In the year 15 A.D. we learn from Tacitus[34] that Germanicus had built near the mouth of the river Rhine a thousand ships with sharp bows so as to be able to resist better the waves. Some had flat bottoms to enable them to take the ground with impunity. Some had a steering apparatus at both bow and stern in order that thereby they could be rowed in either direction. Many were decked for the accommodation of throwing machines. They were equally useful as rowing and sailing ships, and just as in the mediæval times ships were built with towering decks for “majesty and terror of the enemy,” so as early as this period these vessels were imposing as to their size whilst inspiring confidence to their own soldiery. Good serviceable ships as they were, yet after defeating the Cherusci at the mouth of the Ems they were shipwrecked in a storm although the wind blew from the south. It is only fair to add, however, that the ancients, especially the Romans, were wont to build their vessels very quickly[35] and consequently they erred, no doubt, in constructing them too slightly. The Saxons who, after the death of Alexander the Great, came to the mouth of the Elbe and subjugated the Thuringians, and who are said to have possessed the art of tacking, already referred to, had such light vessels as belonged to the stone age. They were wonderfully light, made out of willows and covered with skins, but had a keel of knotty oak; yet these daring navigators, without compass or chart, and with but a feeble knowledge of the stars, managed to find their way to the Orkneys. We pass now from the English Channel and the Rhine to consider that land which has given birth to a long line of robust, vigorous ships and men, who after the Phœnicians are the finest race of seamen that ever sailed a sea. A little clumsy like their ships the Scandinavians have always throughout history stood for manliness and strength. And if we were right when we submitted that a nation’s character exhibits itself in a most marked degree in its ships, surely of no people could this remark be made with greater truth than concerning the inhabitants of that Northern peninsula who, in the early days of our own country, harassed our forefathers beyond all endurance, but left behind to us the heritage of a love of the sea.[36] There is in the Viking ship and its descendants not so much beauty as nobility, not prettiness but power. The first mention of these Northerners is by Tacitus[37] who refers to them as the Suiones. (Tacitus died A.D. 108.) As Cæsar was struck by the difference between the Roman ships and those of the Veneti, so Tacitus remarks that the ships of the Suiones differ from the Romans’, too. Although these were not sailing ships—_nec velis ministrantur_—yet they were of the same design as those which were fitted with mast and sail. Double-ended, they could easily be beached and in battle could the more rapidly manœuvre ahead or astern.