Page 247 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

L15IO-I44O B.C.]
It had long been the custom for the pious to carve pictures
on the rocks. Often at the sun festivals a propitious rock surface,
one which faced southward and was close to running water
would be adorned with a carving of some phase of the ceremony

the ritual plowing or the chariot of the sun or the night boat
of the sleeping sun-god. Or the ax of the thunder-god would be
portrayed, or more mundane subjects, horsemen or warriors or
oxen or the beasts of the chase. It was known that these pictures
called down the favor of the gods, bringing fortune to the por­
trayer or the person portrayed, bringing increase to the herds

or luck in the hunt. But now everywhere appeared carvings of
the ship, some but roughly chiseled, others detailed and accu­
rate representations, all according to the skill of the artist and the
time at his disposal. Surely with so many carvings the gods
could not be unmindful of the vessel and the necessity of work­

ing actively for the success of its voyage.
With the sailing of the ship more than a score of the young
men from this obscure little village on the Swedish coast—men
who had been bom around the time when Thothmes II of Egypt
was, unknown to them and their people, waging victorious war

in the Sudan—joined the growing company of the deep-sea sail­
ors of the world. It was a cosmopolitan company, as it had always
been, and its range was the whole known world and a good dis­
tance into the unknown. Ships sailed wherever there was trade to

be done and cargoes to be acquired, and the sailors were not par­
ticular about where they hired, preferring a well-found ship and
a “lucky” captain of whatever nationality. They changed ship
at any convenient port, lugging their sea chest and their bed­
ding roll with them and making themselves understood to their
new shipmates in the bastard Cretan which was the lingua franca

of the sea.
Scandinavians had been sailors for generations. They had
fished from the coasts since before sun-worship, and the horse­
men from the east who had brought it had come to their country

hundreds of years ago. The young men had heard their grand­
fathers tell that in their day skin boats were still to be seen on
the coast and men who were old then had recalled how they
had crossed and recrossed the North Sea in them, to the coast