Maritime transport, fluvial transport, or more generally waterborne transport is the transport of people (passengers) or goods (cargo) via waterways. Freight transport by sea has been widely used throughout recorded history. The advent of aviation has diminished the importance of sea travel for passengers, though it is still popular for short trips and pleasure cruises. Transport by water is cheaper than transport by air, despite fluctuating exchange rates and a fee placed on top of freighting charges for carrier companies known as the currency adjustment factor (CAF).
A nautical chart is a graphic representation of a sea area and adjacent coastal regions. Depending on the scale of the chart, it may show depths of water and heights of land, natural features of the seabed, details of the coastline, navigational hazards, locations of natural and human-made aids to navigation, information on tides and currents, local details of the Earth's magnetic field, and human-made structures such as harbours, buildings and bridges. Nautical charts are essential tools for marine navigation; many countries require vessels, especially commercial ships, to carry them. Nautical charting may take the form of charts printed on paper or computerized electronic navigational charts. Recent technologies have made available paper charts which are printed "on demand" with cartographic data that has been downloaded to the commercial printing company as recently as the night before printing. With each daily download, critical data such as Local Notices to Mariners are added to the on-demand chart files so that these charts are up to date at the time of printing.
A navigator is the person on board a ship or aircraft responsible for its navigation. The navigator's primary responsibility is to be aware of ship or aircraft position at all times. Responsibilities include planning the journey, advising the ship's captain or aircraft commander of estimated timing to destinations while en route, and ensuring hazards are avoided. The navigator is in charge of maintaining the aircraft or ship's nautical charts, nautical publications, and navigational equipment, and he/she generally has responsibility for meteorological equipment and communications. With the advent of GPS, the effort required to accurately determine one's position has decreased by orders of magnitude, so the entire field has experienced a revolutionary transition since the 1990s with traditional navigation tasks being used less frequently.
The Nautical Archaeology Society (NAS) is a charity registered in England and Wales and in Scotland and is a company limited by guarantee.
Keith Muckelroy (1951-1980) was a pioneer of maritime archaeology. Instead of the traditional particularist or historiographic approach used by maritime archaeologists, Muckelroy's ideas were new to the field, influenced by the prehistoric and analytical archaeology he learned under Grahame Clark and David Clarke at Cambridge, the tenets of processual archaeology gaining traction in the U.S., and his own experiences on shipwreck sites in British waters, notably the 1664 Dutch East Indiaman Kennemerland, several Spanish Armada wrecks, and the Mary Rose.
Roger Sarty is among Canada's leading historians, specializing in the history of Canada's Navy and coastal defence.
The North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH) is the national organization in the United States of America for professional historians, underwater archeologists, archivists, librarians, museum specialists and others working in the broad field of maritime history. NASOH is an affiliated society of the American Historical Association.
Adriaan Hendrik Johan Prins, generally known as A. H. J. Prins was a Dutch Africanist and maritime anthropologist.
The Society for Nautical Research was founded in 1910 by Charles Napier Robinson to promote the academic field of maritime history in the United Kingdom.
Niels Windekilde Jannasch, OC was a German-Canadian mariner, marine historian and the founding director of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.
Daniel Gibson Harris (1915–2007) was an accountant, a British agent during World War II and a writer on Swedish naval history.
A master mariner is a licensed mariner who holds the highest grade of seafarer qualification; namely, an unlimited master's license. Such a license is labelled unlimited because it has no limits on the tonnage, power, or geographic location of the vessel that the holder of the license is allowed to serve upon. A master mariner would therefore be allowed to serve as the master of a merchant ship of any size, of any type, operating anywhere in the world, and it reflects the highest level of professional qualification amongst mariners and deck officers.
Mark C. Hunter is a Canadian naval historian and currently an employee of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Willem Fredrik Jacob Mörzer Bruyns,, is a Dutch historian of navigational science, specializing in the history of navigational instruments. He rose to be Senior Curator of Navigation at the Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum before his retirement in 2005. Since 1972, Mörzer Bruyns published several books and a hundred-and-ten articles in scholarly journals, on the history of navigation and navigational instruments, and on the exploration of the Dutch in the Arctic, in the nineteenth century. He wrote over sixty-five book reviews on these subjects in scholarly journals.
Theodore Ernest Ferris (August 17, 1872 – 1953 was a naval architect and engineer responsible for the "Ferris Designs" used by the US Emergency Fleet Corporation, of the United States Shipping Board, during World War I.
Robert Steele & Company was a shipbuilder based in Greenock, Scotland formed in 1815 by Robert Steele and two sons. It followed dissolution of a shipbuilding partnership between Robert Steele and John Carswell, known as "Steele and Carswell." The first vessel the company built was the three-masted barque Rebecca. The company was one of the shipbuilders credited with the development of the four-masted barque along with Alexander Stephen and Sons.
Roger Charles Anderson was an independently-wealthy English maritime historian, collector, and a leading figure in the early years of the Society for Nautical Research and of the Navy Records Society. Four times editor of the Mariner's Mirror, Anderson was also a founder trustee, and later chairman of the board of trustees, of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and held the higher Doctor of Letters degree. In 2005, the Swedish naval historian Jan Glete characterized Anderson as "one of the most important naval historians of the twentieth century. He mainly wrote about early modern warship technology and used his linguistic skills to write books and essays based on the literature from several countries."
The15th Destroyer Flotilla also known as the Fifteenth Destroyer Flotilla was a naval formation of the British Royal Navy from August 1916 to March 1919 and again from September 1939 to May 1945.
