THE FIRST HOMELAND.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 59, 24 October 1911, Page 2

THE FIRST HOMELAND.

OITR ORIGINAL ANCESTORS. The Craft They Sailed in. The' London correspondent of the “Sydney Morning Herald” writes: — 1 have lately been amongst some or the ancestors of the Australian race ; some of the original ancestors, that is. England itself, which colonised Australia, is really only a colony ol another land which still exists. 1 believe there are old Scotish poems in which the old English writer speaks of quite different country—a low-lying, bleak island fringed country, * on the Continent ol Europe, across the sea—as the home country, just as wo in Australia speak of the British Isles to-day. That must have been at the same time when they still talked practically the same English as certain other lowlands up on the Baltic coast. Indeed the whole of that north-west epast of Europe, was busy 'moving then, and perhaps some, of the only half-settled families in Scotland or .England would still go sailing off at. times, the same as their kinsmen from across the sea, on pillaging voyages down the coast pf Africa, or around into the Mediterranean.,, . H In a museum in Copenhagen a few days since we Saw, as any Australian who passes that way can see, the figures of two of the ancestors of Australians—a man and a woman—clothed exactly as they were some 2000 years ago—long before they even thought of colonising the British Islands ; and in Christiania, in a shed behind the University, the other day we saw the actual remains of one of the ships in which these’ fierce old seamen carried on their explorations, crossed the sea to colonise England, Scotland, Tarts of Ireland,’ Normandy, and Southern .Italy, and carried terror and death quite impartially along all the coasts ,of; Europe, and amongst their own/ earlier -colonists in Britain. ■ i i The Ship of our Fathers. It is a ship in which some of the Vikings once sailed. It is only preservecT becausb some • forgotten chief was buried in it. They know nothing about the chief—there was no history in those ! days. All they know is that on the ocean side of the fiord on which Christiania lies, about 100 miles down from Christiania, near the farmhouses of Gokstad, not far from the coast, there had from time immemorial existed a nirge mound known throughout the district as the King’s Heap (Kong’s hangen). There was no history of it, except a tradition that a king was buried there with all his treasures. It was an old, old fable, came down from goodnes knows when, but the people of the neighbourhood in 1880 thought that it might be a good speculation to dig the mound tip to see if any treasure was left: Fortunately they were stopped from doing so by order of the Antiquarian Society of Norway, which apparently, by the good laws of that country, had some power’ to stop them. The Antiquarian Society did the excavation very carefully itself. They had' scarcely, begun to dig when they came upon what was clearly the woodwork of a complete ship. The old tradition, that had been told to generations of children all these years, had boon true enough. A king had been buried there. The true story must have been handed down amongst the farmhouses from father to son for 'century after century from the actual time when tho little crowd—women with their long plaited hair, flaxened-htured men, and children with their swathed and bandaged leg-wear—stood ’ around and watched the ceremony , in tho. (lays, whOA Alfred Was ’’just; turning ’the scales against tho plundering Danes in England. The last relic of that tradition ‘ Still lingered "in the nineteenth century. They had buried tins chief here by the coast, with his treasure, sure enough. They had buried him in his ship. We saw that ship a few days ago. Wo were expecting to see something roughly shaped, bulky, clumsily fitted with a few rough What wo saw was a long, lightlybuilt galley, as , graceful as a swan, shaped to lines as delicate as those of tho P. and O. liner at Port Macquarie. The thin bow curved away at a delicate angle, bluffed out gradually above, and curved in lightly beneath, until the bottom amidships was almost as flat as that of a modern steamship. There was no clumsy, blunt-ended stern—the same delicate lines as those at the bow swept up to the point of' the stern as clearly as in a Manly ferry boat. The light planking on the sides was studded regularly with big flat-headed iron nails—the joints were planed down so as to be barely noticeable; the stern-post was finished off along all its length with a groove and bevelling as neat as a dining-room table. , THE OFFICERS’ BEDSTEADS. There ’ were the bed-steads of the ship’s officers, five of them— very like, a low wooden bed of these days, with short turned bed-posts, made so that they could be taken to peices and stowed in the hold. There were ■the ithrcc ship’s boats—or . rather peices of them—l3ft. 17ft, and 23ft long; the biggest must have been nearly a third as long as ;the ship herself, .1 suppose they kept her either,'towingi behind or turne.d upside .down afong. the deck. The boats were shaped exactly like the ship—-double-ended,■ like any modern Norwegian rowing boat. But they all had rudders like‘the big boat. The big ship herself—she was 75ft long and 17ft wide—has her rudder still fixed. It was not hinged on the stern as rudders afterwards were but on the right-hand side of the ship over the counter; a little way from the stern. It was hinged by a thick rope to a couple of big wooden buttons on the outside of the ship. The rudder itself was a stout dumpy oar, with a very big, thick blade; the modern rudder is really the same thing only i little more developed. They learned to stick them on to the stern of the .mat a few centuries later, but at this time they wove only about half way on their development from the oar stage although there was alreadya tiller on this one—the tiller pointed athwart the boat instead of fore and .’fix At this time the rudders were always on the . right hand side of every ooat—l suppose where a man could work them with his right hand. And that was why they called tho right -.ide of a ship the “steerb'oard” or starboard—tho word comes direct to us from the time of the Vikings only we have long forgotten its old meanmfS' THE FIRST PORT-HOLE Down the centre of the ship, aft, of Llie mast, exactly as you may find in modern yacht to-day are a couple >f raised brackets on which to place spars-—and there are the spars still resting on them. When-the ship was •• liling they must have heeled over a n't at times—so they closed tho var-holos with wooden ports. There •i"’ the openings for the oars in the third plank from tho top of the ships ..stlc —it holes along each side. As '.on see them to this day some of the ports are closed with wooden shutters and others are open. They are round holes (miniatures of the modern porthole. of which 1 suppose they are

