The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (50 page)

The Viking ships present at the battle of Svold represent the culmination of a
line of development in northern European shipbuilding the origins of which were hundreds if not thousands of years old. The ships of northern Europe were distinct from those of the Mediterranean or the Monsoon Seas in two key respects: the hulls tended to be built with strakes overlapping rather than laid flush and joined to one another by clenched bolts, a style called lapstrake or clinker; and until shortly before the start of the Viking age the sail was
apparently unknown on the continent north of the Rhine. When sails were developed in or introduced to
Gaul and the
British Isles is unknown, but
Pytheas’s claim that
Ultima Thule lay six days from the
Shetland Islands or Great Britain assumes the use of a sail by at least the fourth century
BCE
. The Shetlands are four hundred miles from where the
Arctic Circle intersects the coasts of
Norway and Iceland, so if Pytheas and his crew sailed from the Shetlands, they would have to have averaged
seventy miles per day, about twice the speed possible under oars.

The next positive evidence for sails in the British Isles comes from the
Broighter “boat,” a twenty-centimeter gold model of a boat from the north of Ireland dated to the first century
BCE
. Fitted with eighteen oars, a steering oar, and a mast and yard for a square sail, a life-size version of the model would yield a boat of between twelve and fifteen meters long. There is little reason to believe that mariners of Pytheas’s day, or even earlier, could not
rig their hide boats with a mast and sail, and it seems likely that if he had fallen in with far-ranging mariners who did not use sails, he would have mentioned it. Whether sails were used throughout the British Isles or whether there was a line of demarcation between areas of ships with sails and those without them is hard to know. Regardless, the practice of building large, unrigged vessels continued as late as the seventh century.

The
Broighter boat is contemporaneous with the oldest firsthand account of northern
European ships, in Caesar’s
Conquest of Gaul
. During a naval campaign against the
Veneti on the south coast of Brittany in 57
BCE
, Caesar was especially impressed with their seamanship and the differences between their ships, designed to weather the rough Atlantic littoral, and those of the Mediterranean. “
The Gauls’ own ships were built and rigged in a different manner from ours,” he wrote.

Caesar had ships built on the Loire, but smaller and fitted with rams, they were no match for those of the Veneti. “
Perfectly equipped and ready for
immediate action,” the Veneti ships rode so high in the water that when the Romans “tried erecting turrets they found that they were still overtopped by the foreigners’ lofty sterns and were too low to make their missiles carry properly, while the enemy’s fell with great force.” The Romans finally gained the advantage by cutting the halyards of the Veneti ships with “pointed hooks fixed into the ends of long poles.” Because the Veneti ships carried no oars, the Romans could then pick off the powerless ships one by one.

Caesar gained additional experience on his two crossings to Britain, and for the second he ordered the construction of ships suited to crossing the English Channel. As he writes:

The largest collection of
Roman-era vessels on the Rhine was discovered during the construction of a hotel in the 1980s, when workers uncovered the remains of five fourth-century vessels adjacent to what had been the
Classis Germanica
base at Mainz. Four were slender, open
lusoriae,
general-purpose transports and patrol boats measuring about 21 by 2.5 meters, with a single mast rigged for a square sail, and thirty oars. (The fifth and smallest vessel was an inspection boat with a small cabin for officials.) In building these, shipwrights fastened planks around a temporary frame, which was then removed before permanent frames were inserted into the complete hull, a process that would have facilitated the mass production of these river craft, which made up a growing proportion of the imperial fleet in the post-Augustan era.

This hybrid method of hull construction is similar to the “Romano-Celtic” design associated with vessels found in Roman Gaul and Britain. Described as a
“frame-based”
shipbuilding technique, this is known from the remains of the second-century
Blackfriars barge excavated at London, and from the third-century sailing merchantmen found at St. Peter Port, on the island of Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Neither hull was built using the shell-first method found in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in northern Europe; nor were complete frames erected before planks were fastened to them. Instead, the frame was erected in stages: a section of framing was assembled and after planks were attached to this, the frames were extended beyond the last completed strake. In this way, the framing rather than the planking was the dominant element in determining the shape of the hull. Neither this style, nor that
of the Mainz vessels, developed into a fully frame-first sequence, which was only introduced from the Mediterranean, where it evolved, in the later
Middle Ages.

The Blackfriars, St. Peter Port, and Mainz vessels all carried
sails, but although Roman patrol craft especially would have been well known to people living along the Rhine-Danube corridor, and in fact many of the crews were recruited from the indigenous population, there is little evidence of sails being used north of the Rhine until well after the end of Roman rule in Gaul. One of the best preserved vessels of the period is a fourth-century vessel found in the Nydam bog near Schleswig, about eighty kilometers north of
Kiel. The twenty-two-meter-long hull has thole pins for thirty oars and was steered with a
quarter rudder, but there is no evidence of either mast or rigging. The layout of the shell-first, lapstrake
Nydam boat conforms to a first-century description of Germanic vessels by
Tacitus: “
The shape of their ships differs from the normal [that is, Roman] in having a prow at each end, so that they are always facing the right way to put into shore. They do not propel them with sails, nor do they fasten a row of oars to the sides. The rowlocks are movable, as one finds them on some river-craft, and can be reversed, as circumstances require, for rowing in either direction.”

