grain each year over the first three centuries AD.
Until recently, it was generally the case that ships were the most advanced representations of the technology available to the societies that produced them.
Prehistory and antiquity
Asian developments
The earliest attestations of ships in maritime transport in Mesopotamia are model ships, which date back to the 4th millennium BC. In archaic texts in Uruk, Sumer, the ideogram for "ship" is attested, but in the inscriptions of the kings of Lagash, ships were first mentioned in connection to maritime trade and naval warfare at around 2500–2350 BC.Austronesian peoples originated in what is now Taiwan. From here, they took part in the Austronesian Expansion. Their distinctive maritime technology was integral to this movement and included catamarans and outriggers. It has been suggested that they had sails some time before 2000 BC. Their crab claw sails enabled them to sail for vast distances in open ocean. From Taiwan, they rapidly colonized the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia, then sailed further onwards to Micronesia, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar, eventually colonizing a territory spanning half the globe.
Austronesian sails were made from woven leaves, usually from pandan plants. These were complemented by paddlers, who usually positioned themselves on platforms on the outriggers in the larger boats. Austronesian ships ranged in complexity from simple dugout canoes with outriggers or lashed together to large edge-pegged plank-built boats built around a keel made from a dugout canoe. Their designs were unique, evolving from ancient rafts to the characteristic double-hulled, single-outrigger, and double-outrigger designs of Austronesian ships.
In the 2nd century AD, people from the Indonesian archipelago already made large ships measuring over 50 m long and standing 4–7 m out of the water. They could carry 600–1000 people and 250–1000 ton cargo. These ships were known as kunlun bo or k'unlun po by the Chinese, and kolandiaphonta by the Greeks. They had 4–7 masts and were able to sail against the wind due to the usage of tanja sails. These ships may have reached as far as Ghana. In the 11th century, a new type of ship called djong or jong was recorded in Java and Bali. This type of ship was built using wooden dowels and treenails, unlike the kunlun bo which used vegetal fibres for lashings.
In China, miniature models of ships that feature steering oars have been dated to the Warring States period. By the Han dynasty, a well kept naval fleet was an integral part of the military. Centre-line rudders, mounted at the stern, started to appear on Chinese ship models starting in the 1st century AD. However, these early Chinese ships were fluvial, and were not seaworthy. The Chinese only acquired sea-going ship technologies in the 10th-century AD Song dynasty after contact with Southeast Asian k'un-lun po trading ships, leading to the development of the junks.
Mediterranean developments
The earliest historical evidence of boats is found in Egypt during the 4th millennium BC The Greek historian and geographer Agatharchides had documented ship-faring among the early Egyptians: "During the prosperous period of the Old Kingdom, between the 30th and 25th centuries BC, the river-routes were kept in order, and Egyptian ships sailed the Red Sea as far as the myrrh-country."The ancient Egyptians were perfectly at ease building sailboats. A remarkable example of their shipbuilding skills was the Khufu ship, a vessel in length entombed at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2500 BC and found intact in 1954.
The oldest discovered sea faring hulled boat is the Late Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of Turkey, dating back to 1300 BC.
By 1200 BC, the Phoenicians were building large merchant ships. In world maritime history, declares Richard Woodman, they are recognized as "the first true seafarers, founding the art of pilotage, cabotage, and navigation" and the architects of "the first true ship, built of planks, capable of carrying a deadweight cargo and being sailed and steered."
Medieval and early modern periods
Asian developments
During the 15th century, China's Ming dynasty assembled one of the largest and most powerful naval fleets in the world for the diplomatic and power projection voyages of Zheng He. Elsewhere in Japan in the 15th century, one of the world's first iron-clads, "Tekkōsen", literally meaning "iron ships", was also developed. In Japan, during the Sengoku era from the 15th century to 17th century, the great struggle for feudal supremacy was fought, in part, by coastal fleets of several hundred boats, including the atakebune. In Korea, in the early 15th century during the Joseon era, "Geobukseon", was developed.The empire of Majapahit used large ships called jong, built in northern Java, for transporting troops overseas. The jongs were transport ships which could carry 100–2000 tons of cargo and 50–1000 people, 28.99–88.56 meter in length. The exact number of jong fielded by Majapahit is unknown, but the largest number of jong deployed in an expedition is about 400 jongs, when Majapahit attacked Pasai, in 1350.
European developments
Until the late 13th or early 14th century, European shipbuilding had two separate traditions. In Northern Europe clinker construction predominated. In this, the hull planks are fastened together in an overlapping manner. This is a "shell first" construction technique, with the hull shape being defined by the shaping and fitting of the hull planks. The reinforcing s are fitted after the planks. Clinker construction in this era usually used planks that were cleft and could be made thinner and stronger per unit of thickness than the sawn logs, thanks to preserving the radial integrity of the grain.An exception to clinker construction in the Northern European tradition is the bottom planking of the cog. Here, the hull planks are not joined to each other and are laid flush. They are held together by fastening to the frames but this is done after the shaping and fitting of these planks. Therefore, this is another case of a "shell first" construction technique.
These Northern European ships were rigged with a single mast setting a square sail. They were steered by rudders hung on the.
In contrast, the ship-building tradition of the Mediterranean was of carvel constructionthe fitting of the hull planking to the frames of the hull. Depending on the precise detail of this method, it may be characterised as either "frame first" or "frame-led". In either variant, during construction, the hull shape is determined by the frames, not the planking. The hull planks are not fastened to each other, only to the frames.
These Mediterranean ships were rigged with lateen sails on one or more masts and were steered with a side rudder. They are often referred to as "round ships".
Crucially, the Mediterranean and Northern European traditions merged. Cogs are known to have travelled to the Mediterranean in the 12th and 13th centuries. Some aspects of their designs were being copied by Mediterranean ship-builders early in the 14th century. Iconography shows square sails being used on the mainmast but a lateen on the mizzen, and a sternpost hung rudder replacing the side rudder. The name for this type of vessel was "coche" or, for a larger example, "carrack". Some of these new Mediterranean types travelled to Northern European waters and, in the first two decades of the 15th century, a few were captured by the English, two of which had previously been under charter to the French. The two-masted rig started to be copied immediately, but at this stage on a clinker hull. The adoption of carvel hulls had to wait until sufficient shipwrights with appropriate skills could be hired, but by late in the 1430s, there were instances of carvel ships being built in Northern Europe, and in increasing numbers over the rest of the century.
This hybridisation of Mediterranean and Northern European ship types created the full-rigged ship, a three-masted vessel with a square-rigged foremast and mainmast and a lateen sail on the mizzen. This provided most of the ships used in the Age of Discovery, being able to carry sufficient stores for a long voyage and with a rig suited to the open ocean. Over the next four hundred years, steady evolution and development, from the starting point of the carrack, gave types such as the galleon, fluit, East Indiaman, ordinary cargo ships, warships, clippers and many more, all based on this three-masted square-rigged type.
The transition from clinker to carvel construction facilitated the use of artillery at sea since the internal framing of the hull could be made strong enough to accommodate the weight of guns. It was easier to fit gunports in a carvel hull. As vessels became larger and the demand for ship-building timber affected the size of trees available, clinker construction became limited by the difficulty of finding large enough logs from which to cleave planks. Nonetheless, some clinker vessels approached the size of contemporary carracks. Before the adoption of carvel construction, the increasing size of clinker-built vessels necessitated greater amounts of internal framing of their hulls for strengthsomething that somewhat lessened the conceptual change to the new technique.