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Boats have been with us for a very long time. The first vessels were rafts, which were used in the settlement of Australia 50-60,000 year ago. The earliest actual boats were dugouts or canoes made from hides. The Pesse canoe found in the Netherlands was a dugout made between 8200 to 7600 BC.
Traditional boatbuilding using planks began in the third millennium, and craft so constructed have been found on the Nile. The clinker-built Viking longships were particularly seaworthy and were used to establish a settlement in Newfoundland in 1000 AD.
For centuries, boats and their big sisters, ships, were purely commercial or military, but technology advances in the 19th century opened the door to leisure craft.
Mankind has always been fascinated by the sea and ships. Hence there are untold thousands of books, stories and poems about voyages of discovery, great naval battles, maritime disasters and shipboard romances, to name but a few.
The most abiding legend is that of RMS Titanic. Claimed by her designers to be unsinkable, she sped through the night across the Atlantic on her maiden voyage, despite ice floe warnings radioed to the ship. After striking a berg, she sank within hours, along with over two-thirds of her passengers and crew. Her wreck, lying 13,000 feet down, remains a magnetic attraction to this day. Author and explorer James Cameron located Titanic and has dived on her no less than 33 times. In 2023, the submersible Titan sadly imploded on its way down to the ocean floor, killing the captain and his four passengers. Titanic memorabilia command huge prices at auctions.
So think nautical and float your ideas for stories or poems. You have rich waters in which to trawl.
Anchors aweigh!
Unfathomable,
Immense in its depth and scope,
The ocean in me.
That’s not about ships/boats, but it is about the medium they float in. I have always found oceans scary. Does that mean my mind is a scary medium? Maybe…