Maritime history

They also facilitated an exchange of cultivated crop plants, introducing Pacific coconuts, bananas, and sugarcane to the Indian subcontinent, some of which eventually reached Europe via overland Persian and Arab traders.

This helped establish the Arab Empire (including the Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates) as the world's leading extensive economic power throughout the 8th–13th centuries according to the political scientist John M.

Historians generally trace the origins of the League to the foundation of the Northern German town of Lübeck, established in 1158/1159 after the capture of the area from the Count of Schauenburg and Holstein by Henry the Lion, the Duke of Saxony.

By the late 16th century, the League imploded and could no longer deal with its own internal struggles, the social and political changes that accompanied the Reformation, the rise of Dutch and English merchants, and the incursion of the Ottoman Turks upon its trade routes and upon the Holy Roman Empire itself.

Uniformly scattered across the Italian peninsula, the maritime republics were important not only for the history of navigation and commerce: in addition to precious goods otherwise unobtainable in Europe, new artistic ideas and news concerning distant countries also spread.

From the 10th century, they built fleets of ships both for their own protection and to support extensive trade networks across the Mediterranean, giving them an essential role in reestablishing contacts between Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had been interrupted during the early Middle Ages.

The maritime republics reestablished contacts between Europe, Asia and Africa, which were almost interrupted after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; their history is intertwined both with the launch of European expansion towards the East and with the origins of modern capitalism as a mercantile and financial system.

Among the most important products were: The maritime republics' great prosperity deriving from trade had a significant impact on the history of art, to the point that five of them (Amalfi, Genoa, Venice, Pisa and Ragusa) are today included in UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites.

In the 16th century, Duarte Barbosa noted that many ships from the Kingdom of Cambaya in what is modern-day India sailed to Mogadishu with cloths and spices, for which they in return received gold, wax and ivory.

She claimed their return followed an epic two-year exploration of the east coast of North America, south into the Chesapeake Bay area and perhaps as far as the Spanish territories in the Caribbean.

[73] The lead researchers on the project, Evan Jones and Margaret Condon, claim to have found further evidence to support aspects of Ruddock's case, including some of the information she intended to use to argue for a successful return of the 1498 expedition to Bristol.

Jacques Cartier was a French navigator who first explored and described the Gulf of St-Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named Canada, likely comes from the Huron-Iroquois word “kanata”, meaning “village” or “settlement”.

Among the other famous explorers of the period were Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Yermak, Juan Ponce de León, Francisco Coronado, Juan Sebastián Elcano, Bartolomeu Dias, Ferdinand Magellan, Willem Barentsz, Abel Tasman, Jean Alfonse, Samuel de Champlain, Willem Jansz, Captain James Cook, Henry Hudson, and Giovanni da Verrazzano.

In 1505, he was made a subject of Castile by royal decree and in 1508, he was appointed to the newly created position of piloto mayor (master navigator) for Spain's Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in Seville, a post he held until his death in 1512.

He wrote the first accounts of explorations in Central and South America in a series of letters and reports, grouped in the original Latin publications of 1511–1530 into sets of ten chapters called "decades."

Under Emperor Yongle, this naval undertaking served primarily as a deliverer of letters demanding tribute and allegiance to the middle kingdom; gifts were the first approach to gaining a country's favor, but if circumstances required it Zheng He's fleet would resort to violence.

[84] By the early 17th century, the Dutch merchant Jacob le Maire, together with navigator Willem Schouten, set off to investigate Drake's suggestion of a route to the south of Tierra del Fuego.

By the time of Julius Caesar, several well-established combined land-sea trade routes depended upon water transport through the Sea around the rough inland terrain features to its north.

These routes usually began in the Far East with transshipment via historic Bharuch (Bharakuccha), traversed past the inhospitable coast of today's Iran then split around Hadhramaut into two streams north into the Gulf of Aden and thence into the Levant, or south into Alexandria via Red Sea ports such as Axum.

His health suffered from the fever which carried off an immense proportion of the soldiers and sailors, but the £25,000 of prize money which he received freed him from the unpleasant position of younger son of a family ruined by the extravagance of his father.

The Spanish Armada was blown north up the east coast of England and in a hasty strategic move, attempted a return to Spain by sailing around Scotland and out into the Atlantic, past Ireland.

Through the efforts of the Continental Navy's apparent patron, John Adams and vigorous congressional support in the face of stiff opposition, the fleet cumulatively became relatively substantial when considering the limitations imposed upon the Patriot supply poole.

Commissioned Captain 7 June 1799, he took command of USS Essex in December and sailed in January 1800 for the Pacific to provide similar protective services for Americans engaged in the East Indies trade.

One of the leading members of "Preble's Boys", a small group of naval officers who served during the First Barbary War, Macdonough's actions during the decisive Battle of Lake Champlain are often cited as a model of tactical preparation and execution.

Steam was an option only for a limited number of trades until the 1860s, focusing on routes requiring scheduled services and/or reliable average speeds on a voyage – and only where the customer was prepared to pay the higher costs involved.

The two major tasks of the Confederate Navy during the whole of its existence were the protection of Southern harbors and coastlines from outside invasion, and making the war costly for the North by attacking merchant ships and breaking the Union Blockade.

He commanded the battleship USS Oregon at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, San Francisco, and when war with Spain was deemed inevitable, he received orders to proceed to Key West, Florida, with all haste.

George Dewey was an admiral of the United States Navy, best known for his victory (without the loss of a single life of his own forces due to combat; one man died of a heart attack) at the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish–American War.

Trans-oceanic travel, transatlantic and transpacific, was a particularly important application, with steam powered Ocean liners[107] replacing sailing ships, then culminating in the massive Superliners which included the RMS Titanic.

As of March 2020, global superpowers are currently in competition of laying claim to both regions of the Arctic Circle and shipping routes that lead directly into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans from the North Pole.