6. A sixth-century Byzantine mosaic shows a fisherman hauling a net while his mate steers their small boat, probably a reference to the calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew (Matthew 4:18). The mosaic is in the Basilica di Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. The Adriatic port was the site of a Roman naval base under Augustus, and capital of the Western Roman Empire (402–476) and of the Ostrogoths (until 554) before it became the capital of Byzantine Italy. Courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
7. A Byzantine imperial dromon fitted with Greek fire, a medieval flamethrower, attacking a ship in the fleet of the rebel Thomas the Slav in 821. Greek fire was developed in the seventh century by a Syrian Byzantine refugee from the Arab conquest. Despite dire threats of eternal damnation and more temporal punishments, knowledge of how to make it soon spread to navies across the Mediterranean. This illustration is from a twelfth-century Sicilian manuscript of John Skylitzes’s eleventh-century Synopsis Historion (vitr. 26-2, fol. 34v). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid/Art Resource, New York.
8. The first-century BCE gold Broighter boat, named for the town in County Derry, northern Ireland, where it was found in 1895. Part of a votive deposit to the sea god Manannán Mac Lir, this is probably a model of an oceangoing vessel, of wood rather than hide-covered, complete with seats, oars, rowlocks, steering oar, and mast. The twenty-centimeter-long model probably represents a vessel twelve to fifteen meters long. Courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin.
9. Shipbuilding scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, which recounts the story of William, duke of Normandy’s campaign to take the English throne in 1066. To the left, a man is shaping a plank with a side axe. In the center, the master shipwright is checking the lines of the hull of the upper ship by eye while someone else finishes the planks of the completed hull, and a third man bends over a breast augur. Two men are applying the finishing touches to the hull below, one with an axe or adze, and the other with a drill. To the right are five complete hulls being drawn to the water’s edge, as we know from the caption in the following panel: “Hic trahunt naves ad mare” (Here they drag the ships to the sea). Courtesy of the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, France.
10. A ship crossing the Persian Gulf, from Yahya Ben Mahmoud al-Wasiti’s thirteenth-century manuscript of the Maqamat (Assemblies, or Entertaining Dialogues), by al-Hariri of Basra (1054–1122). Although the stylized rig is difficult to interpret, the ship apparently has three decks and a fluked anchor hangs from a projection from the bow. The image is best known for al-Wasiti’s depiction of a centerline rudder, the first known from the Indian Ocean region and roughly contemporary with the oldest depiction of a rudder from Europe. Photograph by Gerard Le Gall; courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris/Art Resource, New York.
11. A passenger-carrying junk at Kaifeng, China, one of some twenty-eight vessels depicted in Zhang Zheduan’s 5.25-meter-long scroll painting Qingming Shanghe Tu (Along the River During the Qingming Festival) of about 1125. The boat is being pulled by five trackers (out of frame to the left). The bipod mast is supported by numerous stays, and the massive centerline rudder is readily visible. (Scrollable versions of the Qingming Shanghe Tu are available online.) Courtesy of the Palace Museum, Beijing.
12. A Venetian great galley from a fifteenth-century shipbuilding treatise by Michael of Rhodes. Great galleys helped open regular commercial sea trade between Genoa and Venice and the markets of Flanders in northwest Europe. Although they originated as oared warships, their primary means of propulsion was a massive lateen sail, and oars were reserved for auxiliary propulsion. Courtesy of David McGee, ed., The Book of Michael of Rhodes. Vol. 1, Facsimile: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, image from page 236. © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of MIT Press.
13. The Doge of Venice Departing for the Lido in the Bucintoro on Ascension Day by Antonio Canaletto (1697–1768). Starting in the year 1000, the doge annually boarded the elaborately carved and gilded state barge to cross the Venetian lagoon to perform the sposalizia, a wedding rite that symbolized Venice’s dominion over the Adriatic and its trade, and thereby affirmed its exclusive relationship with the sea against other prospective suitors. Courtesy of the British Museum, London.
14. A detail from the scroll commissioned by Takezaki Suenaga to commemorate the repulse of the Yuan (Mongol) Chinese invasion of Japan in 1281. At right, the three Oyano brothers are boarding a Chinese ship under a hail of arrows. To the left, Suenaga is cutting the throat of a Mongol warrior while another lies dead on deck. The Mongols cowering belowdecks are portrayed with distinctly simian faces. Although there is no mast adequate for a sail, it has probably been lowered for battle. Details characteristic of Chinese vessels of the time include the winch for an anchor forward and the heavy centerline rudder. Courtesy of the Imperial Museum, Tokyo.
15. An illustration from a 1341 manuscript of the Iranian national epic, Shahnamah (Book of Kings), written by Firdawsi at the start of the eleventh century. Here the legendary king Kay Khusraw is crossing the Sea of Zareh in pursuit of his maternal grandfather, Afrasiyab, who killed his father. The Sea of Zareh is actually a salt lake called the Goud-e Zereh near the border between Afghanistan and Iran and fed in part by the Helmand River, and crossing it would not have taken the seven months described by Firdawsi. Courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase, F1942.12.
16. A ship taking soundings, from the Ordonances of Armoury, Jousting, Sword, and Axe Combat, and Chivalry (fol. 138v), written in the mid-fifteenth century for Sir John Astley. The ship is a carrack, or galleon, the forerunner of the full-rigged ship with a combination of square sails on the fore and main masts, and a fore-and-aft lateen sail on the mizzen. The bow incorporates a heavy forecastle protected by shields, while two of the crew man the topcastle at the top of the mast. The text explains what course to steer after the water has reached a certain depth. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, New York.
