Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/91

Rh excavations, and sent Mr. Nicolaysen, a learned and skillful antiquary, to superintend them. They were continued under his direction during April and May, and finally brought the viking's vessel into view. The ship was twenty-two and a half metres (or about seventy-two feet) long, five metres (or seventeen feet) wide in the middle, would draw a metre and a half (or five feet) of water, and had twenty ribs or benches for rowers. It is considerably the largest vessel of antiquity that has yet been discovered.

The Danish Professor Engelhardt, in 1863, unearthed from the turf-pits of Nydam, in Schleswig, a vessel fourteen metres (or forty-five and a half feet) long; and another vessel was found in 1867, at Tune, thirteen metres (or forty-two feet) long. Neither of these vessels could be compared, however, as to its state of preservation or its dimensions, with the one found at Gogstad.

The tumulus is now nearly a mile from the sea, but the nature of the alluvial soil makes it evident that the waves formerly washed its base. The vessel had, it then appears, been drawn immediately out of the fiord, and placed upon a bed of fascines or hurdles and moss. The walls had then been covered with clay, the hold filled with earth and sand, and the whole covered over so as to form a tumulus. The prow of the vessel was turned toward the sea, for at that period it was believed that, when God should call the chief, he would come out of his grave and launch his ship all equipped upon the waves of the ocean.

Some interesting objects were found on the prow of the vessel, which at first escaped attention. A piece of a beam showed the hole in which the shaft of an anchor had been inserted, but only bits of iron were found. The remains of two or three small oaken canoes of very fine form were unearthed, and by their side were found a number of oars, some of which were intended for the canoes, and some for the vessel itself. They were eighteen or twenty feet long, and of a shape much like that of the oars which are used in England in regattas. The blocks were worked very thin, and some of them were ornamented with carvings. The floor of the ship was as well preserved as if it had been built yesterday, and was adorned with curved lines. Some pieces of wood seemed to have formed parts of drag-nets. Certain beams and planks are supposed to have formed partitions separating the benches of rowers from one another, leaving a passage in the middle. A neatly shaped hatchet, several inches long and of the form common to hatchets of the iron age, was found on a pile of oaken chips. Some beams had dragons' heads at their ends, rudely carved and painted in the same colors as the walls of the vessel—that is, in black and yellow. The colors are still bright enough to show that water has not greatly affected them. As olive and other vegetable oils were then unknown, we must suppose that the colors were prepared with some kind of fat, perhaps with whale-oil.