Reference
- shipVessel for conveying passengers and freight by sea. The earliest sea-going ships were probably Egyptian, making voyages to the E coast of Africa in c.1500 bc. In China, extensive sea voyages were being made by ships that carried more than one mast and featured a rudder by c.AD 200, some 1200 years before such ships appeared in Europe. In the Mediterranean region, the galleys of the Greek, Phoenician and Roman navies combined rows of oars with a single square sail, as did the Viking longboats, which were capable of withstanding violent seas. By the 14th and 15th centuries, carracks and galleons were being developed to fulfil the exploration of the New World. Fighting ships of the 17th and 18th centuries included frigates of various designs. Sailing freighters culminated in the great clippers of the late 19th century, some of which had iron hulls. A century or so earlier, the first steamships had been built. They were powered by wood or coal-burning steam engines that drove large paddle wheels. In 1819, the first Atlantic crossing was made by 'steam-assisted sail', and this crossing soon became a regular service. By the mid-19th century, steamships, such as Brunel's Great Britain (1844), were driven by propellers or screws. Marine steam turbines developed at the turn of the 19th century, and gradually replaced reciprocating (back-and-forth cranking) steam engines for large vessels, early examples being the ocean liners of the 1900s. Oil, rather than coal, soon became the favoured fuel for large engines. Diesel engines developed in the early 1900s, but were considered unreliable and, although less expensive to run, they did not replace steam turbines until the 1970s. Some of the newest military ships and icebreakers are fitted with nuclear engines in which heat from a nuclear reactor raises steam in boilers to drive steam turbines.
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Perspectives
Vanguard of Empire
In this book, Smith has assembled a portrait of the small vessels invented and refined in the shipyards of Spain and Portugal half a millennium ago. He focuses on the advances in maritime technology that made the European conquest of the New World possible. Shipwrights worked by trial anderror to make ships that would travel faster and farther, carrying larger and larger cargoes. Pilots developed new methods of celestial navigation and learned the patterns of wind and sea currents. Long voyages taxed the physical and emotional well-being of the crew, requiring new methods ofsupply and sustenance. In addition to covering these developments, Smith's book shows how ships were built, outfitted, and manned, illustrating what life at sea was like in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Focusing on the advances in maritime technology that made European expansionpossible, this book will shed light on a neglected aspect of the European conquest of the New World.
Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age
The Vikings were the master mariners and ship-builders of the middle ages: their success depended on these skills. Spectacular archaeological finds of whole or partial ships, from burial mounds or dredged from harbours, continue to give new and exciting evidence of their practical craftsmanship and urge to seek new shores. The nautical vocabulary of the Viking Age, however, has been surprisingly neglected - the last comprehensive study was published in 1912 and was heavily dependent on post-Viking Age sources. Far better contemporary sources from the later Viking Age are available to document the activities of men and their uses of ships from c.950-1100, and Judith Jesch undertakes in this book the first systematic and comparative study of such evidence. The core is a critical survey of the vocabulary of ships and their crews, of fleets and sailing and battles at sea, based on runic inscriptions and skaldic evidence from c.950-1100. This nautical vocabulary is studied within the larger context of "viking" activity in this period: what that activity was and where it took place, its social and military aspects, and its impact ondevelopments in the nature of kingship in Scandinavia. JUDITH JESCH is Reader in Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, and author of Women in the Viking Age.
The Ghost Ships of Archangel
An extraordinary story of survival and alliance during World War II- the icy journey of four Allied ships crossing the Arctic to deliver much needed supplies to the Soviet war effort. On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to head further north into the ice field of the North Pole, seeking safety from Nazi bombers and U-boats in the perilous white maze of ice floes, growlers, and giant bergs. Despite the risks, they had a better chance of survival than the rest of Convoy PQ-17, a fleet of thirty-five cargo ships carrying $1 billion worth of war supplies to the Soviet port of Archangel--the limited help Roosevelt and Churchill extended to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to maintain their fragile alliance, even as they avoided joining the fight in Europe while the Eastern Front raged. The high-level politics that put Convoy PQ-17 in the path of the Nazis were far from the minds of the diverse crews aboard their ships. U.S. Navy Ensign Howard Carraway, aboard the SS Troubadour, was a farm boy from South Carolina and one of the many Americans for whom the convoy was to be a first taste of war; aboard the SS Ironclad, Ensign William Carter of the U.S. Navy Reserve had passed up a chance at Harvard Business School to join the Navy Armed Guard; from the Royal Navy Reserve, Lt. Leo Gradwell was given command of the HMT Ayrshire, a fishing trawler that had been converted into an antisubmarine vessel. All the while, The Ghost Ships of Archangel turns its focus on Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, playing diplomatic games that put their ships in peril. The twenty-four-hour Arctic daylight in midsummer gave no respite from bombers, and the Germans wielded the terrifying battleship Tirpitz, nicknamed The Big Bad Wolf. Icebergs were as dangerous as Nazis. As a newly forged alliance was close to dissolving and the remnants of Convoy PQ-17 tried to slip through the Arctic in one piece, the fate of the world hung in the balance.
