Well worth attention would be those very boats that first explored the wild fjords of the storied North, that pushed their unwelcome dragon-prows into every bay and broad river of Europe from end to end, that caused even the great Charles to weep, that added a petition to the Litany of the Church, that formed the navies on whose power were built kingdoms in Sicily and Russia, in Normandy and amidst the British Isles, that centuries before the days of Columbus sailed through ice-laden seas to the well-favoured American shore. Here they are! Put together with skill and preserved with care, they stand in sheds that form part of the University Museum. That ships will be required beyond the grave to sail on undiscovered seas is the simple opinion of many unsophisticated branches of mankind. The Chinese send vessels to the illustrious dead by burning them on earth. Probably with the same idea the ancient Norse buried them in their barrows or howes. The ship on which a viking had sailed in life became his coffin after death. Thus simply does the _Heimskringla_ in the _Story of Hakon the Good_ describe such burials. "So King Hakon let take all the ships of Eric's sons which had been beached, and let draw them up aland. There King Hakon let lay Egil Woolsark in a ship, and all those of his folk with him who were fallen, and let heap over them stones and earth. Then King Hakon let set up yet more ships, and bear them to the field of battle; and one may see the mounds to-day."[45] Such a king's howe was heaped up long ago at Gogstad on Sandefjord, where to-day is a prosperous little watering-place, hard by the mouth of the seaway by which Christiania is gained. Here in 1880 a well-preserved viking ship was brought to light and in due course it was reverently deposited in the Museum of the University at the Capital. Its lines are graceful and it is of very shallow draught. The size is quite considerable, just seventy-eight feet from end to end. It is framed with a heavy keel and rather light ribs; the planks are extremely neatly cut and carefully riveted together with iron nails and square washers. It must have possessed some suppleness, which was probably an advantage in a stormy sea. The two ends are very much alike, but by the stern is a steering-board, like a great oar, fixed loosely on the side that we still know as the starboard. Through the third plank from the top are pierced rowlocks and along the gunwale are ranged the big-bossed shields by which the Northmen sought to ward off blows. They are round, not large, and painted yellow and black. Compared with those of Chinese junks or Arab dhows, the lines of the viking vessel are strikingly modern in character: this is much less surprising than it otherwise would be when it is recollected that the Bronze Age sculptures on the Scandinavian rocks prove that boats of considerable dimensions had been used by the ancestors of the builders for something like a thousand years.