Junk

First Known Use of junk Noun 1 14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2 Verb , in the meaning defined above Noun 2 , in the meaning defined above. Learn More about junk. Resources for junk Time Traveler! Explore the year a word first appeared. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Is Junk an Adjective or a Noun? Dictionary Entries near junk Juniperus juniper webworm Junius junk junk art junk bond junk bottle. Phrases Related to junk a piece of junk. Statistics for junk Look-up Popularity.

Time Traveler for junk The first known use of junk was in the 14th century See more words from the same century. More Definitions for junk. English Language Learners Definition of junk. More from Merriam-Webster on junk Rhyming Dictionary: Words that rhyme with junk Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for junk Spanish Central: Translation of junk Nglish: Translation of junk for Spanish Speakers Britannica English: Translation of junk for Arabic Speakers Britannica.

Comments on junk What made you want to look up junk? Get Word of the Day daily email! Need even more definitions? Ask the Editors Word of the Year: Literally How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. Is Singular 'They' a Better Choice? Junks were used as seagoing vessels as early as the 2nd century AD and developed rapidly during the Song dynasty — They were found, and in lesser numbers are still found, throughout South-East Asia and India, but primarily in China.

Junk (ship)

Found more broadly today is a growing number of modern recreational junk-rigged sailboats. The term junk may be used to cover many kinds of boat—ocean-going, cargo-carrying , pleasure boats , live-aboards. They vary greatly in size and there are significant regional variations in the type of rig, however they all employ fully battened sails.

The Malay Maritime Code, first drawn up in the late 15th century, uses junk frequently as the word for freight ships. The historian Herbert Warington Smyth considered the junk as one of the most efficient ship designs, stating that "As an engine for carrying man and his commerce upon the high and stormy seas as well as on the vast inland waterways, it is doubtful if any class of vessel… is more suited or better adapted to its purpose than the Chinese or Indian junk, and it is certain that for flatness of sail and handiness, the Chinese rig is unsurpassed.

The structure and flexibility of junk sails make the junk fast and easily controlled. The sails of a junk can be moved inward toward the long axis of the ship. In theory this closeness of what is called sheeting allowed the junk to sail into the wind.

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In practice, evidenced both by traditional sailing routes and seasons and textual evidence [13] junks could not sail well into the wind. Classic junks were built of softwoods although after the 17th century of teak in Guangdong with the outside shape built first. Traditionally, the hull has a horseshoe-shaped stern supporting a high poop deck. The bottom is flat in a river junk with no keel similar to a sampan , so that the boat relies on a daggerboard , [14] leeboard or very large rudder to prevent the boat from slipping sideways in the water.

The planking is edge nailed on a diagonal.

Junk - Wikipedia

Iron nails or spikes have been recovered from a Canton dig dated to circa BC. For caulking the Chinese used a mix of ground lime with Tung oil together with chopped hemp from old fishing nets which set hard in 18 hours, but usefully remained flexible. Junks have narrow waterlines which accounts for their potential speed in moderate conditions, although such voyage data as we have indicates that average speeds on voyage for junks were little different from average voyage speeds of almost all traditional sail, i.

This conjecture was based on the size of a rudder post that was found and misinterpreted, using formulae applicable to modern engine powered ships. More careful analysis shows that the rudder post that was found is actually smaller than the rudder post shown for a 70' long Pechili Trader in Worcester's "Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze". Another characteristic of junks, interior compartments or bulkheads , strengthened the ship and slowed flooding in case of holing.

Ships built in this manner were written of in Zhu Yu's book Pingzhou Table Talks , published by during the Song dynasty.

All wrecks discovered so far have limber holes ; these are different from the free flooding holes that are located only in the foremost and aftermost compartments, but are at the base of the transverse bulkheads allowing water in each compartment to drain to the lowest compartment, thus facilitating pumping. It is believed from evidence in wrecks that the limber holes could be stopped either to allow the carriage of liquid cargoes or to isolate a compartment that had sprung a leak.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter on the project of mail packets between the United States and France:. As these vessels are not to be laden with goods, their holds may without inconvenience be divided into separate apartments, after the Chinese manner, and each of these apartments caulked tight so as to keep out water. In , Sir Samuel Bentham , inspector of dockyards of the Royal Navy , and designer of six new sailing ships, argued for the adoption of "partitions contributing to strength, and securing the ship against foundering, as practiced by the Chinese of the present day".

