Talk:Ship

Technically true?

Hi ThoughtIdRetired, you recently put, "For most of the age of sail, the word "ship" often denoted that a vessel was ship-rigged – that is: square-rigged on all of three or more masts. This ambiguity can usually (but not always) be resolved from the context" into the article. Is this true? Is that a citable assertion?

Would it not be more prudent to say, "During the age of sail, ship acquired a specific connotation among mariners as a full-rigged ship with square-rigged sails on all of three or more masts, which distinguished it from vessels with other sail plans and their own specific nautical names." Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 18:47, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

The closest reference I have found so far to support this is:
"SHIP, vaisseau, (scip, Sax.) a general name given by seamen to the first rank of vessels which are navigated on the ocean. Amongst people who are unacquainted with marine distinctions, this term is of very vague and indiscriminate acceptation: and indeed sailors themselves, submitting occasionally to the influence of custom, receive it according to this general idea. In the sea-language, however, it is more particularly applied to a vessel furnished with three masts, each of which is composed of a lower mast, top-mast, and top-gallant-mast, with the usual machinery thereto belonging." from William Falconer. An Universal Dictionary of the Marine (that's the short title) first printed in 1669.
I feel that supports the ambiguity bit - whether it is resolvable from context is a bit of explanation that I feel an editor is allowed. The actual definition of a full-rigged ship in Falconer's dictionary is not fantastic, but he was making an early attempt at a nautical dictionary - he didn't have anyone to copy. We know that he is saying that there are three square rigged masts, because he has talked about a lower mast, topmast and top-gallant. That, as may sources say, is a "square-rigged mast". It just is not defined by using the word "sail". (Which is a lot easier for a modern reader to understand, and is used by modern sources, even if alongside the 3 section mast description.) Fore and aft sails (on their own) are put on masts with a different structure: pole masts (even if there is then a topmast above it). To get a feel for Falconer's ability as a dictionary writer, look, for instance, at his footnote to the more well known The Shipwreck, for studding sail, which says "1. Stud, or studding-sails, called by the French Bonettes en etude, are light sails, which are extended in moderate breezes beyond the skirts of the principal Sails; where they appear as Wings upon the Yard-arms. According to a conjecture of one of Falconer's friends, these sails seem originally to have been called steadying Sails, from their tendency to keep the ship in a steady course, as also from the Saxon word s ted, to assist." If you know what he is talking about, that is OK - but...

There might be better sources, but it takes a while to find them. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 19:33, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Of course, just to complicate things, "ship" is a very old word in the English language. If the meaning in the Age of Sail is mentioned, the article should possibly mention the usage before that era. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 19:45, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

ThoughtIdRetired, my formulation of the newly introduced sentence in the lead section was intended to distill what's presented in the Nomenclature section. The new sentence introduces a time frame and frequency without supporting it with a citation. I suggest that that "For most of..." and "often denoted" suggests that someone did a study on the time frame and frequency of occurrence of the nautical usage, compared with non-nautical usage of ship, both assertions requiring verification with a citation.

