Know your boat

Throughout this course, we will refer to various types of seafaring vessels, so we thought it would be helpful to provide you with some annotated diagrams:

• Sailing ship rig types
• Cog
• Bottom structure
• Inner structure
• Sails on a full-rigged ship
• Cross section
• Parts of a sailing rig

Hover over the hotspots on the diagrams (or click on them if you’re using a touch-screen device) to find out more about them.

When you look at a boat you may want to think about how it was constructed. A ‘frame-first’ construction gains its shape and strength from the inner framework whilst the reverse is true with a ‘shell-first’ construction. Can you think of the benefits of both techniques?

You do not need to learn all of this terminology and will not be tested on it! Later in the course we will give you links to a number of glossaries that can be downloaded and referred to throughout the course.

There are various online glossaries of shipbuilding terms that you may want to refer to:

• UNESCO Basic terminology of shipbuilding
• Wooden ships of River John: Shipbuilding terms
• The Art of Age of Sail Illustrated Terminology from the Age of Sail
• Modern Shipbuilding Terms - 1918