The History of Ships

With a foreword by Frank Carr, CB, CBE, formerly Director of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

The ships of any age express the needs and ambitions of the people who build them. They also reflect the state of technology at the time. A history of ships, therefore, also charts the history of man, and in this book Peter Kemp covers all the 5,000 years of man’s struggle for mastery of the sea.

As the centuries passed, the oarpower of a Pharaoh’s funeral barge gave way to the use of sail in the Viking longship and the trading ‘cogs’ of the Middle Ages. With progress in ship design, voyages became longer and more adventurous. New lands were discovered and there was a boom in maritime trade, calling for new types of ship to carry and protect it. Then, in the nine- teenth century, seafaring was transformed by the twin revolutions of steam power and iron construction. And today we are in the age of the supertanker, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and nuclear submarine.

The scope of this book includes merchant- men and men-of-war, ceremonial, pleasure and trading craft of all civilizations and ages, as well as the people who built and sailed them. This revised edition has an extra thirty-two pages to bring the story up to date, including a chapter on the new challenge to marine engineering posed by the discovery of oil under the sea. On the naval side, there is an examination of the lessons to be learned from the recent war in the Falklands.

The full grandeur of the subject is cap- tured in more than 270 magnificent colour photographs, while individual two-page sections are devoted to topics of special interest in each period, such as the birth of navigation or the de development of the Dreadnought battleship. Of special note are the fourteen superb double-page recon- structions of vessels that were milestones in maritime history.