Nephi’s observation that he was not following accepted shipbuilding practice tells us that Nephi knew the difference, unless Yahweh let him know that there was a difference. The common methods must have been inadequate in some important ways. The Lord tends to be conservative: Nephi built a sailing ship, not a steamship. Probably the unusual instructions resulted in increased seaworthiness, since the era’s common ships were not designed for transoceanic voyages.
Egyptians and Phoenicians had been sailing the open seas for centuries before Nephi built his ship. The Philistine man of war had a proper keel and was an improvement over the keelless Egyptian warships. These cultures succeeded in impressive seafaring both in terms of distances and load capacity of their ships. It is unknown how Nephi’s ship differed.
Kelly DeVries, professor of the history of technology at Loyola College in Maryland, describes the possible sail and rigging of Nephi’s ship:
Nephi mentions nothing about the sails themselves, although he does tell us that he sailed the vessel (1 Ne. 18:8), so they probably were not different. They did not have either the curious workmanship or the difference that he ascribes to the vessel itself. It must have had a large rectangular sail.
Sails were made at this time from many different substances. We know, for example, that in the Far East sailors were using silk. In India they were using flax and silk. Wool was used in ancient Greece, and the Egyptians used flax. There were also fibers that could be taken from the palms themselves, or from fronds, that when tightly woven were quite flexible and could create a sail—perhaps not one that we envision, but one that would be very effective in catching the wind and propelling the boat.
We know that these rectangular sails were more than simple propulsion devices. They could in fact be manipuplated by gathering the rigging together, pulling the sail shut, and allowing a pocket of air to be used, rather than a full sail of air. This would allow for maneuverability at the time over even the roughest of waters.
There is a small dwarf palm that grows in the mountains of the Dhofar region of Oman that makes an excellent cordage. One of the unique features of that particular type of rope is that unlike other ropes, which degrade when exposed to water, the dwarf palm rope actually strengthens and toughens when exposed to water.
Literature: Nephi has used events from the Bible as models for his narrative. As he describes the building of the ship, he appears to intentionally couch his description as a new creation. Bokovoy and Tvedtnes suggest that, when he wrote his brethren “beheld that it was good” (1 Ne. 18:4), he “recalls a key phrase that occurs seven times in the creation account, ‘God saw that it was good.’” They also suggest that the ship as a means of salvation echoes both Noah and Moses’s “ark of bulrushes.”