His idea was not adopted. Bentham had been in China in , and he acknowledged that he had got the idea of watertight compartments by looking at Chinese junks there. Bentham had already by this time designed and had built a segmented barge for use on the Volga River, so the idea of transverse hull separation was evidently in his mind.

Perhaps more to the point, there is a very large difference between the transverse bulkheads in Chinese construction, which offer no longitudinal strengthening, and the longitudinal members which Brunel adopted, almost certainly inspired by the iron bridge and boiler engineering in which he and his contemporaries in iron shipbuilding innovation were most versed. Due to the numerous foreign primary sources that hint to the existence of true watertight compartments in junks, historians such as Joseph Needham proposed that the limber holes were stopped up as noted above in case of leakage.

He addresses the quite separate issue of free-flooding compartments on pg of Science and Civilisation in Ancient China:. Less well known is the interesting fact that in some types of Chinese craft the foremost and less frequently also the aftermost compartment is made free-flooding. Holes are purposely contrived in the planking. This is the case with the salt-boats which shoot the rapids down from Tzuliuching in Szechuan, the gondola-shaped boats of the Poyang Lake, and many sea going junks.

The Szechuanese boatmen say that this reduces resistance to the water to a minimum, though such a claim makes absolutely no hydrodynamic sense, and the device is thought to cushion the shocks of pounding when the boat pitches heavily in the rapids, as it acquires and discharges water ballast rapidly supposedly just at the time when it is most desirable to counteract buffeting at stem and stern.

As with too many such claims, there has been no empirical testing of them and it seems unlikely that the claims would stand up to such testing since the diameter or number of holes needed for such rapid flooding and discharging would be so great as to significantly weaken the vulnerable fore and aft parts of the vessel.

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The sailors say, as sailors all over the world are inclined to do when conjuring up answers to landlubbers' questions, that it stops junks flying up into the wind. In Fu-Nan Cambodia gold is always used in transactions. Once there were some people who having hired a boat to go from east to west near and far, had not reached their destination when the time came for the payment of the pound of gold which had been agreed upon.

They therefore wished to reduce the quantity to be paid. The master of the ship then played a trick upon them. He made as it were a way for the water to enter the bottom of the boat, which seemed to be about to sink, and remained stationary, moving neither forward nor backward. All the passengers were very frightened and came to make offerings. The boat afterwards returned to its original state.

This, however, would seem to have involved openings which could be controlled, and the water pumped out afterwards. This was easily effected in China still seen in Kuangtung and Hong Kong , but the practice was also known in England, where the compartment was called the 'wet-well', and the boat in which it was built, a ' well-smack '.

However, the wet well is probably a case of parallel invention since its manner of construction is quite different from that of Chinese junks, the wet well quite often not running the full width of the boat, but only occupying the central part of the hull either side of the keel. More to the point [19] wet wells were apparent in Roman small craft of the 5th century CE.

Leeboards and centerboards , used to stabilize the junk and to improve its capability to sail upwind, are documented from a AD book by Li Chuan. The innovation was adopted by Portuguese and Dutch ships around Because the daggerboard is located so far forward, the junk must use a balanced rudder to counteract the imbalance of lateral resistance. Other innovations included the square-pallet bilge pump , which was adopted by the West during the 16th century for work ashore, the western chain pump, which was adopted for shipboard use, being of a different derivation.

Junks also relied on the compass for navigational purposes. However, as with almost all vessels of any culture before the late 19th century, the accuracy of magnetic compasses aboard ship, whether from a failure to understand deviation the magnetism of the ship's iron fastenings or poor design of the compass card the standard drypoint compasses were extremely unstable , meant that they did little to contribute to the accuracy of navigation by dead reckoning.

