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Today’s post is a follow-up…a follow-up to the Viking age! (and, um, also to this Ferrebeekeeper post). On September 17th, the world’s largest Viking ship, the Draken Harald Harfagre, sailed into New York Harbor and tied up at the North Cove Marina in southern Manhattan. The ship has sailed across the Atlantic from Norway where it was made by master boatwrights in the best approximation of ancient methods. Doughty and fearless sailors have navigated the craft through horrible northern seas filled with giant whales, icebergs, volcanoes, Greenland, and other sundry hazards. When it reached Vinland…er North America, the boat sailed up the Saint Lawrence Seaway, toured the Great Lakes, and now it has come to New York City by traveling through the canals and down the Hudson.
You can see the magnificent vessel for $10.00 (or for $5.00 if you are a child) until this coming Sunday (the schedule and details are here). Don’t delay! Before you know it the Viking age will be gone forever…
Strange Ocean World (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil on paper)
Well…it was another day that got away. What with work and dinner and the grind, I failed to write about beaked whales. Don’t worry: those magnificent diving experts cannot escape our pen forever, but, in the interim, we must fall back on my daily doodle book (which Ferrebeekeeper cognoscenti know is a little moleskine sketch book that I carry around and draw in during my spare time). I have a big sarcophagus-shaped pencil tin too—which is full of colored pencils and markers to bring my drawings to life. The first sketch however (above) only required one “Blue Denim” colored pencil. It’s a little unclear, but I think it is a picture of the future oceans filled with bathyspheres, synthetic ocean life (to replace the fish we are recklessly killing off), and ships driven by fanciful propulsion. Synthetic beings and post-humans fly through the weird clouds of this strange ocean world. In fact, maybe it’s not Earth at all, but somewhere else entirely—an ocean world of oddly familiar alien marvels.
City with Glowing Crystal (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink on paper)
Next is another troubling pastiche of nature and technology. A happy monster ambles by a shambling city while a gambling demon tosses dice at a magic crystal. Reptiles and weeds fill up the foreground as strange elongated opossums creep in from the sides. It’s just like now! This might as well be a CNN photo about the 2016 election. This image may need to be colored in. What do you think?
Succulent Fruit (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, Colored Pencil and Ink on paper)
Finally, thanks to enthusiastic comments from my favorite readers, I included more fruit. One of my tasks at my new day job is overseeing the fruit supplies for a big office full of desk jockeys who spend all day looking at important documents. Because of ancient precedent, almost all of the fruit is bananas, and my colleagues beg piteously for different fruit. I have provided their wants…in this fantasy drawing which shows a succulent world of juices, seeds, and glowing tutti-fruit color. It could also be that there is a statement here about our world of agriculture, selective breeding, transgenic alteration, and over-consumption…or possibly it is just a fun doodle I made at lunchtime. As always, thanks for looking at my little artworks. I treasure everybody’s comments (though I realize I have been slower than usual to respond). Let’s keep enjoying the rest of summer. I’ll keep drawing (and the post about beaked whales will appear soon). Cheers!
Roman Liburnian
The early days of the Roman Empire were marked by huge naval battles. The First Punic war saw great fleets of polyremes battling for the Mediterranean and that tradition continued as Rome grew and conquered the Mediterranean and fought civil wars right up until the battle of Actium left one man in control of the entire sea. Thereafter, in the days of Empire, giant ships were no longer needed for dealing with pirates or policing sea lanes. The navy of the later Roman Empire consisted principally of liburnians (also known as liburna), small light galleys which were not so swift and giant as the monstrous oared ships of the Republic.
Liburnians of the Danube fleet during Trajan’s Dacian Wars (Bas Relief from Trajan’s column, 118 AD)
Liburnians were named for, um, the Liburnians an Illyrian tribe inhabiting the Adriatic coast of Greece (what is today Croatia). The Liburnians were pirates and sea raiders. When the Macedonians conquered Liburnia, the military men were impressed by the lightness, maneuverability, and deadliness of the Liburnian vessels, so they made them part of the navy. Later, in the second half of the first century BC, Rome conquered the Hellenic world and took up this naval design (as well as a huge host of other Greek concepts).
Roman Liburna
The original liburnian boat had a single bench of 25 oars on each side. The Romans refined altered this design to feature dual rows of oarsmen pulling 18 oars per side. A liburnian was probably about 31 meters (100 ft long) and 5 meters (16 feet wide) wide with a draft of a meter (3 feet). The Romans also added a prow for ramming other boats.