17. Jorge Aguiar’s portolan chart of the Mediterranean drafted in 1492, the year of Columbus’s epochal discovery, and the oldest extant chart of Portuguese origin. Drawn on a sheepskin, the neck of which is west, the chart shows Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands, and the coast of Africa from Cape Verde to Egypt and the Red Sea. Clearly seen on the Iberian Peninsula are Lisbon and Granada, newly taken from the Moors, while Genoa and Venice dominate the Italian Peninsula. The Rhine and Danube Rivers are treated as one, flowing between the North Sea and Black Sea, and while ports in the British Isles and around the Black Sea are well represented, the coasts of Denmark and the Baltic are blank. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
18. Noah’s ark as seen by the Mughal illustrator Miskin, who painted this miniature in about 1590. As popular a figure in the Quran as he is in the Hebrew Bible, Noah (in Arabic, Nuh) kneels on the third deck facing aft, his head wreathed in a flaming halo, while the crew—dressed only in loincloths—sail the ship. Others try to maintain order among the castaway menagerie, which includes elephants, tigers, leopards, dromedaries, monkeys, pelicans, and doves, and other passengers, one of whom has fallen over. While the animals are shown in pairs, Miskin’s ark apparently carries no women. Courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase, F1948.8.
19. Johan Bruun’s Kronborg Castle, View from the Øresund, 1739. The Øresund is the narrow strait between Denmark and what is now Sweden where all ships had to anchor to pay their toll for passage through the sound, under the supervision of the guardship of the Danish crown, shown at center. Courtesy of the Handels-og Søfartsmuseet på Kronborg, Helsingør, Denmark.
20. “John Bull Taking a Luncheon, or British Cooks Cramming Old Grumble-Gizzard with Bonne-Chére.” Drawn just after the battle of Aboukir, James Gillray’s cartoon shows Admiral Lord Nelson in the forefront of British admirals and naval heroes—including Warren, Howe, B
ridport, Duncan, and St. Vincent—offering platters of ships to a gluttonous John Bull, who complains, “What! more Frigasees? why you sons o’ bitches you, where do ye think I shall find room to stow all you bring in?” Published October 24, 1798, by H. Humphrey. Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.
21. Giant Demon Attacks a Ship from the seventeenth-century Sripal Ras (The Annals of Sripal), written by Yasovijayji and Vinayvijayj. The verse epic recounts the story of the lay Jain devotees Sripal Raja and his queen, Mayana, who together and singly endure many tests of faith. Seeking to make a name for himself, Sripal Raja traded on land and sea. This illustration shows his ship as an armed British trader, the most powerful and long-ranging vessels known to the merchant community of Gujarat of the 1770s when this was painted. Courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase, F1999.22.
22. Jean Dupas’s gold, silver, and palladium leaf and paint mural History of Navigation. Measuring more than six meters high by nearly nine meters long, the mural is an exotic interpretation of its subject designed for the first-class salon of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (French Line)’s ocean liner Normandie (1935–41). The ship itself exemplified the aesthetic celebrated in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925. This was known as “ocean liner style” for decades before the demise of the ocean liner gave rise to the more generic term “art deco.” Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, New York.
23. Stephen Bone’s On Board an S-Class Submarine: Up the Conning Tower. An official Royal Navy war artist, during World War II Bone spent time in a variety of warships to capture the realities of the isolated and often claustrophobic conditions of life at sea. Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.
24. The port of Singapore has been one of the world’s busiest for the past two decades, thanks in large part to its embrace of containerization. So efficient is this form of cargo transportation that there are no people visible on the ship or the wharf. All the work of transferring containers between ship and shore is done by solitary crane operators fifty meters or more above the pier. Courtesy of the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore.
25. A huge catch aboard a trawler in the Gulf of Alaska. Judging from the two members of the crew seen toward the bow, the bulging trawl net is at least ten feet across. This picture illustrates the strain that modern industrial fishing with its sophisticated electronic tracking devices, mechanical efficiency, and phenomenally strong gear like nylon netting has put on fish stocks worldwide. Photograph by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Marine Observer Program; courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Washington, D.C.
26. The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower being replenished by the fleet oiler USNS Big Horn. The Eisenhower is nuclear-powered and the hoses leading from the Big Horn supply jet fuel for the carrier’s air wing, while helicopters transship dry goods, including mail for the crew. The U.S. Navy has long been in the vanguard of underway replenishment, which is essential to long-distance overseas operations such as those shown here in the Arabian Sea. Photograph by Darien G. Kennedy; courtesy of the U.S. Navy.
Oceania
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Pre-Columbian South America and the Caribbean
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Pre-Columbian North and Central America
The shaded area indicates the range of the paper birch (Betula papyrifera), or canoe birch, and thus of the birchbark canoe.
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Ancient Egypt
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From Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley
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The Bronze Age Near East
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The Classical Mediterranean
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The Muslim Indian Ocean
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East and Southeast Asia
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The Medieval Mediterranean
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Europe Through the Viking Age
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Late Medieval Europe
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The Monsoon Seas
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Asia and the Pacific in the Early Modern Period
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The Atlantic World
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Early Modern Europe
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Asia and the Pacific at the Turn of the Millennium
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The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 112
