CHAPTER II
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 fuller than in the smaller types.
There is an old manuscript in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, dating from about A.D. 1000, in which appear three pictures of Noah's Ark (see p. 26). The house part of the design is frankly impossible—it would capsize the ship—but the hull in each case—the boat part—is not at all unlike the well-known Bayeux-tapestry ships, but of a better and more seaworthy shape, though in some of them the big dragon figure-head is unduly exaggerated. The space between the benches was called a "room", and the port and starboard portions of this were known as "half-rooms". The crew were all told off to these half-rooms as their stations, except those quartered forward and aft. Thus the "Long Serpent" had eight men to each "half-room", and from this item of information it has been estimated that she carried a crew of something between six and seven hundred men. Goodness knows how many King Canute's big "Dreadnought" carried.