Old Boat Antiques
For thousands of years, humans have been taking to the water for exploration, commerce, relaxation, hunting and warfare. Of course, the experience has been modified by technology these days, but at their cores sailing and boating are the same as they have always been. For this reason, tradition has a stronger role on the sea than in many other pursuits, a fact also due to the fact that the ingenuity that has gone into boating and sailing over the centuries still strikes a chord in the human spirit - a chord of adventure and exploration, of acting in harmony with nature.
What the old boat enthusiasts and practitioners of centuries past have in common with modern day mariners (and even more casual day trippers) is an attraction to the serenity of the ocean — an abiding respect for the rumbling powers of the deep sea and a passion for accepting the forces of weather and current. One must work with these forces rather than against them.
Finding an old boat part or nautical antique to spruce up a modern watercraft or to decorate a room or office in a nautical theme is easy with Mega Ministore's Old Boat Antiques section. The sellers whose offers we currently list offer thousands of unique pieces, from all corners of the globe and in all price ranges. Check through the various categories in the menu to find the item or type of item(s) you are hunting for. Our sellers come from all backgrounds, as indeed do their old boat items and rare collectibles — it's just a matter of looking around the Mega Ministore listings until you find what you need!
The old boat antiques on these pages can each be seen in more detail on eBay. This is also where our nautical items are bought and sold. The eBay bidding and buying system makes it easy because all sales are backed by eBays's safe buying policies.
The links in each listing below will take you to a details page where you can better decide if you want to buy or place a bid on a specific item. Note that many of these pieces are one-of-a-kind and a similar item may not show up again for some time; if you see something you like and current bidding is still in your price range, go ahead and place your own bid - you can't go wrong if you only bid what you're willing to pay!
Nautical antiques for sale
We search the web for vendors who sell nautical antiques, select the most relevant ones and sort them into specific categories so you can see a larger selection of offers.
Hover over tab to show items; click tab to see page.
We constantly scan eBay to find nautical antiques listings from a variety of sellers and categories, including misspellings, abbreviations, and foreign-language listings.
Articles (nautical antiques)
Mystery or misery on the high seas? Crew eschews GPS to sail by sextant
In 1854, a wooden ship called Mystery completed a successful voyage from England to Australia. And in 2008, a crew pulled up the anchor on that vessel's spiritual descendant, Spirit of Mystery, to make the same voyage with the same technology. Namely, Captain Pete Goss and his three-man crew (son, brother, brother-in-law) are using the sextant and the stars...
New 11-part series about exploring shipwrecks to air on Discovery Channel
The Discovery Channel, long known for its interesting but artificially melodramatic series about the natural world and history, has recently announced that it will be producing eleven episodes of a series that follows a company searching and collecting treasure from shipwrecks around the world. The exploration company is Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc., which...
Historic Civil War shipwreck faces uneasy future in its Marine Sanctuary home
The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, sixteen miles off the coast of Cape Hatteras, NC, is home to America's first such designated shipwreck: the USS Monitor, an iron ship that went down during the Civil War. The designation was given in 1975. Although the ship is still in reasonable shape, with several sections of it having been removed and put on display...
Stash of first-ever US gold coins (worth $100K each) found in Gulf of Mexico shipwreck
Divers exploring wrecks in shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico have located the remains of a 19th-century paddle wheeler that had, among other exciting treasures, a bunch of coins that are the first gold coins ever minted in the United States. The coins were minted in New Orleans; in Charlotte, NC; and in Dahlonega, Ga. The Civil War stopped the minting for a...
April Fool's Day sunken treasure find is biggest African gold cache since the pyramids
On April 1, 2008, a mining operation with De Beers discovered a 500-year old sunken ship's remains off the coast of Namibia. The ship is completely destroyed, but the extremely rare gold coins, in numbers that are unusual for this type of ship at the time, are intact and still being found by the score. It is, according to archaeologist Dieter Noli, the largest...