Mayflower
"Vivid and remarkably fresh...Philbrick has recast the Pilgrims for the ages."--The New York Times Book Review Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History New York Times Book Review Top Ten books of the Year With a new preface marking the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower. How did America begin? That simple question launches the acclaimed author of In the Hurricane's Eye and Valiant Ambition on an extraordinary journey to understand the truth behind our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. As Philbrick reveals in this electrifying history of the Pilgrims, the story of Plymouth Colony was a fifty-five year epic that began in peril and ended in war. New England erupted into a bloody conflict that nearly wiped out the English colonists and natives alike. These events shaped the existing communites and the country that would grow from them.
Online Resources
- The 1620 Mayflower voyage and the English settlement of North AmericaWhittock explores the reasons for migration to the New World in 1620 and later, and the significance of those migrants, both at the time and their impact on the evolution of the US today as it celebrates its 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims in New England on the Mayflower. In November 1620, a battered sailing ship wearily worked its way up the coast of what is today Massachusetts. Called the Mayflower, there was little about the ship and its passengers that indicated it might ever have a place in future history, myth and legend. In fact, everything pointed towards hardship, perhaps disaster. As those on the ship looked out on the shoreline of Cape Cod, their anxieties must have mounted.
- THE CHARACTERIZATION OF WATERLOGGED ARCHAEOLOGICAL WOOD: THE THREE ROMAN SHIPS FOUND IN NAPLES (ITALY)Three apparently well-preserved shipwrecks dating back to Roman times were brought to light near Piazza Municipio in Naples (Italy), during the excavation for the construction of Line 1 of the subway. The shipwrecks were covered by marine sand and silt, below the water table. In order to establish the nature and the extent of wood degradation and, therefore, determine how best to preserve the shipwrecks, a diagnostic investigation was carried out. The study involved the identification of wood species, chemical characterization of the residue component and physical and micro-morphological characterization.
- The Ferriby boats : seacraft of the Bronze AgeIn 1937 the author, then aged 19, found the remains of an ancient boat at Ferriby on the Humber shore. This book is his own account of his discoveries, excavations and research over 50 years since the first boat find. The importance of this and the subsequent finds was only fully recognised after World War II, when the new technique of carbon-14 dating revealed that the Ferriby Boats were built before 1000 BC. This makes them the oldest plank-built boats found anywhere in the world apart from Ancient Egypt and the Aegean; they predate any similar craft in Northern Europe by half a millennium a...
Streaming Media
- The Galley, Coins, and the AlphabetIn addition to creating material abundance, technology, whether it's an oxcart or a telecommunications network, facilitates interaction between people. Explore the role of trade in early societies and how ships, coins, and the alphabet shaped the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean.
- The Viking InvasionsWatch as the one- or two-boat raids of the late 8th century grew into vast armies of 50 ships or more by the middle of the 9th.k Intent on settling permanently, the invaders' influence in eastern England would be profound, with patterns of landholding, legal institutions, and even language altered forever.
- Seafaring BritainBritain became a world power thanks to its domination of the seas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Visit the historic dockyard in Portsmouth, where you can see some of the ships that helped put Britain on the map. Then discover some of the less well-known but equally impressive ports and ships, plus some of Britain's many coastal lighthouses.
- Machines at Sea—Ancient ShipsSpurred by their dependence on maritime trade, the ancient Greeks became masters of nautical engineering. Follow the development of their ship design and sailing techniques, which were adopted by the Romans and paved the way for the great age of exploration in the 15th century.