The Biggest Navy in history?

Numerically it was the British until the Yanks overtook them. But the answer entirely depends upon the type of nautical technology used,  from what period of time and for how long. We cannot compare the navies of the Ancient World with those of today, but in their time they were state of the art. The Vikings built a huge amount of sailing ships, but a navy they were not. Just a few of the good old boys having their bit of fun with some plunder and pillage here and there.

The largest navy was actually the Chinese during the Ming Dynasty with a fleet of over 300 ships

Yes,on D-day invasion have been collected biggest number of boats.

Edited by medenaywe - 29-Mar-2011 at 12:34

Originally posted by me The largest navy was actually the Chinese during the Ming Dynasty with a fleet of over 300 ships

Originally posted by Sureshot Tonnage is not a good way of figuring out who had the largest navy. A single Nimitz class carrier weighed more than the entire Royal navy fleet at Trafalgar, but has it, on its own made a greater contribution to history, or actually won anything? Not really. But a whole fleet of warships is more than just one, and the question was which is the largest navy. Does that mean that a Nimitz carrier is a larger Navy than the Trafalgar fleet would have been? Of course not, it's nonsense. I think it would probably be a close run thing to count the number of RN vessels and compare them at the height of the Napoleonic wars with the USN of 1945. I think it would probably have been the USN, but finding stats for the RN around, say 1810 would be very tricky. I couldn't find anything after a quick search, but reckon it would have been 500+ vessels.

 

The largest navy ever in terms of tonnage was the American navy in 1945. In terms of number of warships the largest navies probably were the navies of Hellenistic states during Classical Antiquity before the mediterranean was unified by Rome, as the hellenistic states were always at naval war and had fleets of hundreds and hundreds of triremes, quadriremes, quinquiremes, sixes, sevens, etc. These ships were not very large in terms of tonnage, but were deployed in huge numbers. They were adapted to the geography of the mediterranean.

One example was the naval battle of Cape Ecnomus in 256 BC which involved 680 quinquiremes with a total crew of 285,000 men, since a quinquireme had a crew of 420 men (as compared with 170 for a trireme). We have several other instances of battles involving 400-500 warships during the hellenistic period, another battle was Actium in 31 BC, involving 540 warships.

Battles involving such number of warhisps wouldn't appear again in history. The largest battle ever by tonnage was Jutland.