The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Read Online Free PDF Page A

very worst can happen,” writes Vinner. The ship can sail down. “The ship can plunge sideways from a wave-top down into the valley in front, and then be filled with water by the wave from which it has fallen.” To slow their speed, Vinner and the Saga Siglar crew first tried to “goosewing” the sail, tying up the center of the broad square of wool so that only two small triangles could catch the wind. That failing, they took the sail down altogether. Under a bare pole, Saga Siglar scudded before the wind for ten hours at an average speed of 8.4 knots—as opposed to the 7.5-knot average (and 10.7 maximum) that Gunnar Marel Eggertsson held Gaia to during what he thought was a fast two-and-a-half-day sail between the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Saga Siglar, writes Vinner, “was a beautifully safe ship.... She carried her sail well, rose well to the waves, and her movements were easy. Above all, however, she was dry.” Even running from the hurricane, she took on no more water “than the crew could manage to pump out again.” In case anyone objected that Vikings didn’t
have
pumps, he added, “A frightened man with a bailer is quicker than even the best pump.” Yet in 1992, off the coast of Spain, this beautifully safe ship sank.
    Gudrid’s ship did not sink. But when the wind let them go, the saga says, no one on board knew where they were. They had been blown off course.
    To Viking poets, the wind was the neigher, the wailer, the whistler, the coldly dressed, the roaring traveler, the squally one, the wolf of the sail, the waverer, the never silent. The sky was the weaver of winds. The sea was the ring of the island, the house of sands and seaweeds and skerries, land of fish, land of ice, and land of sailing wind. The best ship imaginable, owned by the god Odin, caught a fair wind whenever its sail was hoisted. (It could also be folded up and kept in the god’s pocket for convenience.) Being blown off course was so common that the Vikings had a word for it:
hafvilla,
literally “bewildered by the sea,” or as we might say today, “at sea.” But being blown off course presupposes the Vikings could
set
a course. How, without a compass or a clock, did Thorstein and Gudrid ever expect to know where they were?
    To sail safely down the coast of Norway, according to Arne Emil Christensen, you needed only to recall your fairy tales. “The landmarks, mainly characteristic mountains,” he writes, “are featured in fairy tales that explain them as petrified trolls and giants, who in the old days had their quarrels and friendships. The stories told on board not only passed the time but instructed young crewmen in the art of navigation: Such tales helped the sailors remember the landmarks.”
    Between Norway and Greenland, landmarks are scant. A manuscript written by an Icelander who traveled frequently to Norway in the 1300s describes the voyage from Hennoya, on the coast north of Bergen, to Hvarf, the southernmost tip of Greenland (the name means “Turning Point”), in this way: “Hvarf is reached by sailing due west from Hennoya in Norway, and then one will have sailed to the north of Shetland so that it can only be seen if there is good visibility at sea, and to the south of the Faroes, so that the sea is halfway up the slopes, and to the south of Iceland so that they can see its birds and whales.”
    Islands, mountains, birds, and whales. As Christensen writes, “No mention of tools used for navigation can be found in the text; apparently the sailor had to learn how to use nature as a guide.” Islands are often topped by banks of cumulus clouds. Mountains are magnified by mirages, common in the far north where the sea is coldest. Auks and gannets fly up to a hundred miles out to sea each morning; if they have fish in their beaks, you can follow them back to land, for they are returning to feed their nestlings. Whales of some kinds, like humpbacks, haunt the shallower water close to land; others stay in the