Ships of Discovery and Exploration

Introduction Ships of Discovery and Exploration recounts the stories of more than 130 ships that sailed in exploratory voyages in all parts of the world and for all sorts of reasons. Until the nineteenth century, all kinds of ships were used for exploration. Only in the mid-1800s were ships built for specific exploratory assignments, so it is not possible to speak of the evolution of discovery ships as a distinct type before about 150 years ago. It is equally difficult to treat the history of maritime discovery as a continuous process, for until the European "age of discovery," which started in about the fifteenth century, exploration was a regional phenomenon in which limited horizons were gradually expanded. Some of these regions were small, almost local, but others -- Europe itself, the Indian Ocean and East Asia, and Oceania -- were vast areas comprising a multiplicity of heterogeneous networks. Europe's overriding contribution to maritime discovery was to connect these regions and to create a more or less unified global network for the transportation of goods, peoples, and ideas. This development occurred only in the last 500 years, but much of the groundwork that made it possible was laid over the course of thousands of years before that. The focus of maritime exploration prior to the late eighteenth century had a geographic orientation. By that time, the outlines of the world's oceans had been well defined and described. In the Age of Enlightenment, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the mission of voyages of exploration came to embrace the study of ethnography, zoology, and botany, and increasingly, specialists in these fields signed on for long voyages. Advances in technology -- the need to lay submarine cables, for instance -- and lines of inquiry related to the economics of fisheries and environmental and navigational sciences introduced a new dimension into the work of maritime discovery. This resulted in the construction of a wide variety of purpose-built vessels designed to examine the waters of the world beneath the surface in new ways. For much of the early period of discovery the names of the vessels used in exploration, if indeed they had names, are unknown. To tell the story of maritime discovery with reference only to a handful of specific named ships would be to overlook some of the most daring and decisive of our forebears'achievements. In recent years, a number of early voyages of discovery have been re-created in vessels, and along routes, of greater or lesser authenticity. These vessels -- Polynesian voyaging canoes, Mesopotamian reed boats, Greek galleys, Irish curraghs, Arabian dhows -- have drawn attention to what was possible. Even if the results of some of these modern voyages are inconclusive, they almost invariably throw new light on our understanding of the past. The South Pacific is the locus of one of the oldest and most sustained efforts of exploration by any maritime people. The islands of Oceania are divided into three main groups, reflecting both geographic and ethnographic characteristics. Farthest to the west, and settled first, are the islands of Melanesia,* which lie within a broad band between New Guinea and the Fiji Islands. To the east is Polynesia, a huge triangle whose sides are described by a line drawn between Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the east, New Zealand in the southwest, and Hawaii to the north. Micronesia, north of Melanesia, spans the Pacific from Palau to Kiribati and embraces the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana island groups. Although many specifics remain unknown, one widely accepted theory is that the distant ancestors of the islanders encountered by Europeans from the sixteenth century on oPaine, Lincoln P. is the author of 'Ships of Discovery and Exploration' with ISBN 9780395984154 and ISBN 0395984157.