Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/67

Rh he has himself given us of the two voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan; the first to the North Seas, the second towards the east of the Baltic. These voyages were related to Alfred by the navigators themselves; and he has inserted what they told him in his Saxon translation of the Latin History of Orosius. It has been observed that Alfred "obtained from Ohthere and Wulfstan such information of the Baltic sea with the adjacent countries, as far exceeded that of professed geographers, either before or after his time, till the route of Ohthere was retraced in the year 1553 by the English navigator Chancellor, who was supposed the original discoverer of the northern passage to Russia." Ohthere rounded the North Cape, and penetrated into the White Sea, from which he ascended a great river, which must have been the Dwina, on which Archangel now stands. Wulfstan navigated the Baltic as far as to the land of the Estum, the present Prussia. "This Eastland," says his narrative, "is very large, and there be a great many towns, and in every town there is a king; and there is a great quantity of honey and fish. The king and the richest men drink mares' milk, and the poor and the slaves drink mead. There be very many battles between them. There is no ale brewed amid the Estum, but there is mead enough." Pytheas had remarked the same abundance of honey and use of mead, among the people of this coast, twelve centuries before.

It is one of Alfred's many great merits, and titles to perpetual and grateful remembrance, that he first called into action, and gave proof of what could be achieved by the natural right arm of England—her maritime strength. The year 887, the sixth of his reign, while he was engaged in that first struggle with the northern invaders which ended so disastrously, is marked as the year in which he fitted out his first few ships. Twenty years later, in his days of prosperity and power, he built a much larger fleet, and introduced certain important improvements in the form of the vessels, which, whether suggested by his own inventive sagacity, or borrowed, as it has been D 3