Quote Originally Posted by Fisherking View Post
But what do the Portuguese call their ocean-going ships? Nau. Yes, nau as in Hindi, for boat. Few of these Indian built ships have been recovered in various parts of the world. Indian shipbuilding expertise ruled the world - till colonialism killed it.
We called it... Nau. Actually even nowadays many asiatic languages have many words of portuguese origin. So probably Nau is just one of them.

About the Oriental ships (at least in the 15th Century) most of the "ocean going ships" were either of arabic or far-eastern kind of ships like Dhows and Junks.

Indians did indeed a very straightforward shipbuilding industry. As far as I know most of the "local" ships were of the galley type, oar powered and latin rigged.
Actually that made the portuguese to adapt to many of those local types of ships to deal with the tactics used by the locals that often used the abundant estuaries to hide after raiding commerical shipping...where a Nau or a Galleon cant obviously follow.

I will try to get some pics of eastern shipping.

V.