Much of the contact between Old World cultures occurred as the result of maritime exploration, travel, and trade. The ships that transported people and goods along the sea-lanes of the Old World were instrumental in facilitating and maintaining cross-cultural contact and exchange. This section will briefly outline some of the major types of vessels used by mariners in the Old World. Innovations in navigation will be treated in a separate section.

Navigation

European and Mediterranean Ships

Mediterranean Europe, along with Northern Africa and the Middle East, benefited from a long history of maritime technology inherited from the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Cretans, Mycenaeans, and Phoenicians. Sails were in use on the Mediterranean from at least 2000 BCE. The earliest existing evidence for the use of sails in Northern Europe is much later in date – between the 1st century BCE and the second and third centuries CE.

In the Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period, naval operations were dominated by large warships driven by both sail and oar. Previously, in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the Athenians had developed a type of warship called the trireme, which employed three banks of oarsmen in order to maximise speed and manoeuvrability in combat. During the Hellenistic period, we also hear of quadriremes and quinqueremes. While some scholars have argued that these names refer to the number of banks of rowers, others believe that they refer to the number of rowers powering each oar. This galley style of naval combat depended mainly on ramming and boarding tactics, and would remain prevalent in the Mediterranean until the advent of the sailing ship armed with cannons in the late 1400s and early 1500s CE. Naval power helped governments to protect their commercial interests from both piracy and the aggression of rival navies. When, for example, Emperor Augustus established a firm network of naval power throughout the sealanes of the Roman Empire, maritime trade rapidly grew and prospered.

The typical Mediterranean merchant ship of antiquity, the round ship, changed relatively little from the Bronze Age onward, except in terms of size. Evidence from underwater excavations of shipwrecks and from ancient art reveals that these ships featured rounded planked hulls with raised bows and sterns. They usually sported a single mast placed in the centre of the hull and were rigged with a single square sail. In Roman times, some vessels had a second mast situated forward of the main mast.

Around the second century CE, a new type of sail became widely used in the Mediterranean. This was the triangular lateen sail, which could catch the wind on either side of its surface, thereby allowing a vessel to sail closer into the wind. Sailors no longer had to depend solely on the wind blowing in the desired direction when they wanted to undertake a voyage. The Byzantines may have adopted the lateen sail from the Arabs, and then passed it on to other Europeans. Around this time, the Byzantines, along with other Mediterranean shipbuilders, introduced a new form of hull construction. Instead of assembling the planked and mortised hull first and inserting a ribbed skeleton into this shell, they began constructing the skeleton (ribs and keel) first and then built the planked hull around this interior structure.

In Northern Europe, ancient boats had hulls of sewn or nailed planks. Among the most successful Northern European boats of the early medieval period were those of the Vikings. These were propelled by oar and by a rectangular sail. They were steered by a side rudder that was lashed to the starboard side of the hull near the stern. Their hulls were usually double-ended with rounded bottoms and flared sides. The efficiency and seaworthiness of these boats is attested by the establishment of Viking settlements in North America, and by the maintenance of regular contacts between Iceland, Greenland, Scandinavia, the Baltic, and Europe’s Atlantic coast. The lightness and buoyancy of these vessels also allowed the Vikings to use them in relatively shallow water. As such, they could make extensive use of Europe’s river systems.

The cog was another common Northern European vessel in medieval times. It became dominant in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when the merchants of the Hanseatic League made use of their great cargo capacities. This capacity was afforded by the shape of the hull, which had a flat bottom and sharply inclined bow and stern. They tended to sport a single square-rigged mast. As early as the beginning of the ninth century, we have evidence of cogs with enclosed cabins. Around 1242, we also see evidence of the use of stern rudders on cogs, a development that had already occurred in China by the first century CE. Their use of an axial rudder in combination with a square sail on a single mast, gave cogs improved handling characteristics in the rougher waters of the Atlantic.

This was not lost on Mediterranean ship designers, who began adopting some of the features of the cog in the early 1300s. The first "cocha" are mentioned in Genoa in 1311. Further developments were made by Italian and Iberian shipbuilders throughout the fourteenth century. A mizzen mast with triangular lateen sail was placed toward the stern of the vessel, while a small square-rigged mast was placed to the fore of the main mast. Thus, a new type of vessel, the carrack, was born. Along with this new system of masts and rigging, the carrack had a massive ribbed skeleton, two or three decks, enclosed structures at the bow and stern (fore and stern castles), and a sternpost rudder for steering. These carracks could hold 1,000 tons of cargo. With their seaworthiness and copious capacity, fifteenth century carracks ranged from the Baltic to the eastern Mediterranean. The carrack, as exemplified by Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, also proved eminently suitable for trans-oceanic travel, and so, it constituted the basic design upon which much of future European shipbuilding would be based. A new era of world trade, exploration, and expansion now opened up for Europe, an era which depended greatly on the evolution of ship design.

