Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/148

 rust and damp would make them useless as weapons. These, consequently, had to he stowed under a deck, or in chests. The shields alone could bear exposure to wet, and they appear to have been hung outside from the rails all round the vessel; so that they would occupy the place of quarter-cloths, or wash-boards, above the gunwale of our shipping. The stowage of their plunder also, which consisted of bulky articles, as malt, meal, grain, cattle, wool, clothes, arms taken in the forays on the coast, (and they had transport vessels as well as war vessels with them on their marauding expeditions,) required vessels of a considerable size. We need not suppose that, of the 1200 vessels which King Olaf in his last levy to oppose Canute the Great had assembled and brought to the Baltic, the greater number were more than large boats, of perhaps thirty feet of keel, with a forecastle deck, a cabin aft, and the centre open, and merely tilted over at night to shelter the crewr. Yet to construct many hundreds of such rude craft as this,—and any kind of boat or ship below this, as a class of vessels, could not have withstood sea and weather along the coast of Norway, and across the Skagerackto the Sound,—implies a general diffusion of the art of working in iron; a trade in the arts of raising and smelting the ore; and a knowledge, in every district of the country, of the smith-work and carpenter-work, and tools and handicrafts necessary for ship-building and fitting out ships for sea. We have some data in the sagas from which we can arrive at the dimensions and appearance of the larger class of vessels used by the Northmen, allowing that the ordinary vessels of the peasants gathered by a levy could be no larger or better than large herring boats. We have in the Saga of Olaf Tryggvesson some details of the building of the Long Serpent and the Crane, sometime between the years 995 and 1000. The Long