A modern cargo ship is 1300 feet long. If you compared that to giraffes nose to tail, many of them would drown.
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Today I sketched a model cargo ship from Safari, Ltd. It was chosen for a Tuesday because I needed something that could be drawn quickly. The composition was mostly rectangles and shadows, but it led us into a much larger discussion about the history and scale of real-world shipping.
Humans have been shipping goods for over 3,000 years. The Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of ocean in double-hulled canoes using only the stars and swells to guide them. But it wasn’t until the Age of Sail (1500s–1800s) that large-scale ocean shipping exploded. Columbus’s Santa Maria, considered large in its day, was 80 feet long and carried about 100 tons. The Chinese, centuries earlier, had cargo ships 3 to 4 times that size. With competition for shipping, people moving across the atlantic, and the rise of many wars, ships became faster, and stronger using first sails, then coal, then diesel.
Today, cargo ships operate with only 20 to 30 crew, and carry up to 240,000 tons of cargo. At any moment, there are 50,000 such ships on the sea, carrying around 2 million crewmembers, and each burning up to 200 tons of fuel per day or roughly 10 million tons of fuel burned each day. They haul everything from plastic giraffe toys to actual giraffes, and if you stacked Santa Maria on one, it’d look like a lunchbox.
Click here to watch the cargo ship episode of Sketch & Coffee, Live!
If you are an educator and would like a 20-30 minute lesson plan about the history of Cargo Ships, download the file below.
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