The European Voyages of Exploration

Middle Eastern and North African Ships

The peoples of the Middle East and North Africa were the direct heirs to a long tradition of boat and shipbuilding stretching back to, and even beyond, the great early civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Planked boats and reed crafts were in use by the third millennium BCE and there are records of voyages from Babylon, through the Persian Gulf, to the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and even further to western India. Middle Eastern sailors were using sails, made of either reed or cloth, since 2500-2000 BCE. In the sixth century CE, Procopius wrote of sewn boats being constructed in the Persian Gulf area. These vessels were made of planks fastened together by palm fibre. Such craft continued to be made into the twentieth century.

The dhow was, and is, one of the more well-known types of Middle Eastern vessels. By strict definition, a dhow refers to a trading vessel of 150 to 200 tons, with a single mast and a lateen style of rigging. It is native to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. But the term has also been used to describe any type of similar-sized trading vessel in these waters, regardless of the number of masts and style of rig. During the medieval period, dhows were typically built of teak or coconut palm wood. The masts were also made of palm. While many of the ships of the Mediterranean or East Asia were built with iron nails, the timbers of a dhow’s hull were lashed or sewn together with coconut fibre ropes and the spaces between the timbers were tightly caulked. It is not known precisely when the lateen rig was developed, and if, indeed, it was an indigenous Arab development.

We have little information on the performance and handling of ancient and early medieval Middle Eastern ships, but we do know that from at least the first century CE, Arab seafarers were making direct voyages to India by making use of the southwestern monsoon winds in July and October, and the northeastern monsoon winds in November and March. The import of timber from the Malabar coast of India was one of the principal objects of such voyages. Some of the tales of Sinbad may be based on possible Arab voyages from the Persian Gulf as far as China. Early elements of these stories are datable to the late ninth century CE. A round trip to and from China would have taken about a year and a half.

By the end of the tenth century, different sorts of ships were used by Islamic sailors in the eastern and western Mediterranean. Some were built in the European fashion with nails and timber often imported from the Byzantines or from other parts of Europe. Other vessels were small lateen-rigged craft. Oared galleys were mainly used by the Muslims for military purposes. Most Islamic bulk cargoes in the Mediterranean were hauled in barges that were towed behind other vessels. Cargoes were also transported in large round ships that travelled in convoys between the eastern and western Mediterranean.

Indian Ships

Evidence from excavations, particularly from clay tablets, shows that the great civilisations of Mesopotamia in the Middle East and Harappa in the Indus Valley of India, were in contact by sea between the middle of the third and the middle of the second millenniums BCE. From the fourth to the seventh centuries CE we find accounts of sea voyages between India and China. It is not known for certain whose mariners were moving in which directions, but a certain amount of this east-west traffic would have been undertaken by Indian sailors using Indian-built vessels. As a result, Indian mariners and designers would have had a great deal of exposure to ideas and technologies from a variety of cultures: Classical, Arab, Indonesian, and Chinese.

The earliest extant evidence of sailing in Indian waters was written by Strabo in the first century CE. He noted the inadequacy of the sails that were used on vessels that plied the waters between India and Ceylon. Earlier Harappan shipbuilders may have constructed vessels with planks joined by wooden fastenings. There is no evidence yet for the construction of sewn planked boats before the early sixteenth century. There is a belief, however, that the dhows used by Arab sailors in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf were in fact of Indian origin. If that was the case, then the construction methods used in the building of Arab dhows (as outlined above) may also have been employed by Indian shipbuilders much earlier than the sixteenth century. Between 1270 and 1368, some vessels in the Indian Ocean were quite large, with more than one mast, and with hulls constructed using iron nails.

East Asian Ships

It is known that the Chinese were in contact with India and the Mediterranean world since at least Roman times. But the distinctive Chinese style of shipbuilding seems to have undergone very little influence from outside cultures. Conversely, Chinese nautical developments such as the stern rudder and the magnetic compass have exerted a profound impact on shipbuilding, handling, and navigation. There is no early direct evidence for the use of sails, though a pictogram hints that sails were used from the late second millennium BCE.

One of the most well-known Chinese and East Asian vessel types is the junk. Junks were flat-bottomed craft with high squared sterns and square bows. They often sported two or even three masts with sails often made of matting that was stiffened with horizontal battens. The name "junk" actually comes from the Portuguese term "junco," which in turn was adapted from the Javanese word "djong," meaning "ship." The characteristic hull design of the junk appears to have been developed between the first century BCE and the third century CE. Axial rudders, for more effective steering, were developed by the first century CE. The use of battened sails seems to date from the twelfth century CE. A survey written by a Chinese government official in 1225 mentions junks with three or four masts that were equipped with compasses and could carry as many as 400 passengers.

The late fifteenth century saw the development of huge ships by the Ming Dynasty. The largest of these Ming treasure ships tipped the scales at 1,500 tons, and exhibited many of the typical design features of the junk, but on a colossal scale. Some of the hulls of these ships had as many as 13 watertight compartments, which helped to keep the entire hull from flooding if damage occurred. The large ships of the Ming fleet were among the most lavish and seaworthy vessels afloat anywhere in the fifteenth century. With such craft, the Chinese were able to undertake trade and political expeditions around the Indian Ocean, even reaching the east coast of Africa.