ABSTRACT
In 1400, different ship types and maritime technologies dominated the oceans in different parts of the world. The western Pacific and China Seas were the domain of junks from China. Local shipwrights even built imitations of European ships, accepting the superiority of those designs. Europeans also borrowed from some practices in other parts of the world. The melding of a number of European shipbuilding traditions around 1400 into the full-rigged ship led to a long period of development, modification, improvement, and refining of the design of sea-going ships of all types. In the south, two general ship types, the galley and the round ship, inherited from the classical world, remained the preferred choices of Mediterranean mariners. Full-rigged ships in various forms took on an ever-larger share of the carrying trades in the fifteenth century. Dutch shipbuilding of the seventeenth century was a case of the incomplete adoption of a new technology.
