Vanguard of Empire: Ships of Exploration in the Age of Columbus

by Roger C. Smith

In this book, Smith has assembled a portrait of the small vessels invented and refined in the shipyards of Spain and Portugal half a millennium ago. He focuses on the advances in maritime technology that made the European conquest of the New World possible. Shipwrights worked by trial and error to make ships that would travel faster and farther, carrying larger and larger cargoes. Pilots developed new methods of celestial navigation and learned the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195073576
• ISBN13: 9780195073577
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"