Sailing: Did you mean...?

It was all very well pocketing other people’s valuables and roistering at rum parties, but life on a pirate ship involved a surprising amount of hard work. Pirates were first and foremost sailors and in the Golden Age...

Unlike today, where shipbuilding is based on science and where ships are built using computers and sophisticated tools, shipbuilding in ancient Rome was more of an art relying on rules of thumb, inherited techniques...

The Portuguese colonization of the Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) Islands began from 1462. Initially envisaged as a base to give mariners direct access to West African trade, the Central Atlantic islands soon became...

The Periplus of the Euxine Sea (Circumnavigation of the Black Sea) is a description of trade routes along the shores of the Black Sea written by Arrian of Nicomedia (Lucius Flavius Arrianus), a historian and philosopher...

The HMS Gloucester was wrecked in the North Sea, about 30 miles off the shore of Norfolk, England, shortly after dawn on 6 May 1682. It was a warship in the navy of Charles II of England (r. 1660-1685), and at the...

Christopher Columbus (l. 1451-1506 CE, also known as Cristoffa Corombo in Ligurian and Cristoforo Colombo in Italian) was a Genoese explorer (identified as Italian) who became famous in his own time as the man who discovered...

The caravel (caravela in Spanish and Portuguese), was a type of medium-sized ship which, with its low draught and lateen or triangular sails, made it ideal for exploration from the 15th century onwards. Fast, manoeuvrable, and only needing...

The SS Great Britain was a steam-powered ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) which sailed on its maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York in May 1845. It was the largest passenger ship in the world at the time...

The Suez Canal in Egypt, which links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, was taken over by the British in 1882 and was only reluctantly released 75 years later. The seizure in the 19th century...

Piracy has involved many nationalities over the centuries, but one of the prominent groups in the medieval and early modern periods was the French pirates, who terrorised the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean...