Get premium membership and access revision papers with marking schemes, video lessons and live classes.

Processing. Please wait.

Meaning of water transport and vessels used

Answer Text:
Water transport.
- Water transport has progressed from early rafts and canoes to the modern large passenger and freight ships.
Rafts.
- A raft is a simple floating structure, usually made by tying together floating
material like animal skin, papyrus stalks or logs.
- The earliest people to make rafts were the Australians. They made rafts called catamaran by tying logs together.
- Rafts however sank easily and required a lot of manpower upstream.
Canoes.
- A canoe was a narrow boat that was propelled by one or more paddles. The oldest canoe was made by stripping the bark from trees (bark canoes).
- Later, a new canoe was made from a hollow on a log (dug-out canoe).
Sailing ships.
- Humankind learned that the wind could move a boat more easily than human beings if the ship had a piece of cloth fixed on poles (sail).
- The Egyptians used the sailing ships by 3000BC on the Mediterranean and Red seas.
- The Greeks made sailing ships known as galleys which were used for trade and war.
- They used war galley known as triremes to defeat the Persians and Phoenicians.
- The Arabs and Persians relied on the monsoon winds to reach the east
African coast during the East African trade.
- The Portuguese invented a three-masted ship called a caravel as the one used by Christopher Columbus and other explorers to sail to America and the Far East.
- The Carrack used by Vasco da Gama was five-masted to sail to east Africa.