In the lead paragraph, let's stick with a distillation of what's in Nomenclature. Let's make sure that everything in Nomenclature is a direct paraphrase of what each reference states, not an inference that you or I bring to the article. Sincerely, HopsonRoad (talk) 00:48, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Getting this right is substantially more difficult than it first appears. Putting the various points in a somewhat random order:
(1) I accept that my first attempt at a sentence in the lead needs revision - not least the issue of weasel words is apparent to me now.
(2) I think it is important, in the lead, to point out that the technical, rig-specific use of "ship" means that there can be some ambiguity on what is intended by the writer. We know this from the OED (certainly for current usage, but to some degree in the past from the cites associated with the full entry) and from Falconer as a ref. The reason for doing this is to improve the usefulness of this encyclopaedia. A reader who is trying to find out what is meant by the word ship needs to see, totally clearly, that the word may have some ambiguity in its meaning. That should be stated in the lead, because a quick consultation of Wikipedia will not go any further.
(3) Looking at your suggestion: During the age of sail, ship acquired a specific connotation among mariners as a full-rigged ship with square-rigged sails on all of three or more masts, which distinguished it from vessels with other sail plans and their own specific nautical names. (a) I think sources do not show that the rig-specific definition is confined to mariners. It is used by most people in the broader maritime world and its associated commercial spheres. Otherwise it would not be used, for instance, by those in the insurance world when compiling Lloyd's Register of Shipping, nor by the merchants who charter ships or consign cargoes in them, together with the journalists who compile the commercial pages of newspapers. (Clearly Lloyd's Register and the many, many commercial pages in newspapers are their own RSs on this – interesting Lloyd's Register of Shipping is the most punctilious on not using "ship" when they mean "vessel", certainly in the issues that I have browsed recently. (Lloyd's Register has a lot more in it than a list of vessels - there is quite a lot of non-list content at the beginning.)) (b) I am not sure that ...acquired a specific connotation.. fits. It is a precise definition - see sources like Underhill and Bennett for this (and Richard Henry Dana in his The Seaman's Friend, particularly in the early part of the book, plate IV explanation). "connotation" does not seem to make this clear.
(4) I am hesitant about stating that the rig-specific definition is concurrent with the Age of Sail. "Age of Sail" is a technical term used by maritime historians that is not often clearly defined by them. It is not, however, the entire period in which sail was used as a means of propulsion (which the encyclopaedia user could easily presume). Nor do we have any evidence (from sources) that the rig-specific definition of a ship is totally concurrent with the Age of Sail - it is unlikely that it is. There is somewhere (and I will have to track it down, which will take a while) a source (or sources) that clearly states that originally vessels were defined by their hull shape and usage, rather than by their rig. To infer that the rig-specific use of "ship" is swept up in that change in describing vessels would be wrong, but it would help the reader if a footnote made clear that there was a change from use/hull type to rig to identify/distinguish vessels. (The source(s) that I need to find do have a rough date for this change.) It would also assist in our thinking here to know the date of that terminological change.
(5) Yes, there are bits of what I am suggesting for the lead that should be in the main body of the article as well, with appropriate references.
I am probably all out of ideas on this subject right now, but I will get back to it later. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 08:43, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

I think I have finally fixed the issue in the main text of the article. It took a new (to me) source to fix the thinking in my mind and the discovery that a source that I have had for ages addressed part of the story with hard data from a primary source (so, we have their secondary source interpretation). ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 15:56, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Prehistory and antiquity

The section "Asian developments" seems to be unsupported by references, particularly the references given: for instance "The first sea-going sailing ships were developed by the Austronesian peoples from what is now Taiwan." None of the three references given at the end of that paragraph specifically state this. Since it is a major statement of fact, unless someone can promptly come up with an authoritative source that supports this, much of this text should be deleted.

There are other problems in this section: "Austronesian rigs were distinctive in that they had spars supporting both the upper and lower edges of the sails....". Whilst this is broadly true, in a section on the sailing rigs of early and pre-history, it is a huge omission to not mention that Egyptian sailing vessels had a yard and a boom on their square sails - something that can be clearly seen in many of the surviving contemporary illustrations that have survived (and are discussed in chapter 2 of Casson's Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World.)

The section "Mediterranean developments" completely ignores the trade in grain that supported the major cities of this time. Quite simply, the classical era cities (e.g. Rome) could not have existed without deliveries of grain by ship. Casson's paper The Grain Trade of the Hellenistic World makes this point for part of that time period. There are many merchant ship wrecks in the Mediterranean that are evidence of this trade, as well as the extensive written records that document it. Surely some mention is needed.

The article does not cover 1200 BC to 1300 AD – a quite impressive gap in which we saw, at a minimum, the development of the Viking longship and the Cog (ship). Nor is the extensive trade in wine from (present-day) France to England mentioned – a trade that gave us the word ton for measuring the size of ships. This started in the article's 2,500 year time gap with the Romans, then arguably had a pause with the collapse of the Roman Empire and then was going strong from about 1000 AD onwards.

There is probably a lot more to comment on, but this is a start. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 13:45, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

As an aide-memoire to this point, the trade in tin (essential for the Bronze age) is a key part of the pre-history story. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 19:23, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

References

Recent edits

I am not sure that we are all pulling in the same direction with these edits:

Cleft timber was used for carvel construction right across the Northern European zone, not just in Scandinavia. Consider, for instance, the Newport ship, built in Northern Spain of cleft oak (and all the output of English and Scottish shipyards, etc.). So I find In Scandinavia to be confusingly off-target in explaining the subject. Also I do not get the relevance of the Romans – the periodisation of this part of the article is hopefully clear from the section headings.

. Firstly, explaining what is meant by cleft timber. What I was looking for was somewhere else in Wikipedia that explained this, so that the term could be linked. To date, I cannot find an explanation of timber conversion for boat and ship building. If there really isn't one, this material could perhaps go in Carvel (boat building). Adams makes a key point: that a cleft plank has to be sourced from a tree with a diameter three times that of the width of the plank "... for a cleft board cannot be much more than a third of the parent tree’s diameter."(pg 60). There is some discussion of this, for instance mention of a database of the length and width of clinker planks over time. Clearly there is quite a bit of important detail on this subject – but all of it is too much for this high level article. Hence the need for links and, if need be, the writing of those linked articles.

