#10 – HMAV Bounty (The Bounty)

Captain: Captain Bligh, screaming in a longboat
If there’s one thing that you definitely want on a boat named after a delicious coconutty chocolate bar, it’s clearly Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins fighting. You can all see how it’d go – Mel takes his shirt off, Anthony straightens his stock, Mel calls him a “bowel-trowelling Jewboy”, Anthony points out that there’s literally no such thing as a Welsh Jew, the crew pours melted Bounties all over them and the mutiny begins in style. AND Liam Neeson’s in it somewhere. Want to unwrap our six inches of high-calorie goodness, Liam? Course you do.

Pros: Everyone loves chocolate
Cons: Schizophrenic skipper

#9 – The Black Pearl (Pirates of the Caribbean)

Captain: Jack Sparrow and his grubby hair
To the untrained eye, taking Jack Sparrow’s shilling and sailing aboard the Black Pearl looks like a pretty sensible decision. Cruising around the Caribbean with Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush? Excellent. But then you get the option to make a bit on the side, and everyone else is doing it so you take a handful of Aztec gold and suddenly OH GOD YOU’VE GOT NO SKIN LEFT. If there’s one thing that future employers hate, it’s a great big gap in your CV that you can’t explain without the use of the magic sentence “I was a cursed pirate aboard a ghost ship”.

Pros: Excellent tanning opportunities
Cons: No flesh to tan

#8 – Disco Volante (Thunderball)

Captain: Emilio Largo, he of the tarantula-style hairy hands
What do you fancy after a long hard SEVENTEEN HOURS of fighting bad guys underwater? That’s right, an obscenely fast boat ride! Sean ‘look at my lovely wetsuit’ Connery takes on the original Number Two on the Disco Volante, an improbably zippy hydrofoil with a name which means ‘Flying Saucer’ (and not, as we originally assumed, ‘Flying Disco’). Fortunately, Emilio Largo is basically a giant seal with no depth perception, so he gets harpooned and the world doesn’t get blown up and Sean gets his end away. Again. At least there are always plenty of condoms onboard ship, eh sailors?

Pros: Detachable submarines
Cons: Owned by an international criminal organisation

#7 – Bismarck (Sink the Bismarck!)

Captain: Ernst Lindemann, the least buoyant Ernst ever
I know this isn’t a desperately patriotic thing to say, but I think the Bismarck got absolutely fucking shafted. The titanic (more on which later) German warship sunk HMS Hood, the biggest battlecruiser ever constructed, without any effort at all – by contrast, it took sixteen ships INCLUDING TWO AIRCRAFT CARRIERS to finally send it to the bottom along with most of the 2,300 men aboard. Bismarck was like the fat kid at school who becomes a bully because it’s easier than being thought a clumsy git, and the Royal Navy’s yapping little twat ships should have been held down one by one and given Chinese burns.

Pros: the favourite film of crotchety grandfathers everywhere.
Cons: The title’s a massive spoiler.

#6 – Orca (Jaws)

Captain: Quint, who never gets invited to George’s dinner parties in case he kills Sharky
Ahab isn’t the only seaman intent on killing every massive fishy bastard he can find – Quint, the mononymic captain of the Orca, became equally obsessed with nailing the Great White that terrorised Amity way back in ’75. If Hilaire Belloc had been writing about summer blockbusters instead of Matilda telling lies and being burnt to death, he might have found time for a few lines on the subject of Quint, who just couldn’t chill the fuck out and ended up as shark chow.

Pros: Can be deconstructed into convenient raft-sized lumps
Cons: Gets absolutely rinsed by a massive shark

#5 – RMS Titanic (Titanic)

Captain: Edward Smith and his excellent beard
Despite its high profile, Titanic’s staying at the bottom of the top five because, when all’s said and done, it was basically a shit ship. Being a ship is, when all’s said and done, not that hard – all you have to do is not sink. And what did Titanic do? Yep. I didn’t give Bismarck a hard time about this because, as discussed, it had to face the naval equivalent of having its shoelaces tied together and being kicked down a hill by a gang of vicious Year 8s, but Titanic basically bounced off an ice cube and tipped everyone into the Atlantic. And then that selfish bitch Rose let lovely Leo freeze to death although she had a door AND a lifejacket. Still wouldn’t have happened if the Titanic wasn’t a crap boat.

Pros: Kate Winslet’s tits
Cons: James Cameron’s smug face

#4 – That Rowing Boat (Bridget Jones’ Diary)

Captain: Daniel Cleaver and his magnificent cheating cock
“Fuck me, I fucking love Keats!” And we fucking love you, Hugh Grant. The rowing boat plays a brief but pivotal role in Bridget Jones’ Diary, first supporting Daniel Cleaver’s duplicitous arse as he sculls Bridge around mid-minibreak and then cheekily capsizing to hammer home just how much more fun Daniel and Bridget are having than Mark Darcy and that icy bitch Natasha, whose boat is either in cahoots with our one or had a horrible row with it and is determined not to stoop to its level. Has the anthropomorphising of nautical vessels got a bit OTT now, do you think? Time to go into space, then.

Pros: Did we not already mention Hugh Grant’s arse?
Cons: It’ll probably take ages to dry out now. The boat, that is, not his arse.

#3 – Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)

Captain: Han Solo, that scruffy-looking nerf herder
It’s the fastest SHIP in the galaxy, and that means it gets a place in here. The Falcon is, when you think about it, basically the interstellar equivalent of an Astra that’s been seriously lowered and had a massive spoiler jammed on the back before being used to drive bags of dope (cunningly concealed under the subs in the boot) really fast from Hemel Hempstead to Milton Keynes. If you saw Han Solo in a bar, you’d leave, because he’s an unconscionable yobbo and his wingman’s a bear. Still, who amongst us hasn’t secretly fancied buying some neon underlights and blatting through Slough like an absolute twat? Everyone loves a bit of rough.

Pros: Having a go in the ventral blaster turret.
Cons: Sharing a head (that’s nautical for ‘toilet’) with Chewie.

#2 – Watership Down (Watership Down)

Captain Chief Rabbit: Hazel, Scourge of Efrafa
Not going to split hares (HAHAHA) here, Watership Down definitely isn’t a ship at all. It’s more… a hill. BUT it’s a hill full of rabbits that go out on completely terrifying missions to sexually slash and burn every other lapine community for miles around, gathering up legions of does like so many placid inflatable dolls and bringing them back to their rape warrens to be systematically brutalised by the bullying, laddish rabbits we’ve just spent half the film hating on (when the Dark Rabbit isn’t scaring the shit out of everyone). Still, if you can’t beat them…

Pros: Seriously, so much sex*.
Cons: *rape

#1 – Friendship (all of the films, except for the films that are the sad films)

Captain: Nicholas Sparks

If there’s one thing our voyage today has taught us, it’s that friendship is bigger than a whale. Not even Moby-Dick could mess with friendship.
See?

Pros: Oh, come on.
Cons: Seriously, mate, Bert and Ernie will fucking ream you. Just leave it, yeah?

Which is your favourite cinematic ship? Tell us all about it down below! Ahem.