chapter 1At SeaThey set sail in good weather. But once they were at sea, the fair winds died. They were tossed this way and that and made no headway all summer. Sickness set in.... Half their people died. The seas rose, and they were faced with danger on all sides. The Saga of Eirik the RedThe first time i saw a viking ship in the water, i was struck with the desire to stow away on it. Writers, even the normally sedate scholarly type, tend to wax effusive about Viking ships. They were unrivaled, the best and swiftest ships of their time, the swift greyhounds of the oceans, the ultimate raiding machine, a masterpiece of beauty, the most exquisite examples of sophisticated craftsmanship, a poem carved in wood. What temples were to the Greeks, wrote one expert, ships were to the Vikings. Said another, Plato may have denied the existence of ideal forms in this world, but Plato never saw a Viking ship. The story of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, however, begins with a shipwreck. As The Saga of the Greenlanders tells it, Leif Eiriksson had just spent a year in Vinland as the first Norseman to set foot in the New World, and was heading home with a ship full of timber and wine grapes. He'd had fair winds all the way and had just sighted the great ice cap when one of his crewmen admonished the young captain. Going a bit close to the wind, aren't you? Im watching my steering, said Leif. But Im watching something else, too. Don't you see it? It was a ship or a skerry. He couldn't tell which. The older man saw nothing until they came closer, then he, too, could see a wreck clinging to a bit of bare rock. Leif anchored close to the reef and sent his towboat over. He rescued fifteen people to add to his crew of thirty-five and as much of their baggage as he could fit into his already-laden ship. The wreck had been carrying house timber from Norway to the Greenland settlement; the men secured it as best they could on the rock, and the next spring Leif sent his boat out to fetch whatever could be salvaged. By then, most of the rescued fifteen had died. The only person known to have survived the journey is Gudrid. If she had ever shared my delusions of peaceful, sunny, blue-sea sailing, surrounded by a crew of handsome men, she would have lost them abruptly on the first of her eight voyages. She knew the killing force of the sea, of weeks at the mercy of the winds, of fog that froze on the sails and rigging, when hands blue with cold was not a metaphor and no land, no shelter, was in sight. She knew how fragile a Viking ship was. You can easily sail her down if you are not doing it right, Gunnar Marel Eggertsson, the captain of Gaia, told me. Gaia was a Viking-ship replica with the dual mission of spreading environmental awareness and arriving in America in 1991, one year before the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbuss discovery. From the west coast of Norway, where the boat was built and financed by the Norwegian owner of the Viking cruise-ship line, G Excerpted from The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