Secondly, the thinned down paragraph starting with The transition from clinker to carvel construction.. seems to have been eviscerated of its key fact – that it is a complex subject which is not fully understood. The rest of the paragraph is there to explain (briefly) why it is complex. Looking at that detail, the use of shipboard artillery needed more than just gunports. Guns are heavy and produce large shock loadings. That was not spelt out in the original text (perhaps it should have been), but reducing this passage to simply imply that carvel allowed holes to be cut in the sides of a ship for the guns is missing a big part of the story. The new text the increasing size of clinker-built vessels came to necessitate internal framing of their hulls for strength implies that earlier clinker ships had no framing, which is clearly wrong (look at the Gokstad ship, for example. You can see the frames in the pictures in the article. Later Nordic cargo vessels had more substantial frames and beams.) Adams discusses how beams were attached to the hull in early and late examples and explains how that attachment was changed to give greater strength. But the framing was there, both before and after. It just needed to be stronger and of a better design.
Overall, the original passage tried to capture the points made in the source at some length. I think we have to remember that Adams is a professor at a leading maritime archaeology institute and has worked on a number of key sites, starting with the Mary Rose, Gribshunden (an early carvel warship), another early carvel vessel in the Baltic and many other key sites over his career to date. I think we can take it that his discussion of the transition from clinker to carvel is not only based the research that he and others have been part of, but is taught to the students at Britain's premier university for maritime archaeology. This is a more complex story than we have seen from previous generations (I must check, for instance, Unger for what he says on this – from memory he does not go into much in the way of complexities). The earlier writers on the subject had much less information to go on than those working on it now. Drifting away from the points made by Adams is less than helpful. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 18:48, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Headings (and content) in history section

There have been several edits amending the headings in the history section. (originating with User:AmateurEditor's edits.) I think we need to acknowledge that there is something of a mess here, whichever set of headings we go for. The first problem is that the periodisation of history is very Eurocentric. So maritime history in other parts of the world really do not fit.

The content about 15th century China appears to have been stuck into the article with no real regard for where it belongs, anyway.

Then there is nothing about the development of the (European) ship after the first full-rigged ships were developed. That omits the change in the way square rig worked – the system of 1492 has substantial differences from that of the closing days of the 18th century. Coverage of this would make clear that the statement in the (then) medieval section This provided most of the ships used in the Age of Discovery... Over the next four hundred years. was laying out that the medieval merging of Mediterranean and Northern ship designs was the foundation of what happened in later periods.

The solution appears to be cutting the 15th century China content out of the Medieval subsection (to go in another section) and write a new section for 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. There is some element of forcing the subject into this date range, but I think it will work. In this time period we see (eventually) the introduction of meaningful stability calculations, the use of the logarithm to define the curves of hull shapes, improved rig designs, including topmast backstays (so ultimately making the topsail the major working sail of square rig, first to be set and last to be handed), the footrope, reefing of square sails (didn't start until c. 1650), introduction of the ship's wheel (some time in the first decade of the 18th century), early measures to prevent scurvy, the chronometer, also early trials of copper-sheathing of hulls; in the military area, the line of battle, broadside gunnery (again, later than you think), etc., etc.

I would resist applying any of the standard historical period labels to the new subsection, as many readers have no idea what they mean and they do not necessarily fit the developmental history of ships. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 20:09, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

ThoughtIdRetired and AmateurEditor, perhaps the answer is to have separate sections for Europe and Asia with timeline subheadings in each that make sense for that region. Right now, we timeline headings with regional subheadings, which causes the issue, described above. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 20:28, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, macro-regional division is a good idea. Would be a problem if it were split at too fine a level. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 20:59, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in responding. I agree that "medieval" is not a good global periodization. I agree with the suggestion to use centuries for the section headers instead, with subsections by regional period as makes sense, and further reading links as applicable. I will not likely be much involved going forward. I edit infrequently these days, and usually elsewhere. AmateurEditor (talk) 00:54, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Just to be clear, AmateurEditor, the suggestion was to have geographic regions as the section headings and time periods as the subordinate headings. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 13:32, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

That could make sense. It should be whatever best presents the info from reliable sources to the reader. AmateurEditor (talk) 00:45, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

She - female, feminine, gender of ships and boats

Please see the discussion Talk:Watercraft#She - female, feminine, gender of watercraft. Nø (talk) 08:49, 10 November 2025 (UTC)