Days of the Discoverers | Page 8

up at the huge warehouses. Since the Hanseatic League
secured a foothold in Norway, in 1343, most Norwegian ports had been
losing trade, and Bergen, or rather the Hanse merchants in Bergen, had
been getting it. Between the Danes and the Germans it looked rather as
if Norwegians were to be crowded out of their own country.
The Hanse traders not only received and sold fish for the Friday
markets of northern Europe, but sold all kinds of manufactured goods.
It was said that they had two sets of scales--one for buying and one for
selling. Norwegians had either to adapt themselves to the new methods
or give their sons to the ceaseless battle of the open sea. From the
Baltic and Icelandic fisheries, the North Sea and the Lofoden Islands,
their ships got the heaviest and the hardest of the sea-harvesting.
But it takes more than hardship to break a Norseman. In his four years
at sea Thorolf had become tall, broad-shouldered and powerful, and at
eighteen he looked a grown man. He did more than he promised, and
listened oftener than he talked, and his only close friend was Nils
Magnusson, who was now coming down to the wharf. They had known
each other from boyhood.
Nils had been for three years a clerk in Syvert Thorolfsson's warehouse.
While not tall he was neither stunted nor crippled, and easily kept pace

with Thorolf. As he set out the silver-bound horn cups to drink skal[1]
with his friend in his own lodging, the croak and sputter of German talk
sounded in the street below.
"Behold a new Bergen," observed Nils whimsically. "Let us drink to
the founding of a new Iceland. Did you go to Greenland?"
"We touched at Kakortok with letters for the Bishop. The people are
sick and savage with fighting against the Skroelings."
"Now," said Nils, rubbing his long nose, "it is odd that you say that, for
I was just going to tell you some news. The King has given Paul
Knutson leave to raise a company to fight against the Skroelings in
Greenland--and parts beyond. He sails in a month."
"I wish I had known of it."
"I thought you would say that. This is between us two and the candle,
but Anders Amundson is going, and I am going, and you may go if you
will."
Thorolf's gray eyes flamed. "What is Knutson like?"
"Well, they may call him Chevalier, but he has the old Viking way with
him. I said that I had a friend who had long wished to lay his bones in a
strange land, and he answered, 'If your friend sails with me I would
prefer to have him bring his bones home again.' He kept a place for
you."
Three weeks later Thorolf, looking backward as the Rotge, (little auk or
sea-king) stood out to sea, saw the familiar outline of Snaehatten
against the sunrise and wondered when he should see it again. Like a
questing raven his mind returned to the summer spent at the saeter, and
recalled that dark saying of the Wind-wife,--
"In the land of Klooskap shall you be Klooskap's guest."
The galley[2] rode the waves with the bold freedom of her kind. Her

keel was carved out of a single great tree. Her seasoned oaken timbers,
overlapping, were riveted together by iron bolts, with the round heads
outside. Where a timber touched a rib, a strip was cut out on each side,
forming a block through which a hole was bored. Another hole was
bored in the rib to match and a rope twisted of the inner bark of the
linden was put through both holes and knotted. In surf or heavy sea,
this construction gave the craft a supple strength. Calking was done
with woolen cloth steeped in pitch. The mast, of a chosen trunk of fir,
was set upright in a log with ends shaped like a fishtail. The long
oarlike rudder was on the board or side of the ship to the right of the
stern, called the starboard or steerboard. The lading was done on the
opposite side, the larboard or ladderboard. There were ten oars to a side,
and a single large triangular sail.
Long and narrow, hardly ten feet above the water-line at her lowest, her
curved prow glancing over the waves like the head of a swimming
snake, she was no more like the tumbling cargo-ships than a shark is
like a porpoise. When they were two days out, Nils said to Thorolf,
"A Viking in such a galley would sail to the end of the world. By the
way, did the Skroelings in Greenland understand that language the
Wind-wife spoke?"
"I was not there long enough to find out. I once asked a man who
knows their