Naval boarding

Boarding refers to the insertion onto a ship's deck of people who are not a part of that ship's crew. It may be carried out in wartime by naval infantry in an attempt to seize or destroy the vessel, or it may occur in peacetime as a means of inspection.

In wartime

Boarding is used in wartime as a way to seize a vessel without destroying it, or remove its cargo (people or goods) before it is destroyed. For boarding to be successful, it must occur without the knowledge of the crew of the defending ship, or the ship's defenses must be suppressed.

Boarding by military forces may involve the use of small submersibles, inflatable boats, or helicopters to carry troops to the deck of the ship, or may simply be carried out by scuba divers scaling the sides of the ship.

In peacetime

In peacetime, boarding allows authorized inspectors of one nation or group to examine a ship's cargo in a search for drugs, weapons, passengers unrecorded on the ship's manifest, or any other type of contraband that could possibly have been carried. A nation's Coast Guard could also board any suspicious ships that have been overfishing in such a nation's territorial waters (320 kilometres from land).

History of Boarding

Boarding is one of the oldest methods of securing an opposing ship, as the first cases were depicted when the Sea Peoples and Egyptians fought.

Boarding became a viable combat option under the Romans. Since the Romans were primarily a land-based army, they could not effectively combat the Carthaginian Navy effectively, and subsequently lost several sea battles. The corvus, a boarding ramp with two steel spikes, was the Roman answer to this problem. Roman sailors would pilot their ship alongside a Carthaginian ship, drop the corvus from one deck to the other, and cross the board, assaualting the ship. The Carthaginian Navy, unprepared for this "land combat" on the oceans, lost several ships to this tactic. This invention secured Roman naval dominance from then on.

After the Dark Ages, few sea-faring people could actually board another ship without suffering unacceptable casualty levels, and boarding only came back into naval doctrine at the Battle of Sluys where the French and English navies fought each other with muskets and swords, using the ships' decks and rooms as battlefields.

In China this tactic was oft repeated, with a flat expanse of a ship used as a battleground for the marine contingents on the ships.

Boarding in video games

Boarding has also come to define the action of stealing a vehicle piloted by one or more enemies. In some games, if a player is close enough, he is able to forcibly eject the AI or other player from their position and take over the vehicle. However, some of the more "intelligent" AIs also have the ability to eject the player from his own vehicle if he is not prudent enough about the proximity of enemies. Notable examples include Halo 2, where the Master Chief, Arbiter, and Elites can board enemy vehicles and Sid Meier's Pirates!, where the player may close distance with an enemy ship and board it with swordsmen, prompting a fencing duel and deciding the fate of the ship under attack.