The British Navy Book. Field Cyril

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Romans, and it was the special business of the "Count of the Saxon Shore" to rule over them. However this may have been, England became a Saxon country, the remnant of the Britons being driven into Wales and Cornwall.

      Now the Scandinavian peoples were at this time the finest sailors in the world. The Jutes and Angles from Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein belonged to this race, the whole of which became known as "vikings"—that is to say, "the sons of the creeks", from the Scandinavian word vik, a bay, creek, or fiord. But though there must have been a strong Viking element among the Saxon conquerors of England—so much so that it became known as Angle-land, or England, from the Angles—yet the Saxons or English do not seem to have taken so enthusiastically to the sea as the Norwegians and Danes, and, except when special efforts to create fighting fleets were made by King Alfred and Edmund Ironside, were never able to prevent the incursions of their Danish and Norse kinsmen, who, in process of time, firmly established themselves in the country. After the Danes came the Norman Conquest, and during all this period there was little, if any, change in the types of the ships in which the northern nations fared the seas.

      

Noah's Ark, according to a MS. of A.D. 1000 Observe the fullness and apparent capacity of the hull of the dragon-ship on which the Ark proper is erected, and compare it with that of the Nydam ship on the opposite page.

      What were these vessels like? As it happens, we really know more about them than we do of any between their time and the days of Henry VIII. For not only have we very definite details of them and their "gear" in the long "sagas" or historical and traditional poems which have come down to us, sculptured pictures of them in stone, engravings on rocks and upon arms and ornaments, but more than one of the actual Viking vessels have been dug out of the big burial-mounds where they had been hidden for centuries. For the Viking chieftain loved his ship: he lavished ornament and decoration upon it, and regarded it almost as a living thing. When, therefore, the time came for him to take the long last voyage, from which no man ever returns, it was quite natural that he should have wished to make it in the cherished "Dragon Ship" or "Long Serpent", which had so often borne him over the waves on his way to those hand-to-hand combats and harryings and plunderings in which his soul delighted. Sometimes a funeral pyre was erected on the ship herself, and with his favourite sword by his side, his shield and his helmet, the dead chieftain set out on his final voyage, his sons and followers watching the well-known long-ship sailing into the west till she, her sails, and her dead captain disappeared in clouds of fire and smoke under the sunset. Or, again, a dying sea-king would elect to be buried in his favourite ship in some spot overlooking the glassy fiord whence he had so often set out on his piratical exploits. The ship was run up on shore over the rollers which all Viking vessels carried to facilitate beaching, the body was laid amidships with his most treasured earthly possessions, a penthouse of timber was built over him, his favourite horses were killed and placed round the hull of the vessel, and the whole was buried in the depths of a huge mound, which was erected over it.

      The most famous "finds" of this kind were at Gokstadt, in south Norway, in 1881, and at Nydam, in Schleswig, in 1863. In the latter case the ship does not seem to have been used as a sarcophagus, but with another, which had almost entirely rotted away, was found in a bog. Possibly if the huge oval mound now utilized as a cemetery at Inverness, and known as "Tom-na-hurich" ("The Hill of the Fairies"), were tunnelled into, another Viking ship might be brought to light. In the case of the Nydam ship, Roman coins found on board fix her date as being somewhere about A.D. 250. Both from these ships and fragments of others that have been found in various places it is abundantly evident that their builders were as skilled shipwrights as ever existed. Space does not allow us to go into details of their construction, but we may say at once that their finish was perfect, and that their lines were not only beautiful but wonderfully well adapted for contending with the stormy waters of the northern seas. Neither of them appears to have belonged to the largest type of Viking ships, which may be roughly divided into "Dragon Ships" or "Drakkars", "Eseneccas" or "Long Serpents", and "Skutas" or small swift scouting-vessels. It seems just possible, by the way, that our modern slang expression "skoot"—"get away quickly", "clear out"—may be derived from this word. We must try in the next chapter to understand what these Viking ships were like.

      

Broadside View of the Nydam Ship now in the Kiel Museum. Observe the horn-like rowlocks and the steer-board

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      Ancient War-ships

      "Piracy was the exercise, the trade, the glory, and the virtue of the Scandinavian youth. Impatient of a bleak climate and narrow limits, they started from the banquet, grasped their arms, sounded their horn, ascended their ships, and explored every coast that promised either spoil or settlement." Gibbon.

      "Outlaw and free thief,

       My kinsfolk have left me,

       And no kinsfolk need I

       Till kinsfolk shall need me.

       My sword is my father,

       My shield is my mother,

       My ship is my sister,

       My horse is my brother."

       Charles Kingsley.

      If we take the dimensions of the actual Viking boats that have been unearthed, as I have related in the last chapter, we shall have an excellent foundation upon which to form an idea of the bigger and more important ones. Now the Gokstadt boat is nearly 80 feet long and 16 feet 6 inches wide at her greatest beam, and carried mast and sail. The Nydam ship is 75 feet in length, with a beam of 10 feet 6 inches, and had no mast. Both are very flat amidships, and have very fine or sharp ends, but it is evident that in proportion to her length the Gokstadt boat had a much greater beam.

      

A Viking Double-prowed "Long Serpent" or "Dragon-ship"

      Observe the well-supported outer stem, the Dragon Head, the embroidered sail decorated with a variation of the "Swastika" design, which was much used by the Vikings on arms and ornaments; the vane at the masthead, the "shield-row" protecting the rowers, and the steersman guiding the ship by means of her "steer-board".

      That was because she was a sailing-ship and the Nydam vessel was not. The latter may fairly be assumed to have been a "Skuta", and the Gokstadt ship a rather small "Serpent". Now in all the "sagas" that have come down to us the different war-ships which occupy so prominent a place in them are distinguished as to size by the number of oars they pulled. From the Nydam ship, which had fourteen oars a-side, we are thus able to judge the dimensions of famous Viking war-ships like the "Long Serpent" of King Olaf and others, if we allow for the slightly wider space between the rowers' benches necessitated by the greater length of the oars in the larger vessels. Of course, the whole length of the ship was not occupied by the benches. In the Nydam ship, for instance, they took up 46 feet of her length; the remaining 15 feet at each end were required for fighting- and steering-platforms, stowage of stores, &c. In this way it has been calculated that the "Long Serpent"—you must remember that this was a special "Long Serpent", and probably bigger than the usual run of the war-vessels so-called—was 180 feet long, while the still bigger ship belonging to our King Canute works out at no less than 300 feet in length. The beam or width it has not been found possible to estimate exactly, but my own opinion is that the lines, or contour, of these very much bigger ships were much deeper and СКАЧАТЬ