The Nydam boat may represent the kind of vessel in which the
Angles,
Saxons, and
Jutes crossed the North Sea to Britain in the fourth and fifth centuries. Although such a large-scale, long-distance
migration under oars alone would have been challenging, large vessels powered solely by oars were still being used in England in the seventh century as we know from the remains of the
Sutton Hoo ship. When excavated in 1939, the twenty-seven-meter-long clinker hull no longer existed, because in reacting with the soil its timbers and iron fastenings had dissolved, leaving clear casts, traces, and impressions of their form and placement, and even evidence of repairs. The ship was manned by twenty-eight rowers but although there is no evidence of a mast or sail, the hull shape and construction details like a keel suggest that it could have been rigged, and a half-scale model built in 1993 demonstrated excellent sailing ability. Regardless of whether the Sutton Hoo ship was rigged, it clearly belongs to the transitional phase in northwest
European shipbuilding that led to the ships of the Viking age.

Written and visual depictions of Viking-era ships are no more detailed than
Oddr Snorrason’s descriptions of the
Ormr inn Langi
and
Járnbarðinn
at the
battle of Svold but the rich archaeological record makes up for this:
more than twenty ships from the critical ninth and tenth centuries have been excavated across an area running from
Oslofjord to the coast of
Jutland and eastward to the Vistula. The Vikings had a variety of vessels for both warfare and general
use, although merchantmen and warships had several features in common. Like the Nydam and Sutton Hoo vessels, the double-ended hulls were of shell-first, clinker construction and steered with a single quarter rudder, and relatively flat bottoms allowed them to be run up on shore. The incorporation of a keel made it possible to rig a mast and square sail; yet while sailing was useful on long passages, when maneuvering inshore or against fickle winds, or going into battle, rowing was imperative. Unlike warships, which were generally open-hulled throughout,
knarrs
and other merchantmen were decked forward and aft, where the rowers sat, with a break amid
ships in which were crowded the passengers and cargo, everything from food and tools to trade goods and livestock, including sheep, cattle, and horses, which were routinely carried by ship. The Norse introduced horses to Iceland, and for his invasion of England,
William embarked two or three thousand knights who would have traveled with the same number of
warhorses in
ships of similar design.

Among the earliest and most
aesthetically dramatic Viking-era ship finds are the Norwegian
Oseberg ship (21.6 meters by 5.1 meters broad), built around 815–20 and excavated in 1904, and the
Gokstad ship (23.3 meters by 5.2 meters), unearthed from a burial mound in 1880 and dated to about 890–95. Once considered archetypes of the longship (
langskip
), these are now believed to be
karvi,
a type smaller than either the longship or the merchant’s
knarr.
Both ships were rigged, and the Oseberg ship is the oldest northern Scandinavian ship for which there is indisputable evidence of a sail. As was typical of Viking ships, shields could be fastened to racks that ran above the single row of oarports on either side of the Oseberg and Gokstad hulls. That they were found in burial mounds suggests they probably belonged to a chieftain or other important personage, as did the Sutton Hoo ship.

Of slightly later date are five
ships scuttled off Skuldelev to block the approaches to Roskilde, Denmark, during the wars between
Harald Hardradi and
Svein III. The fragmentary remains have been identified as belonging to two
knarrs
(Skuldelev 1 and 3), two warships (Skuldelev 2 and 5), and a fishing boat (Skuldelev 6), which date from between 930 and 1030.
^c
The newest and best-preserved vessel, Skuldelev 3, was fourteen meters long and could carry about five tons with a crew of five to nine people. With a capacity of fifteen to twenty tons, the sixteen-meter Skuldelev 1 was probably built in Norway and is the sort of ship that would have been used for overseas trading. Skuldelev 5, “the small warship” (seventeen meters), and Skuldelev 2 are notable for their roughly 7-to-1 length-to-beam ratio, much narrower than the 4-to-1 ratio of
the other ships. Vessels of comparable design seem to have been copied from the Baltic to Normandy and Ireland, where the thirty-meter-long Skuldelev 2 was built. The bottom planks of both warships have been worn thin from being run up on beaches. Skuldelev 2 is the longest
Viking ship yet found and although the total number of oars is unknown, its complement has been estimated at between fifty and a hundred men. The Icelandic sagas indicate that ships with between thirteen and twenty-three pairs of oars were considered longships, and the Skuldelev 2 would have been at the bigger end of the spectrum.

The Gokstad ship of 895 is a large clinker-built
karvi
intended for ocean sailing. Built primarily of oak, the hull measures twenty-three meters by five meters and could carry about sixty-five people. The ship was found in a burial mound near Sandefjord, Norway, with three smaller boats, a bed, cooking implements, and twelve horses, six dogs, and other animals. Courtesy of the Vikingskipshuset, Oslo.

Those that carried more than twenty-five pairs were called “great ships,” the most celebrated of which is
Olaf Tryggvason’s
Ormr inn Langi
. As described in Oddr’s twelfth-century
Saga of Olaf Tryggvason,
the massive ship was built near
Trondheim and the slip where it was laid down was still visible in Oddr’s day: “
seventy-four ells [thirty-six meters] long, not counting the raised portions at stem and stern.” Ships built for the king were sumptuously decorated, and Olaf “
had the ship painted all sorts of colors, then had it gilded and adorned with silver. On the prow of the ship there was a dragon head.” The ships in
Svein Forkbeard’s expedition to
England were more lavish still. “
On one side lions moulded in gold were seen on the ships, on the other side … dragons of various kinds poured fire from their nostrils. Here there were glittering men of solid gold or silver nearly comparable to live ones, there bulls with necks raised high and legs outstretched were fashioned leaping and roaring like live ones.” Such embellishment was intended to exalt the king and terrify the enemy. Of greater utility, though still ornamental, were wind vanes and on Svein’s ships carvings of “
birds on the tops of the masts indicated by their movements the winds as they blew.”