Origins of sail: from reed boats to the last grain race.

The Persian Gulf: the oldest boat remains

Excavations in Kuwait have produced what archaeologist R. Carter, writing in Antiquity in 2006, calls the earliest remains of sea-going boats found anywhere, from the sixth and fifth millennia BC. He ties them, along with the spread of Ubaid pottery, to a trading network around the Gulf.

At the site known as H3 (As-Sabiyah), lumps of bitumen carry barnacles on one side and the imprint of reeds on the other. According to Wikipedia's summary of the excavation reports, they are read as waterproofing from boats made of reed bundles, and chemical analysis traced the bitumen to the Burgan oil field to the south. The same summary describes a pottery disc from H3 that seems to show a two-masted reed boat and calls it the oldest evidence of masts and sails. The Antiquity abstract we checked does not mention the disc, so we could not confirm that claim.

Older claims for very early sail in Mesopotamia are weaker than they once looked. A 1960 Antiquity paper argued that a socket on the Eridu boat model and marks on a Jemdet Nasr seal, both once read as masts, are probably not masts at all.

Egypt and the Nile

Sources disagree on how early Egyptian boats appear in pictures. Britannica places the earliest historical evidence of boats in Egypt in the 4th millennium BCE and notes clay tablets recording watercraft as early as 4000 BCE. The Mariners' Museum says ship paintings appear on Egyptian vases and murals around 6000 BCE.

The 1960 Antiquity study identifies a sail on a late Predynastic vase in the British Museum (No. 36326) and gives the earliest known sail hieroglyph as a 3rd Dynasty relief at Medum.

Early Nile boats, Britannica says, mostly carried one square sail plus a bank of rowers, because the wind on the narrow river could not be counted on. The Mariners' Museum adds that the first boats were papyrus reed and that later wooden ones kept the reed shape, with flat bottoms, no keel and planks tied with rope. By the 3rd millennium BCE Egyptians were navigating at sea; Britannica reproduces a seagoing ship from a relief of about 2600 BCE at the pyramid of King Sahure. Under Queen Hatshepsut, expeditions reached the east coast of Africa. Herodotus tells of an Egyptian fleet around 600 BCE that left from the Red Sea and returned through the Mediterranean over two years later; Britannica passes this on as his account, not as established fact.

The Mediterranean and the north

Britannica explains the split between two traditions. In the Mediterranean, steady summer high pressure meant long waits for a fair wind, so oared galleys stayed in use and the long, narrow rowed ship became the standard warship. Mediterranean hulls were carvel-built, with bow and stern shaped differently. Northern European boats were clinker-built and the same at both ends, and Britannica links the northern reliance on sail to the storms of the Baltic and North Sea. A model of a Phoenician ship survives from the 13th century BCE.

The lateen sail

Britannica describes the lateen as a triangular sail on a long yard set at an angle to the mast. As the earliest fore-and-aft sail, it let a ship tack toward the wind in a way the square sail could not (see points of sail). Combined with square sails, it produced the ocean-going full-rigged ship. The modern Sunfish dinghy still uses a lateen rig.

Where it came from is disputed. Britannica says the lateen was in use in the eastern Mediterranean by the 2nd century CE, possibly brought from Egypt or the Persian Gulf, and that Arab sailors spread it through the Mediterranean. Wikipedia, drawing mainly on Julian Whitewright's research from 2009 to 2012, says newer evidence points to a Mediterranean origin in Roman times, with Arabs adopting the rig after the Muslim conquests through Coptic shipbuilders rather than introducing it.

Wikipedia also reports that the earliest excavated ship reconstructed with a lateen (Yassi Ada II) dates to about AD 400, that the lateen had largely replaced the square sail in the Mediterranean by the 6th century, and that it became the standard rig of the Byzantine dromon.

Pacific voyaging

According to Wikipedia, Austronesian boats were built by tying planks together through raised lugs, with no metal nails, and were steered with a side oar instead of a rudder. The outrigger let them carry more sail without capsizing, and Micronesian, Island Melanesian and Polynesian single-outrigger craft developed shunting: sailing in either direction without turning around. Their crab-claw sail is a fore-and-aft rig; in Polynesia its upper spar became a fixed mast.