The liburnian served with distinction for centuries in the navies of the golden age empire and afterwards. The boats were not used only for military missions but also for cargo and passenger transport. They saw use on the great rivers as well as on the sea. For many more centuries it liburnians were the backbone of the Byzantine navy as well, until the changing ideas of warfare caused the craft to evolve into the Byzantine dromons and the war galleys of the middle ages.
The largest body of fresh water in China is Lake Poyang in Jianxi Province. The size of the lake fluctuates tremendously between the wet season when the lake’s surface area is 4400 square kilometers and the dry season when it shrinks down to 1000 square kilometers. So every year Lake Poyang shrinks from being the size of Utah’s Great Salk Lake into being the size of Lake Champlain. Lake Poyang is the southern wintering ground of a huge number of migratory birds. It is also the site of what was reputedly the world’s largest naval battle. The north side of the lake is treacherous to navigate and it is said that more than 100 ships have vanished there in the past hundred years. There is a temple on the northern shore of the lake named Laoye Miao (temple of the Old Fellow) and locals call the waters near the temple the “death area” and the “demon horns” because so many ships are lost in that area.
Laoye Miao Temple
Lake Poyang did not always exist. In 400 AD it was an inhabited plain along the Gan River, however when the Yangtze River switched courses the entire plain flooded. Located halfway along the Yangtze, the lake has great strategic importance.
In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Yuan dynasty had lost control of China. Various groups of rebels fought each other to seize the throne of heaven. By summer of 1363 AD there were two main contenders for control of China, Zhu Yuanzhang, the charismatic but ugly leader of the red turbans, and Chen Youliang, the king of Duhan which controlled the most powerful fleet on the Yantze. The former had a smaller force of maneuverable ships while the latter had greater numbers of men (Chen’s navy was believed to have had more than 600,000 men) and a large number of huge tower boats—literal floating fortresses. The total number of combatants on the lake is reckoned to have numbered over 850,000 men.
Artist’s Conception of the Battle of Lake Poyang
Unfortunately for Chen Youliang, the battle started as the lake began to dry out. To prevent the dauntless troops of Zhu Yuanzhang from scaling the tower boats with hooks and ladders, Chen ordered his boats to hold close formation, but this turned out to be ruinous since Zhu launched fire boats into the consolidated line. Hundreds of thousands of sailors died in the horrible fiery battle, and Zhu Yuangzhang went on to found the Ming dynasty, one of China’s greatest dynasties.
Over the centuries, the lake itself kept claiming ships at an astonishing rate. Some of the stories are quite colorful. In 1945 a Japanese ship loaded with plundered treasure sank almost instantly, drowning all 200 sailors and a large treasure. A team of Japanese divers attempted to salvage the wreck but all the divers drowned except for the expedition leader who went permanently insane. After the war, several members of an American team also drowned. On just one day, August 3rd, 1985, thirteen ships foundered or sank.
Some people have tried to ascertain what makes the lake so treacherous. Some experts believe that a huge sunken sandbank tends to cause whirlpools and unexpected currents. Local legend is more inventive. According to myth, an immense capricious turtle lives beneath the lake. Although the turtle often sinks ships, he can also be benevolent. The story of how the Laoye Miao temple came to be built is that the turtle intervened in the great naval battle of 1368 by directly rescuing Zhu Yuangzhang. When Zhu took the title of Hongwu emperor he returned and built the temple to the ancient turtle.
Lake Poyang is drying out.
Lake Poyang
This blog has featured replicas of two ancient sailing ships–the Greek trireme Olympias and the Norwegian Viking ship Dragon King Harald—however the prettiest modern replica of an ancient ship is a reconstruction of a much older vessel. The ship Min of the Desert was hand built by 4 men and 2 teenage boys in the modern Hamdi Lahma & Brothers shipyard in Rashid, Egypt (which was called Rosetta in classical times). The builders used traditional tools and original techniques to craft the Min after a sea-going Egyptian trade ship from 3500 years ago.
Archaeologists know a great deal about the boats which sailed the Nile–since they have the actual ships (which were preserved in tombs in order that Pharaohs could sail in the next world). However sea-faring ships were not preserved in the same way and only trace evidence from underwater archaeological sights survives. To build the Min, the modern shipwrights looked to river ships from tombs for technique, but they looked at ancient Egyptian art for a design. A 3,500-year-old bas relief from the pharaoh Hatshepsut ‘s funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri near Thebes, provided the basic design for the Min of the Desert.
