Seafaring 6i 



to realise how, among a people situated as the Norse 

 folk have been, the sea, from very early days, became 

 their one road, and the people was a predestined race 

 of navigators and explorers. 



The bays and creeks of the Baltic, of Denmark and 

 Sweden, afford the same facilities for navigation that 

 do the fjords of Norway, with their protecting island 

 guard ; and, with the Norse Sea cut off by the narrow 

 passage of the belt, and with the numberless islands of 

 Denmark, this sea, too, is as protected as one could wish, 

 so that the other Scandinavian peoples, the Swedes and 

 Danes, have had equal opportunities with the Norsemen 

 of becoming great navigators. It is, in truth, in the 

 Baltic Sea, including therewith the channel which 

 leads to it, Skaggerrak and Cattegat, rather than on tlie 

 western coast of Norway, that we must look for the 

 growth of that art of navigation which ushered in the 

 great era in the history of Scandinavia, the Age of the 

 Vikings, As we saw, it is Bohusliin, one of the southern 

 provinces of Sweden, and abutting on the Baltic, which, 

 in its rock-carvings, contains the earliest record of the 

 use of ships and the knowledge of navigation to be 

 found in the north. 



We also saw that, so far as it is possible to judge, 

 the shipbuilding of the early times represented by the 

 rock-carvings, had not very materially changed when, 

 a thousand years later, arose the Viking Age, in which 

 these northern ships were to become known almost to 

 every country in Europe. 



In the Museum at Christiania (at the back of the 

 University) we find two relics of the art of shipbuilding 

 in the Viking Age, or near it. These two ships may 



