Sailing shipping came to us from antiquity. Archaeologists each year are further evidence of human use of wind power in an increasingly distant from our era of history. When it appeared the first sailing ship? Now the question no one can answer. Can only be a rough estimate – a man uses sailing navigation is much more than a dozen millennia. Researchers continue to pick up from the bottom Oceans and Seas curious finds, replenish our ideas about the development of ancient navigation.
It is likely that in the coming years our views on the history of sailing will change completely. As long as we rely only on what we know. What do we know? Perhaps one of the earliest written mention of the sailing ship is a Noah's ark. The Bible gives us an accurate description of this grand structure. Its length is 150 meters, width 25 meters and height – 15 meters.
Material for building the Ark served as a long and strong cedar planks. The exact time of construction is difficult to define, but it happened about 4,000 years BC. On the southern Atlantic coast Spain once flourished a rich trading port Tartessos. About her tells us the Greek geographer Strabo. He was convinced that this port is already at that time numbered a history of seven thousand years. Details of those old Events and navigation of the device so remote from our age is unknown. Over five hundred years BC and conquered the mighty Carthage completely destroyed the harbor Tartessos. It is still all the means at our disposal references to this harbor. It can be assumed that the first boat was a tree trunk man, thrown into the water. A prototype of the mast to the sail became the branch for which kept our distant ancestor. Due to its natural observation and wanting to use the wind, the man initially digging sail from animal skins or scutes, collected from the bark of trees. Rivers were natural transportation routes of antiquity, so the idea of sail arose independently in different parts of the world and has been used by man long before the invention of the wheel and horse-drawn carts. Almost all the continents except Europe, found the remains of the ancient rafts collected from the trunks of trees. Such rafts could easily be fitted with a mast, sail, awning from the sun and the steering oar. The oldest of these structures, known to science, is a Brazilian zhangada collected from balsa logs. There are many more mysteries hidden from us layers of time, many significant discoveries in the field of ancient sailing navigation ahead of us. There is no doubt that the achievements of our ancestors in this area is much superior to the known researchers of the certificate.