The question was asked a day ago but most of the answers were European in nature. I was wondering how naval warfare worked in other regions.
I know that China, Japan, Korea, and various South Asian/Southeast Asian cultures had strong navies. How did they conduct naval battles? How did their navies change to accomadate gunpowder? Did they adopt cannons for naval use immediately or were cannons usually used for land fortifications instead?
What about South America, Mesoamerica and the Carribean? Did they have navies or were their boats merely for transport? Was controlling the coast and the inland rivers important for them?
Stephen Turnbull does a great study into some of these questions. He's one of the leading medieval Japanese historians outside of Japan itself.
Let's take a look at Japanese military ships before the advent of modern canon.
One of the most important battles in Japanese tradition was the battle at Dan no Ura in 1184. This was the final battle between the rival Heike and Genji clans, and Genji was the victor. Their patriarch, Minamoto Yoritomo, would go on to establish the Shogunate, a military dictatorship system that would last centuries. Here is a depiction of the battle. Though the painting may have some inaccuracies (it was painted more than 500 years after the fight), it gets the idea right. The boats were small, mobile platforms for troops. The firepower didn't often come from any equipment on the ship, like a siege crossbow or a catapult (though they did exist). It came from the traditional munitions delivery method of the bowman.
About 150 years later, the Mongol empire invaded Japan. Most know the story of kamikaze, the divine wind that destroyed the Mongol fleet (both times). But a lot of people outside of Asia don't seem to know that there was a great deal of combat that did occur for both the 1274 invasion and the 1281 invasion. Japanese forces would sneak out into the bay at night on small, single masted cutters. They'd cut the mast down to make a bridge to the enemy ship, dramatically beginning a tradition that would define Japanese naval combat for the next 500 years, boarding. It was a tactic that saw remarkable success, and was part of the reason why Mongol commanders greatly overestimated the amount of local defenders. This artistic work lacks the dramatic use of the mast, but shows the basics of samurai boarding methods. It was as simple as hooks and well armored fighters. It also shows the brutal samurai tradition of taking enemy heads for collection.
Moving on from Japan, we go to Indochina. Here we see two ethnic societies that we now associate with Vietnam and Cambodia. I'm not very familiar with Cham history, but this is an interesting depiction (from Turnbull's book) that I stumbled upon.
Hi there, I'm glad you posted this as its own question. Here's a previous answer about native American navies that may be of interest to you:
