212 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



inhospitable North had taken to seafaring apparently 

 had been driven to it by the necessity of finding the 

 subsistence which their hyperborean home denied 

 them. The rugged shores of Scandinavia and Denmark 

 bred an ideal race of seafarers children of the storm, 

 the mist, and the frost. Hard as their native rocks, 

 turbulent as the waves that foamed upon their barren 

 shores, they formed an amazing contrast to the men 

 of the South, who wilted under the biting blasts of 

 winter, and thought shudderingly of the land of the 

 Cimmerians, which lay in the mysterious North, as 

 beyond the endurance of flesh and blood. How or 

 when the northmen first conceived the idea of sailing 

 the sea-road, of seeking in softer lands through no 

 matter what trials, the much-desired luxuries denied 

 them by the land of their birth, we do not know, for 

 even their own sagas are silent. But, once having 

 taken to the sea, even though their ships were but 

 cockleshells, they seem to have been at home ; the 

 wave and the tempest had no terrors for them, and in 

 a spirit of comradeship entirely foreign to the Eoman 

 idea of the difference between patrician and pleb, or 

 legionary and galley-slave, they face with cheerfulness 

 and alacrity all the terrors of the Northern Sea. 



Still, their advent marked no advance in civiliza- 

 tion, but the reverse. Before very long the native 

 of any shore within their reach (and their reach grew 

 more and more comprehensive every year) grew to 

 look upon the sea as an easy inlet for the most terrific 

 dangers to him and his. It was no longer a barrier 

 between him and the outer world, contact with which 

 he dreaded, but an open road, along which might come 

 at any hour of the day or night, the ships of the 



