Ships/Shipbuilding

For most of the 15th century, the maritime power of Europeans was confined to the smaller seas whose coasts they inhabited. Spurred by shifting power dynamics, they developed ships capable of crossing the world’s major oceans in the late 15th century, with enough personnel, cargo, and arms to make such voyaging worthwhile. They used such vessels first to explore and exploit Macaronesia, then rounding the southern tip of Africa, entering the Indian Ocean World. The same types of vessels crossed the North Atlantic, bringing colonizers to the Americas. By the early 16th century, these European ships had crossed the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific. They were, however, latecomers to transoceanic voyaging under sail; contemporaries from Asia, the Indian Ocean World, and the Pacific islands were already engaged in transoceanic movement and commerce, and had been for centuries. The singular innovation of Europeans in early modern shipping was their establishment and maintenance of transatlantic routes to the Americas, as an extension of what they had done in Macaronesia, colonizing the Caribbean islands, and then South, Central, and North America. The ships they used were, like those in use all over the world, built of wooden frames and planks, and powered by sailing rigs with multiple masts and multiple sails, allowing for flexibility in sail plan to best match the wind and sea conditions in which the vessel was operating; those conditions changed frequently and often drastically, so that a vessel whose crew could quickly adapt a sail plan to changing conditions had a much better chance of successfully navigating the vessel on a long ocean voyage requiring self-sufficiency for weeks or months at a time. The study of the ships themselves—their design, construction, and techniques of operation—is necessarily interdisciplinary. It requires reading in the history of science, the history of technology, economic history, labor history, military and naval history, material culture, and maritime archaeology; the physical remains of period vessels are essential primary sources. A perennial challenge to writing maritime history with a focus on ships is achieving adequate technical mastery of the subject, which also requires reading technical histories written by museum curators and experts outside the academy, such as serious modelers, replica designers, and naval architects who understand sailing craft. Here, I restrict inclusion of academic history works to those centrally and specifically concerned with the technology of the ship itself. The discipline of archaeology has, over time, produced far more of such works. Some historians have considered ship technology seriously; it is to be hoped that more useful work on the subject will come from the field of the history of technology.

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