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Trading Companies and Sea Routes
How chartered trading companies such as the Dutch and English East India Companies organised ships, capital and routes across the oceans from the 1500s to the 1800s.
Origins and Exploration
Trading Companies and Sea Routes
Chartered companies and the routes that linked continents.
Convict Transports to Australia
The ships, fleets and voyages that carried convicts from Britain to Australia between 1788 and 1868, from the First Fleet to the last convict ship.
Hudson Bay Supply Ships and the Fur Trade
How the Hudson's Bay Company's annual ships sailed from London to York Factory and Moose Factory, carrying trade goods out and furs home through Arctic ice.
Ibn Majid and the Arab Sea Pilots
Ahmad ibn Majid and other Indian Ocean pilots left written sailing directions in verse and prose that preserved centuries of monsoon-era navigation knowledge.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Its Ships
A factual look at the vessels used in the transatlantic slave trade: converted merchant ships, crowded holds, regulation, abolition and the patrols that followed.
The Cape Route to the Indies
How the sea passage round Africa, opened by Portuguese voyages in the 1480s and 1490s, reshaped the spice trade and competed with older overland and Red Sea routes.
The Dutch East India Company and the East Indiaman
How the VOC, founded in 1602, built and ran large armed merchant ships on the route between the Netherlands and Asia, and how the Indiaman type developed.
The Manila Galleons
The Spanish ships that crossed the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco from 1565 to 1815, carrying Chinese goods and American silver on a long, hazardous route.
The Sea Trade in Tin and Amber
How tin from Atlantic Europe and amber from the Baltic reached Mediterranean buyers in prehistoric and Roman times, and what the evidence says about the boats involved.
Zheng He and the Chinese Treasure Fleets
The seven Ming-dynasty expeditions led by Zheng He between 1405 and 1433, their ports of call across the Indian Ocean, and the debates over the size of the ships.
Related topics
More in origins and exploration
Ancient Shipbuilding How early peoples built hulls and rigs. Ancient Trade and Voyages Cargoes and expeditions of the earliest maritime civilizations. Exploration and Empire Ships of discovery, piracy, survey and the industrial age. Polar and Scientific Voyages Ships sent to the ice and to the unmapped deep.