This website started in fact more than twelve years ago, under this very domain name, as a split between two very large chunks of Navistory, which remains a reference website since 20 years for all naval archaeology matters. Its main purpose was, and remains the study of ships and boats since the dawn of time, of the pre-industrial era, ie propelled by oars and wind. Navistory has been partially traduced but had a much needed facelift recently, as a modern responsive website. Naval Encyclopedia was the industrial era side of things. Crucially, it was entirely written in French, and it undergone a gradual translation one year ago, and this english version has been ported on WordPress, while the French-speaking version would remain (at least until all translations has been done) on a separated website, which is still updated and gave an idea of future developments on the English version of the website: http://www.fr.naval-encyclopedia.com/. The whole XIXth century section was imported from cyber-ironclad.com.

The idea behind Naval Encyclopediae has been to cover types of ships, rather than individual ships. However for such massive machines, the heaviest man ever created, individual ships are also covered when their design is unique. The focus is more on naval warfare, rather than civilian ships, but the encyclopedia will also encompass all types of civilian ships built since the dawn of the industrial era, not only generic articles on feeders or LNG carriers. My primary sources are books, about a hundred of them accumulated over the years and carefully chosen, the fruit a true and unalterated ongoing passion for the matter since thirty years. Some depicts classic sailships of the XV to XVIIIth century for example, with tons of engravings, other is an encyclopedia of liners another a review on classic triremes, another is a repoduction of Chapman “navis architectura”, another Jean Boudriot classic ships plans, and the completed collection of four volumes of Conway’s all the world fighting ships which is the main source for this website, coupled with intersected trusted web sources. I wrote many articles for reviews, like “cabotages”, but since i’m not a naval historian, but only an enlightened amateur, i can guarantee to dismiss some false informations that has been copied over and over again, which is still the main plague on the web for some researches.