Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/385

 vessels, and the fish which abounded in their narrow seas. All their other wants were provided by plunder from the industrious and affluent communities of other lands.

In the Hebrides and the sea-lochs of the Highlands they found harbours of retreat the same in character, though not in greatness, as those they left behind them; and we may fairly suppose that it was for these, not necessarily for any temptation in the prospect of plunder, that those districts were frequented by them. Hence it was that the Orkney and other Northern Isles, and even a great part of the north of Scotland, came in hand more naturally to the monarch ruling in Norway than to the king of the Scots.

When we find these sea-rovers in the north-west of Scotland and in Ireland, it becomes obvious, and is confirmed by facts, that they took the north-east coast of Scotland and the northern islands in their way. As the Shetland Islands are not more than two hundred miles distant from the mouths of two of their greatest fiords—the Hardanger and the Sogne, it may be inferred that these islands, or Caithness, was their first landfall, where they could swarm off to the Faroes or Iceland, on the one side, or to Scotland, England, and Ireland, on the other.

As the Vikings must have been thorough seamen, with a great capacity in the handling of their vessels, it is to be regretted, for the sake of arts and inventions, that we have not a fuller knowledge of the details of their craft, and of their method of working them. With, perhaps, the exception of the Phœnicians and Carthaginians, their achievements in