Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Raiders or Traders?" by Andrew Curry (©2008 by the Smithsonian Institution).

Norsemen have traditionally been seen as intrepid seafarers and fierce warriors. They traveled thousands of miles to the east and south: across the Baltic, onto the rivers of modern-day Russia and across the Black Sea to menace Constantinople.

All that wandering would have been impossible without ships. For most of the 20th century, archaeologists assumed that all Viking ships resembled a vessel excavated in Norway in 1880. Known as the Gokstad ship, for the farm on which it was found, it dated to the year 900. A replica was sailed across the Atlantic, from Norway to Chicago, for the 1893 World's Fair. But a discovery in 1962 forced researchers to abandon the idea that the Vikings had only one kind of ship.

At the bottom of a fjord near the Danish town of Roskilde, archaeologists found remnants of five Viking ships piled one atop the other. Dubbed the Skuldelev ships, for a nearby town, each had had a specialized role. One had been a fishing boat; two were cargo ships, so easy to handle that a crew of eight could move 20-ton loads; and one was a warship that could carry about 30 people. The fifth ship, a raider known as Skuldelev 2, was the biggest.

It was 98 feet long but 12 feet wide. Its keel reached just three feet below the surface, and its masts and sail could be lowered to approach fortifications and settlements with stealth.

Because only 20 percent of the Skuldelev 2 could be recovered, the only way to determine its capabilities for certain was to somehow resurrect and sail it. In 2000, researchers at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde began working with scientists to build an accurate replica. They used thousand-year-old methods and replicas of Viking tools, which meant carving each of the ship’s 90 oak planks with axes, wedges, and hammers. After four years, the eight builders had their replica. They called it Sea Stallion from Glendalough for the Irish village where Vikings used to find oak for their ships. With its narrow beam (width) and shallow draft (the depth a ship extends below the waterline), the Sea Stallion could have navigated nearly any river in Europe. But how would it fare on the open sea?

In the summer of 2006, the Sea Stallion sailed under sunny skies and gentle winds from Roskilde to Norway and back in four weeks a virtual pleasure cruise. A test sail in May 2007 around the Roskilde fjord enjoyed similar conditions. A tougher, six-week test was planned for July 2007, with the crew sailing from Roskilde north to Norway, west to Scotland and south to Dublin. Fully loaded, the ship weighed 24 tons-eight of ship, eight of rock for ballast (the weight used to steady a ship) and eight of crew and gear. In ideal conditions, the Sea Stallion could travel 160 nautical miles a day; it could sprint at 13 knots, or almost 15 miles an hour. (A high-tech America's Cup racer might hit 20 knots.) “It ranks as one of the fastest warships in history," says Anton Englert, an archaeologist at the ship museum.

The ship set sail for Dublin on July 1, 2007, under dark skies that presaged Northern Europe's coldest and wettest summer in decades. Nighttime temperatures plunged below freezing. Three days into the voyage, two crew members had been treated for hypothermia; weak winds forced the Sea Stallion to take a 24-hour tow across part of the North Sea to stay on schedule.

After the six-week test, archaeologists at the ship museum in Roskilde began analyzing data generated during the voyage. High speeds over long distances pushed the ship to its limits—and challenged some assumptions about how the Skuldelev 2 had been put together. "The sails are very stable and can take a lot of wind, but problems with the rudder come up again and again, and haven't been solved yet," Englert says.

Information from the crew proved as valuable as technical data. Exhausted sailors told researchers that the close quarters made sleeping nearly impossible. Between the rough water, constant rain and their nautical duties, it was all crew members could do to nap for an hour or two during their rest periods. "That indicates the ship must have had an amphibious behavior—they had to land often just to get some rest,”Englert says. Crossing the North Sea in a narrow ship like this one would have stretched a Viking crew almost to the breaking point, and crossing the Atlantic would have been inconceivable. A ship like this would have been used for coastal raiding.