A boat is a watercraft of any size designed to float or plane, to provide passage across water. Usually this water will be inland (lakes) or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In naval terms, a boat is a vessel small enough to be carried aboard another vessel (a ship). Another less restrictive definition is a vessel that can be lifted out of the water. Strictly speaking and uniquely a submarine is a boat as defined by the Royal Navy. Some boats too large for the naval definition include the Great Lakes freighter, riverboat, narrow boat and ferryboat. The term armed boat, used primarily by English speaking naval forces, referred to any boat carrying either a cannon or armed occupants, such as marines.
Read more about Boat: History, Types, Parts and Terminology, Building Materials, Propulsion, Buoyancy
Famous quotes containing the word boat:
“Casting me adrift, 3500 miles from a port of call. You’re sending me to my doom, eh? Well, you’re wrong, Christian! I’ll take this boat as she floats to England if I must. I’ll live to see you—all of you—hanging from the highest yardarms in the British fleet.”
—Talbot Jennings (1896–1985)
“Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat ... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)