Page 248 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1510-1440 b.c.] The Amber Route 209
of England and back. But the skin boats had gone out of use

when the adzes of imported flint had made it possible to fashion
planks and massive keelsons for wooden fishing boats. And now
with the modern bronze tools a new era of shipbuilding had
opened for Scandinavia, and the sailors need no longer take serv­
ice in foreign vessels as they had done for so long as memory

went back.
Where there are sailors and cargoes, said the old hands

sagely, there will be ships. And sure enough from all the fjords
of Scandinavia vessels were now taking to water, and already
more than half the trade goods of the northern waters were car­
ried in Scandinavian bottoms. And trade was clearly booming,
and the shippers from the Swedish and Danish and Norwegian

coasts were looking beyond the North Sea and the Baltic and the
northern rivers.
For the first few seasons the ship kept to known waters and
to short hauls. Its first voyage, admittedly, went to south Eng­
land, where there was a good market for the collected store of

amber. There the Wessex Downlands were ruled by proudly
independent chieftains, rich in flocks and herds, magnificently
armed and accoutred in their abundant native bronze, and
adorned with massive throatbands of Irish gold. They were not
too proud to trade, though, for trading was in their blood from

distant southern ancestors, and here, where amber was scarce
and bronze abundant, the Swedes were delighted to find that
prices were much more favorable than on the beaches of their
native land. The ship returned with a cargo of bronze and wool
which almost paid, in one voyage, the cost of building the ship.
But several of the crew did not return with the ship, lured in­

stead by a short-handed Breton skipper bound for Spain.
For two or three years thereafter the ship stuck to the coastal
trade, carrying flint from Denmark to Norway, and corn and
hides and woolen goods and furs from port to port along the

Scandinavian coast. They made one voyage up the Elbe to the
limit of navigation in central Germany. Their object again was
bronze, for in Germany there were now plentiful supplies, pro­
duced from the mines in Austria and the Carpathians. There they
found a people who, though they worshipped recognizably the