Ship Owners

A ship is a large watercraft that travels the world's oceans and other sufficiently deep waterways, carrying cargo or passengers, or in support of specialized missions, such as defense, research, and fishing. Ships are generally distinguished from boats, based on size, shape, load capacity, and purpose. Ships have supported exploration, trade, warfare, migration, colonization, and science. After the 15th century, new crops that had come from and to the Americas via the European seafarers significantly contributed to world population growth. Ship transport is responsible for the largest portion of world commerce.

The word ''ship'' has meant, depending on the era and the context, either just a large vessel or specifically a ship-rigged sailing ship with three or more masts, each of which is square-rigged.

As of 2016, there were more than 49,000 merchant ships, totaling almost 1.8 billion dead weight tons. Of these 28% were oil tankers, 43% were bulk carriers, and 13% were container ships.

Nomenclature

Ships are typically larger than boats, but there is no universally accepted distinction between the two. Ships generally can remain at sea for longer periods of time than boats. A legal definition of ship from Indian case law is a vessel that carries goods by sea. A common notion is that a ship can carry a boat, but not ''vice versa''. A ship is likely to have a full-time crew assigned. A US Navy rule of thumb is that ships heel towards the ''outside'' of a sharp turn, whereas boats heel towards the ''inside'' because of the relative location of the center of mass versus the center of buoyancy. American and British 19th century maritime law distinguished "vessels" from other watercraft; ships and boats fall in one legal category, whereas open boats and rafts are not considered vessels.

Particularly in the Age of Sail, the word ''ship'' might apply generally to a seagoing vessel or particularly to a full-rigged sailing ship with three or more masts, all square-rigged. Other rigs on seagoing vessels included brig, barque, and barquentine.

Some large vessels are traditionally called ''boats'', notably submarines. Others include Great Lakes freighters, riverboats, and ferryboats, which may be designed for operation on inland or protected coastal waters.

In most maritime traditions ships have individual names, and modern ships may belong to a ship class often named after its first ship.

In many documents the ship name is introduced with a ship prefix being an abbreviation of the ship class, for example "MS" (motor ship) or "SV" (sailing vessel), making it easier to distinguish a ship name from other individual names in a text.

"Ship" (along with "nation") is an English word that has retained a female grammatical gender in some usages, which allows it sometimes to be referred to as a "she" without being of female natural gender.

History

Prehistory and antiquity

Asian developments

The earliest attestations of ships in maritime transport in Mesopotamia are model ships, which date back to the 4th millennium BC. In archaic texts in Uruk, Sumer, the ideogram for "ship" is attested, but in the inscriptions of the kings of Lagash, ships were first mentioned in connection to maritime trade