Ship of the Line: Did you mean...?

The English mariner, privateer, and explorer Francis Drake (c. 1540-1596 CE) made his circumnavigation of the world between 1577 and 1580 CE. Only the second to achieve this feat after the expedition of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan...

The Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) refers to a period when robbery on the high seas and at colonial ports reached an unprecedented level. Although not all historians agree on the precise time frame, it is generally applied to those pirates...

The Carthaginians were famed in antiquity for their seafaring skills and innovation in ship design. The empire their navy protected stretched from Sicily to the Atlantic coast of Africa. Able to match the tyrants of Sicily and the Hellenistic...

From the 16th to 18th centuries, two treasure fleets sailed each year, one to Mexico and the other to Central America, then part of the Spanish Empire. There they collected precious eastern goods and the riches of the Americas, including...

A depiction of the Sinking the White Ship in the English Channel. The White Ship sank off the coast of Barfleur, Normandy on November 25, 1120 CE. The ship departed from Barfleur on a course for England, but struck a rock on its portside...

Wreckage of the slave ship Clotilda, photograph included in Emma Langdon Roche's Historic Sketches of the South, c. 1914. The "wreckage," as pictured here, would be the dark line of wood appearing out of the water, not the boat on shore...

A pirate ship being careened, that is when a ship is beached and its hull scraped clean of marine encrustations and repaired. From the TV series Black Sails. ©2014 Starz Entertainment

A 1702 illustration of the English pirate Henry Every and his ship the Fancy. Every captured fabulous treasure from an Indian treasure ship in 1695 and disappeared soon after never to be seen again.

This limestone fragment depicts a prow of a ship. There are sailors, facing right; the foremost sailor holds a pole or a spear. The ship was originally painted black while the sailors were painted red. From Egypt, precise provenance is unknown...

Smasher of Napoleon's invasion dream, veteran of three major wars, and scene of the death of the Royal Navy's greatest hero, HMS Victory is one of Britain's most famous warships. Curiously, and despite being on permanent display as a tourist...