Maritime

Monsoon sailing, mastered in the Indian Ocean by the 1st century CE, allowed predictable annual voyages, and ports such as Guangzh...

Pepper from the Malabar coast, cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cloves, nutmeg and mace from the Maluku islands reached the Mediterrane...

Lubeck led a loose confederation of eventually more than 200 towns, from Novgorod's German trading post to London's Steelyard, Bru...

The muda, annual escorted galley convoys, carried pepper, ginger and cinnamon from Alexandria and Beirut, often with pilgrim passe...

Air-dried cod, stockfish, kept for years and was exempt meat for the fasting days that structured the medieval Christian calendar....

Da Gama reached Calicut in 1498 with help from a pilot at Malindi, breaking the Venice and Mamluk controlled Red Sea axis and movi...

European ships loaded textiles, guns and spirits for West Africa, traded for captive people, crossed the Middle Passage to the Car...

After 1565, when Andres de Urdaneta worked out the eastbound return by riding north to the westerlies, one or two galleons a year ...

The VOC ran scheduled services from Amsterdam to Batavia via the Cape, including the Brouwer route that rode the roaring forties a...

Imperial edict confined European commerce to Guangzhou, Canton, where licensed Cohong merchants guaranteed foreign conduct and tra...

From the 15th century, coffee grown in Yemen's highlands moved through Mocha to Cairo, Istanbul and, via Venetian and Levantine tr...

The volta do mar, turning to sea, seems paradoxical: to reach a port to the south you sail west into open ocean to catch the retur...

From about 1849, sharp-bowed composite clippers such as Thermopylae and Cutty Sark sprinted from Foochow, Fuzhou, to London in rou...

Steel four-masted windjammers such as Pamir, Passat and Pommern ran Australian wheat, and earlier Chilean nitrate, eastward around...

The cotton gin of 1793 made short-staple upland cotton profitable, and Southern plantations fed Liverpool's docks and Manchester's...

More than 90,000 vessels transit each year, several hundred a day, making this the busiest shipping chokepoint and the shortest ro...

Between Iran and Oman, the usable deep-water lanes are only a few kilometers wide in each direction. Around 17 to 21 million barre...

Perim Island splits the strait into usable channels a few kilometers wide between Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea. Millions of barrels...

The Bosphorus, at points under 700 meters wide, and the Dardanelles form the only sea exit from the Black Sea, governed since 1936...

The Oresund between Denmark and Sweden, the Great Belt, the main deep-water route, and the Little Belt connect the Baltic to the w...

The only sea exit from the Mediterranean is a two-layer exchange, Atlantic water in at the surface and saltier Mediterranean water...

Opened in 1895 to link Germany's naval bases without the Skagerrak detour, the canal saves roughly 450 kilometers between the Nort...

Franklin's 1845 expedition of 129 men vanished seeking it, with the wrecks finally found in 2014 and 2016, and Amundsen completed ...

Soviet icebreakers pioneered scheduled convoys along the Siberian coast in the 1930s. The route cuts Asia-Europe distance by rough...

Very large crude carriers hauling around 2 million barrels mostly sail the Cape because the Suez Canal handles loaded tankers roug...

The Dover Strait sees several hundred vessel movements a day, among the densest shipping anywhere. Frequent ferry sailings between...

Tens of millions of containers a year move from Shanghai, Ningbo, Yantian and Busan through Suez to Rotterdam, Hamburg, Antwerp, F...

Roughly two weeks to 20 days from China's coast to Los Angeles and Long Beach, with Pacific Northwest and all-water services via P...

Containerization went transatlantic for keeps in the mid 1960s, a decade after Malcom McLean's first domestic box ships. Today the...

Qatar ships on the order of 80 million tonnes of LNG yearly, with a major expansion aiming far higher, and Asia's utilities are it...

China buys roughly 70 percent of seaborne iron ore, and the Pilbara trio of Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue supplies the largest shar...

Before 2022, Ukraine and Russia together supplied a large share of world wheat and most sunflower oil exports, moving through Odes...

Mesopotamian texts of the later third millennium BC speak of ships from Meluhha, widely identified with the Indus region, docking ...

From around the 9th century, Swahili towns such as Kilwa, Mombasa, Lamu, Zanzibar and Sofala grew rich as middlemen between the Af...

From the late medieval period, and on a vast scale from the 16th century as wood grew scarce, colliers carried sea coal from the T...

Ancient rulers dreamed of cutting the isthmus, and Nero even started digging in 67 AD, but for centuries ships were dragged across...