World History Encyclopedia says there is general agreement that the people who settled Remote Oceania came from Taiwan, and credits the Lapita people with introducing outriggers and double canoes. Dates are contested. That article gives Fiji about 1300 BCE and Samoa about 1100 BCE, but within the same article dates the settlement of Remote Oceania to both 1500 to 1300 BCE and 1100 to 900 BCE. A University of Hawaiʻi release puts Polynesian ancestors in Samoa around 800 BC.

That release describes a 2010 radiocarbon study (Wilmshurst, Hunt, Lipo and Anderson, in PNAS) that dated first settlement of the Society Islands to AD 1025 to 1120, about four centuries later than earlier estimates. A second wave, 70 to 265 years later, reached New Zealand, Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui between AD 1190 and 1290.

Hōkūleʻa

The voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa was launched at Kualoa, Oʻahu, on 8 March 1975. Herb Kawainui Kane drew the concept design with Kenneth Emory, using sketches by artists who sailed with Captain Cook. Its hulls are plywood, fiberglass and resin, and its sails were canvas. On its first voyage it left Honolua Bay, Maui, on 1 May 1976 and reached Papeʻete, Tahiti, on 4 June, navigated without instruments by master navigator Mau Piailug of Satawal, Micronesia. More than 17,000 people met it in Tahiti, and the voyage is credited with refuting the idea that Polynesians reached their islands only by accidental drift. Its 50th anniversary was marked in May 2026.

Dhows and the Indian Ocean

The Belitung wreck, a 9th-century Arab dhow found by fishermen off Belitung island in the Java Sea in 1998, is described by the Smithsonian as the oldest Arab vessel found in Asian waters. Its cargo, including more than 60,000 ceramics, is the largest group of Tang dynasty artifacts ever found. A replica, the Jewel of Muscat, was built at Qantab near Muscat from 2007 with no nails: its planks were sewn with about 130 km of coconut-fibre rope, and its sail was made from doum palm leaves in Zanzibar. It left Muscat on 16 February 2010 and reached Singapore that July.

Chinese junks

Britannica says the junk's origin is ancient and unknown, and that junks were sailing to Indonesian and Indian waters by the early Middle Ages. Their sails of linen or matting are flattened by bamboo battens and can be raised or lowered in one pull, like a venetian blind. Junks carried up to five masts, strong transverse and lengthwise bulkheads, and a large rudder that did the work of a keel. The Ming admiral Zheng He died at Calicut in 1433. The size of his largest treasure ships is disputed: Wikipedia reports Joseph Needham's estimate of about 135 m, which Edward Dreyer broadly accepts, against much smaller figures from Sally Church (about 45.7 m), Xin Yuan'ou (61 to 76 m) and Richard Barker (about 70 m).

Viking ships

No Viking Age sail has ever been found, the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde notes, so sails are reconstructed from rigging fittings, picture stones, coins, the Bayeux Tapestry, sagas and sea trials. Scholars still debate whether the sails were tall and narrow or low and wide; the museum's trials indicate the ships could sail close-hauled. Wikipedia reports that the five Skuldelev ships raised from Roskilde Fjord between 1957 and 1962 date to about 1030 to 1042, and that a replica of the longship Skuldelev 2 sailed to Dublin in 2007 and back in 2008.

Clippers and the end of commercial sail

Britannica calls the Rainbow, launched in New York in 1845, the first extreme clipper. The tea clipper Cutty Sark was built at Dumbarton in 1869, the same week the Suez Canal opened, which later shortened the China route for steamships. Royal Museums Greenwich records her record 73-day passage from Sydney to London in 1886 under Captain Richard Woodget.

The last grain races from Australia to Falmouth were sailed in 1949. Passat won, and Pamir became the last commercial sailing ship to round Cape Horn. Pamir was lost in a hurricane in September 1957; six of the 86 people aboard survived.