really the groat grandfathers), hut with a small slit running out of the top of each of them like the tail of a capital Q inverted. That slit was for allowing the blade of the oar to pass through from inside the ship whenever the order came to out-oars.

And there, laid out beside the ship are tho oars exactly the modern shape. The same ridge runs down the centre of the blade; the end of tho handle is fined off in exactly the surge manner. Of course they are very long—more like the sweeps of a barge than a boat’s oar, 17 ft to 181 ft. But they are lighter than modern sweeps, with much smaller blades, and made of spruce. There is no question that each of them was used by one man only. But one would say ho was a big man. Siie was a handsome ship no question. The two upper planks in her tion. The two upper plunks in her sides—the bulwarks—are slightly tumblohomo, like the sides of a modern battleship. And along these bulwarks on the port Side near tho stern there are still fixed—each one half overlapping the next, so as to make a row along the bulwarks—four round shields. One had often seen them arranged so in pictures. There were evidently a row of them along each bulwark originally, for many more shields were found lying along either side of the ship. But most of the bulwarks had fallen in. The shields had big iron bosses in the centre to protect the man’s hand that held them, and they were originally painted alternately yellow and black.

You often see pictures of Viking ships with these shields along their sides, at the same time when all their oars arc working not to mention the sail. In this ship at any rate the oars : could not have been used when the shields were fixed, because the’ shields we saw wore covering up portholes for the oars. They were probably fixed so as an ornament on ceremonial occasions.

And that was how they came to he put there this last time, when the old chief was laid on a special bed inside a sort of strong lean-to of timbers built up in the centre of his ship The ship had before this been floated up to the beach; and then dragged up the shore by a team of the chief’s own horses, and embedded in potter’s lay, which was the reason why it was so perfectly preserved. Then, with his chief’s treasures around him, the harness of his horses, his richest cloak, his precious weapons, and the rare bird—a peacock—which ho had brought home from some long cruise down to Spain or the Mediterranean, the old warrior was buried beneath a mound of earth heaped high over the top of his ship, and the chamber by the mast, in which he lay. I PLUNDERED. ' The antiquaries did not find the treasure. Sotnobody had been there before them in search of that. Long ago when the story of the burial was still fairly fresh, someone, some towhaired outlaw with a friend or two, that cared as little for dead men as living, had come along, probably in the night, and cut straight down into the chamber where the dead man lay all these years in the dark, with his cloak and his gold weapons and drinking cups, and bronze and leaden horse harness around him. It must have been in the days when the people in the neighbourhood could still remember under what part of the mound the treasure chamber lay, because the robbers were in no doubt. You can see the big hole they made right through the port side of the ship, as big as a door, straight into the chamber in which they had left the old chief on Ids bed of state, perhaps a hundred years or two before. And when the antiquarians opened it up a thousand years later they found the dishevelled chamber just as the robbers left it. There were the bones of a very tall, big man, a man getting on in years at the time of his death ; and, in a confused heap, where they had been thrown by plunderers in the hurry to get away with all that was valuable, were a few scraps of goldembroidered silk, a shred of dark \yoollen cloak, a leather purse, a few harness ornaments of gilded bronze, and load thrown aside as worthless. There was still the (red—somewhat different from the others they found in the ship—on which tire old chief had been laid; and some of the feathers of the beloved peacock.