I have always been interested in reading or listening to stories about ships: after all, each of them has its own fate, sometimes no less amazing than the fate of a person. Each ship is beautiful in its own way. Inventing and building a ship is not easy. People suffer for years, sometimes they make joyful discoveries, and sometimes they suffer bitter failures. And I finally decided to write a book myself about the history of shipbuilding. And as soon as I started writing, I immediately began to remember various incidents from my service in the navy. I remember when I was still a cadet at the naval school, we went to sea for the first time on a sailboat. — If a strong wind blows, go away from the shore, - the old boatswain warned us. Before we had time to walk on the sea for an hour or two, the wind grew stronger, the waves rose and we began to be flooded. “Why do we need to go further from the coast? On the contrary, we need to be closer - we won’t drown near the shore,” we decided and pointed the bow of the boat towards the nearest cape. But very soon stones appeared from the water on all sides. The boat began to hit them, and the sail and mast lay on the water. All the cadets had to jump overboard, falling off the rocks and plunging headlong into the water, take the boat away from the shore, put it on an even keel and go out to the open sea as soon as possible. There we were rocked and splashed with splashes, but there was no longer any threat of breaking on the rocks. That’s when the simple thought first occurred to me that before they learned to cross the seas, people probably stayed near the shore for a long time and paid for it with their lives . And the art of building sea vessels itself was also born long and difficult. This book will tell about the long path that ran from the first raft to the modern nuclear-powered ship. V. Sakharnov