Bas-relief from the temple of Hatshepsut
The ships pictured on the bas relief were trade ships which participated in Hatshepsut ‘s trade expedition to Punt, which took place in the ninth year of her reign (Hatshepsut was a lady pharaoh who lived in the 15th century B.C. and reigned as the fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty). From the time of the old kingdom onward, Egyptians had launched expeditions to the land of Punt, a kingdom rich in gold, frankincense, myrrh, and exotic timber. Numerous ancient Egyptian sources mention Punt (which was a trade destination for the Egyptians for over a thousand years) but none actually mention where it is—apparently everyone back then just knew. The actual location has eluded Egyptologists for 150 years. To get to Punt, ships were carried in pieces across the desert to the Red Sea port of Saww. Then the vessels sailed on the Red Sea…to where? Modern day Somalia and Arabia are the best guesses, but the issue remains in doubt.
Detail of Bas Relief of Voyage to Punt (from the temple of Hatshepsut)
When completed Min of the Desert measured 20 meters (66 ft) long and nearly 5 meters (16 ft) wide with a cargo capacity of about 17 tons. Held together entirely by mortise-and-tenon joints, the ship proved to be surprisingly seaworthy and fast. Sailors rowed the Min in to position to raise the sail (a labor which required substantial physical strength) and then traveled along at speeds between 5 and 9 knots. The ship handled 25 knot winds and 3 meter swells with ease. The modern sailors were surprised by the excellence of the 3500 year old ship.
Last year I wrote about the world’s fastest human powered boat, the 170 oar Hellenic navy trireme Olympias, which is scheduled to visit New York’s harbor as part of the tall ship festival this summer (July, 2012). One of my friends has even been training to crew the classical warship while it is here, so we will be returning to that story soon! In the mean time, however I have been following the somewhat related story of the traditional construction of a Viking longboat in Norway.
Dragon Harald Fairhair. Drawing by Øystein Ormbostad
Viking ships were up to three times as fast as the other ships of the time. They could be pulled entirely on the beach and they had flexible, clinker lined hulls which allowed them to conform to the waves in the manner of the serpents, dragons, and seabirds which were their emblems. Vikings used their superior ships to undertake prodigious feats of sailing. The Norse mariners sailed from North America in the west, to the far distant Sea of Azov beyond the Black Sea (and pretty much everywhere in between). Not only were the sea coasts of Europe, Central Asia, and North America accessible to Viking ships: because the vessels had such a shallow draft, they could operate on rivers which were regarded as non-navigable. From the 8th to the 11th centuries, Scandinavian sailors could appear almost anywhere to explore, trade, pillage, or hire out as mercenaries.
The Sea Stallion from Glendalough (Havhingsten fra Glendalough) is the largest replica Viking ship built to date. The ship is 29 metres long and carries 60 oarsmen, with a crew of 70 – 80.
The ship being crafted today in Haugesund (Western Norway) is based on a large greatship (storskipene) of the Norwegian coastal fleet. The boat will be christened the Dragon Harald Fairhair in honor of King Harald Fairhair (c. 850 – c. 933) who welded the petty kingdoms of Norway together as a unified nation (that’s a metaphor—he used statecraft and war to assemble his kingdom rather than actual welding). In order to make the ship as realistic as possible, traditional boatwrights have pored over classical literary sources from medieval sagas, as well as analyzing drawings, carvings, and actual period boats from wrecks and burials. The project’s website describes the completed boat
At a hundred and fourteen feet of crafted oak, twenty-seven feet on the beam, displacing seventy tons, and with a thirty-two hundred square foot sail of pure silk, this magnificent ship will indeed be worthy of a king.
The Dragon Harald Fairhair will have 25 pairs of oars. It is necessary to have at least two people on each oar to row the ship efficiently. That will give a crew of at least 100 persons, yet the craft should be able to be sailed by only twelve.
When it is finished, the Dragon King Harald, will join a veritable fleet of reconstructed Viking boats (which can be seen here at vikingstoday.com). The craft should be seaworthy in summer of 2012, but its builders anticipate spending a season experimenting with rigging and sailing techniques (since there are no actual Viking sailors left to explain how to operate a working Viking longboat.
Dragon Harald Fairhair under construction February 2012 (Arne Terje Sæther)
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