For the containment control problem of underactuated ships with external disturbances, a novel nonsingular fixed-time sliding control scheme is developed. The whole controller design process is divided into two steps: kinematics loop design and dynamics loop design. In the kinematic design, a new nonsingular fixed-time distributed virtual control law is designed by using graph theory knowledge and fixed-time stability theory,so that all the followers converge to the convex hull by a group of leaders in fixed time. In the dynamic design, in order to realize the tracking control of the virtual control law, a robust containment controller is developed through utilizing fixed-time sliding mode control. Subsequently, it is well proven that all the tracking errors could converge to the equilibrium point in fixed time without dependence of initial states of ships. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed methodology is illustrated by numerical simulation.