Indeed, a review of the evidence shows that the Chinese embarked magnetic pointer was probably little used for navigation. The reasoning is simple. Chinese mariners were as able as any and, had they needed a compass to navigate, they would have been aware of the almost random directional qualities when used at sea of the water bowl compass they used.

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Yet that design remained unchanged for some half a millennium. Western sailors, coming upon a similar water bowl design no evidence as to how has yet emerged very rapidly adapted it in a series of significant changes such that within roughly a century the water bowl had given way to the dry pivot, a rotating compass card a century later, a lubberline a generation later and gimbals seventy or eighty years after that. These were necessary because in the more adverse climatic context of north western Europe, the compass was needed for navigation.

Had similar needs been felt in China, Chinese mariners would also have come up with fixes. Junks employed stern-mounted rudders centuries before their adoption in the West for the simple reason that Western hull forms, with their pointed sterns, obviated a centreline steering system until technical developments in Scandinavia created the first, iron mounted, pintle and gudgeon 'barn door' western examples in the early 12th century CE.

A second reason for this slow development was that the side rudders in use were, contrary to a lot of very ill-informed opinion, extremely efficient. It was an innovation which permitted the steering of large ships and due to its design allowed height adjustment according to the depth of the water and to avoid serious damage should the junk ground. A sizable junk can have a rudder that needed up to twenty members of the crew to control in strong weather.

In addition to using the sail plan to balance the junk and take the strain off the hard to operate and mechanically weakly attached rudder, some junks were also equipped with leeboards or dagger boards. The world's oldest known depiction of a stern-mounted rudder can be seen on a pottery model of a junk dating from before the 1st century AD, [22] though some scholars think this may be a steering oar; a possible interpretation given is that the model is of a river boat that was probably towed or poled.

From sometime in the 13th to 15th centuries, many junks began incorporating "fenestrated" rudders rudders with large diamond-shaped holes in them , probably adopted to lessen the force needed to direct the steering of the rudder. The rudder is reported to be the strongest part of the junk.

In the Tiangong Kaiwu "Exploitation of the Works of Nature" , Song Yingxing wrote, "The rudder-post is made of elm, or else of langmu or of zhumu. However, these vessels did not originate from China, but rather from K'un-lun southern country, that is either Java or Sumatra.

He explains the ships' sail design as follows:. The four sails do not face directly forward, but are set obliquely, and so arranged that they can all be fixed in the same direction, to receive the wind and to spill it. Those sails which are behind the most windward one receiving the pressure of the wind, throw it from one to the other, so that they all profit from its force. If it is violent, the sailors diminish or augment the surface of the sails according to the conditions.

This oblique rig, which permits the sails to receive from one another the breath of the wind, obviates the anxiety attendant upon having high masts. Thus these ships sail without avoiding strong winds and dashing waves, by the aid of which they can make great speed. The great trading dynasty of the Song employed junks extensively. The naval strength of the Song, both mercantile and military, became the backbone of the naval power of the following Yuan dynasty.

In particular the Mongol invasions of Japan —84 , as well as the Mongol invasion of Java , essentially relied on recently acquired Song naval capabilities. Worcester estimates that Yuan junks were 11 m 36 ft in beam and over 30 m ft long. In general they had no keel, stempost, or sternpost. They did have centreboards, and watertight bulkhead to strengthen the hull, which added great weight.

Further excavations showed that this type of vessel was common in the 13th century. According to Ibn Battuta, who visited China in On the China Sea traveling is done in Chinese ships only, so we shall describe their arrangements. The Chinese vessels are of three kinds; large ships called chunks junks , middle sized ones called zaws dhows and the small ones kakams. The large ships have anything from twelve down to three sails, which are made of bamboo rods plaited into mats. They are never lowered, but turned according to the direction of the wind; at anchor they are left floating in the wind.

A ship carries a complement of a thousand men, six hundred of whom are sailors and four hundred men-at-arms, including archers, men with shields and crossbows, who throw naphtha. Three smaller ones, the "half", the "third" and the "quarter", accompany each large vessel.