Ship of the Line: Did you mean...?

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) was a British engineer and a key figure of the British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840). Brunel masterminded the Great Western Railway from London to Bristol, designed and built innovative giant steamships...

Captain Charles Vane was an English pirate active in the Caribbean and off the east coast of North America between 1716 and 1720. The pirate, who infamously refused a pardon and instead fired his cannons at the ship of Governor Woodes Rogers...

A model of a brigantine ship. With two masts which were traditionally gaf-rigged and lateen-rigged, the ship was fast and highly manoeuvrable, making the brigantine a favourite ship of pirates. (Deutsches Museum, Munich)

The English mariner, privateer, and explorer Francis Drake (c. 1540-1596 CE) made his circumnavigation of the world between 1577 and 1580 CE. Only the second to achieve this feat after the expedition of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan...

The Carthaginians were famed in antiquity for their seafaring skills and innovation in ship design. The empire their navy protected stretched from Sicily to the Atlantic coast of Africa. Able to match the tyrants of Sicily and the Hellenistic...

The Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) refers to a period when robbery on the high seas and at colonial ports reached an unprecedented level. Although not all historians agree on the precise time frame, it is generally applied to those pirates...

From the 16th to 18th centuries, two treasure fleets sailed each year, one to Mexico and the other to Central America, then part of the Spanish Empire. There they collected precious eastern goods and the riches of the Americas, including...

A depiction of the Sinking the White Ship in the English Channel. The White Ship sank off the coast of Barfleur, Normandy on November 25, 1120 CE. The ship departed from Barfleur on a course for England, but struck a rock on its portside...

A pirate ship being careened, that is when a ship is beached and its hull scraped clean of marine encrustations and repaired. From the TV series Black Sails. ©2014 Starz Entertainment

A 1702 illustration of the English pirate Henry Every and his ship the Fancy. Every captured fabulous treasure from an Indian treasure ship in 1695 and disappeared soon after never to be seen again.