Gokstad ship

• 1. The King's Mound

  ›

  The Gokstad ship lay beneath a Norwegian farm for nearly a thousand years. The sons of the owner of Gokstad farm broke through the frozen ground in 1880 and found its bow. The site had long been called Kongshaugen, drawn from the Old Norse konungr, meaning king, and haugr, meaning mound. Scholars had dismissed that name as rural folklore. They were wrong.

  Nicolay Nicolaysen, then President of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments, arrived in February 1880. He halted the unsupervised digging and organized a proper excavation. His team cut into the mound from the side rather than from the top. On the second day, they reached the ship's bow. The mound still measured 50 metres by 43 metres at that point, though years of ploughing had reduced its height to just 5 metres.

  What they recovered turned out to be the largest preserved Viking longship in Norway. Who had it been built for? How had craftsmen working with oak and willow constructed something capable of open-ocean sailing? And what had been left inside the burial chamber alongside the man who owned it?

  61012

• 2. Oak, Iron, and Willow

  ›

  At 23.80 metres long and 5.10 metres wide, the Gokstad ship was built for warfare, trade, and the movement of people and cargo. The hull is clinker-built: sixteen tapered oak planks on each side, each overlapping the plank below it by about 30 millimetres. The garboard planks, those nearest the keel, are nearly vertical where they meet it and stay narrow as they take the turn of the bilge. The upper planks grow progressively wider.

  Iron rivets fasten the upper planks to the frames. Where the hull runs straight, the rivets are spaced about 180 millimetres apart. Where the planks curve, they close to roughly 125 millimetres. Each rivet is an iron nail driven from outside and bent over a small cinch plate on the inside.

  The nine lowest planks on each side follow a different method. These bottom planks are thinner, around 2.5 centimetres, while the upper planks run 3 to 4 centimetres thick. Rather than rivets, withies, lashings of willow, bind the bottom planks to the frames. Each bottom plank has small cleats carved into its inner face to grip the withies. The combined effect makes the bottom of the ship lighter and more flexible than the sides above the waterline.

  Steering was handled by a quarter rudder attached to the starboard side. The rudder connects to a large wooden block called the wart. Osiers, bent willow shoots, pass through both the rudder and the wart and anchor on the inside of the hull. In shallow water, the fastening could be released quickly to raise the rudder clear.

  Each crossbeam carries a small ledge, about 25 millimetres wide and deep, that holds a removable section of decking. Sea chests rested on top of that decking when the crew was rowing. On longer voyages the chests were likely stowed below decks as ballast.

  Scandinavian sailors measured their ships in rooms, the spaces between crossbeams, from the beginning of the Viking Age through medieval times. Each room held one pair of oars. The Gokstad ship has 16 rooms and therefore 32 oars. When the crew sailed rather than rowed, the oar holes could be covered. A square sail of roughly 110 square metres could drive the vessel to over 12 knots. The mast could be raised and lowered.

  Dendrochronological dating puts the felling of the ship's timber at around 890 AD, the height of Norse expansion into Dublin and York. The ship was commissioned at the end of the 9th century, during the reign of King Harald Fairhair. Someone would soon be buried inside it.

  89457

• 3. Man and Peacock

  ›

  Inside the burial chamber the excavators found a skeleton lying in a bed. The man had been about 40 to 50 years old when he died. He stood between 181 and 183 centimetres, powerfully built. His identity has never been established.

  Around his body lay the bones of twelve horses, six dogs, and one peacock.

  The grave goods surrounding the man included three small boats, a tent, a sledge, and riding equipment. No gold or silver was found in the 1880 excavation. The burial appears to have been plundered at some earlier point. Weapons were also absent, though weapons were considered an important part of a man's burial goods during the Viking period.

  In the 1920s, Professor Anton Willem Brogger of the University of Oslo proposed that the buried man was King Olaf Gudrodson, son of the elderly king Gudrod of Vestfold. Brogger described Olaf as gout-ridden. That identification has never been sufficiently proven.

  The ship, the reconstructed burial chamber, two of the small boats, and two tent boards are displayed at the Viking Ship Museum on the Bygdøy peninsula in Oslo. After thirteen years of debate about a possible relocation, Education Minister Kristin Halvorsen confirmed on the 3rd of May 2012 that the ship would remain at Bygdøy.

  1094117

• 4. Sailing Again

  ›

  The replica Viking left Bergen, Norway, in 1893 and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to be exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Captain Magnus Andersen reported that the hull's flexible bottom rose and fell up to 18 millimetres in heavy seas without taking on water. The gunwale could twist up to 15 centimetres out of true. Speeds around 10 or 11 knots were recorded during the crossing. The Viking remains on exhibit near Chicago to this day.

  A second replica, Gaia, was constructed during the winter of 1989-1990 in Bjørkedal in Volda Municipality. On the 17th of May 1991, Ragnar Thorseth sailed Gaia to North America to mark the thousandth anniversary of Leiv Eriksson's founding of Vinland. On the 19th of June 1991, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, then President of Iceland, gave the ship its name during the voyage. Gaia's oak mast is made from a single piece of timber. Stone serves as ballast. Under full canvas of 120 square metres, Gaia reaches ten knots. Sixteen pairs of oars drive it when not under sail. In May 1993, Knut Utstein Kloster of the Gaia Ship Foundation donated the vessel to the city of Sandefjord. Gaia has also sailed to the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, travelling via the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and North America.

  Munin, a half-scale replica, is based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Íslendingur is held at the Viking World museum in Iceland. The Hugin sits in Ramsgate, England. A replica is also on display at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead, Minnesota. Gaia's home port of Sandefjord is the same municipality where the original ship lay buried for roughly a thousand years before it was found.

  1617131415