Since the end of the age of sail a ship has been any large buoyant watercraft. Ships are generally distinguished from boats based on size and cargo or passenger capacity. Ships are used on lakes, seas, and rivers for a variety of activities, such as the transport of people or goods, fishing, entertainment, public safety, and warfare. Historically, a "ship" was a vessel with sails rigged in a specific manner.
Ships and boats have developed alongside mankind. In armed conflict and in daily life they have become an integral part of modern commercial and military systems. Fishing boats are used by millions of fishermen throughout the world. Military forces operate vessels for combat and to transport and support forces ashore. Commercial vessels, nearly 35,000 in number, carried 7.4 billion tons of cargo in 2007.
Ships were key in history's great explorations and scientific and technological development. Navigators such as Zheng He spread such inventions as the compass and gunpowder. Ships have been used for such purposes as colonization and the slave trade, and have served scientific, cultural, and humanitarian needs. After the 16th century, new crops that had come from and to the Americas via the European seafarers significantly contributed to the world's population growth. Maritime transport has shaped the world's economy into today's energy-intensive pattern.
Read more about Ship: Nomenclature, Types of Ships, Architecture, Lifecycle, Measuring Ships, Ship Pollution, Buoyancy
Other articles related to "ship, ships":
... On 15 June 1992, the ship was donated as a museum and now operates as the USS Lexington Museum on the Bay at 27°48'53 N, 97°23'19, 2914 North Shoreline Blvd, Corpus Christi, Texas ... The ship is carefully maintained, and areas of the ship previously off-limits are becoming open to the public every few years ... The ship's World War II-era gun battery is also being partially restored using guns salvaged from scrapped ships ...
... Two United States Navy ships have borne the name Tarawa, after the Pacific atoll that was the scene of a bloody fight in the Pacific War ... The second Tarawa (LHA-1) is an amphibious assault ship commissioned in 1976 ... This article includes a list of ships with the same or similar names ...
... was the first "civilian" passenger to board the ship, on her voyage from the shipyard in Clydebank to drydock in Greenock ... In 1971, she participated in the rescue of some 500 passengers from the burning French Line ship Antilles ... which parachuted into the sea to conduct a search of the ship ...
... USNS Watertown (T-AGM-6) was a Watertown-class missile range instrumentation ship acquired by the U.S ... Navy in 1960 and converted from her Victory ship cargo configuration to a missile tracking ship, a role she retained for eleven years before being placed out of ...
... under construction to commemorate the earlier ship ... This ship was the fifth US Navy ship to bear the name in honor of the Revolutionary War Battle of Lexington ...
Famous quotes containing the word ship:
“O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Every day brings a ship,
Every ship brings a word;
Well for those who have no fear,
Looking seaward well assured
That the word the vessel brings
Is the word they wish to hear.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)