But once the voyage of Columbus had taught Europe how little it really knew of the world there came the insistent demand for better ships, and as ships had by this time reached the point where far the greater part were propelled by sails alone, the demand for the perfection of ships resulted in the perfection of sails as well as the perfection of hulls. England and Holland, together with the other northern European countries, are largely responsible for this improvement, although France for many years built the finest ships that sailed the seas. Down to the 14th Century the ships of northern Europe showed strongly the Scandinavian influence. The Vikings had developed ships similar in shape to the whaleboats of to-day. They were double-ended affairs, long, low, narrow, and fast, propelled largely by oars, but carrying, generally, one large square sail set about amidships on a sturdy mast. [Illustration: A VIKING SHIP _These ships were developed by the Norse sea rovers for use in war, and as the seas they sailed were generally rough their ships had to be seaworthy. The result was a type that still leaves its mark. The seaworthy whaleboats of to-day are very similar in shape._ ] In these ships the Norsemen regularly sailed the Baltic and the North seas, where the elements give even the ships of to-day many a vicious shaking. Yet these sturdy old pirates, for they were hardly more, ploughed their way through storm and fog, without compasses, without any method of determining their positions at sea except their instinct and what guesses they could make—measuring voyages not by miles but by days—coming, going, bent only on conquest and on pillage. Nor did they confine themselves to the more or less landlocked seas. They launched their sturdy boats from the narrow beaches of Norwegian fjords, and with sturdy backs bent to sturdy oars, and great, colourful square sails set when the wind was right, drove their ships to Scotland, to the Orkneys, the Faroes, and to Iceland, and not content with that drove on to Greenland, to Labrador, to Nova Scotia, and probably drew up their ships on the shores of the very bay that waited yet another half a thousand years ere the Pilgrims saw it from the unsteady deck of the _Mayflower_. In their open boats that tossed like flotsam among the angry waves, these hardy mariners lived. Their food must often have been hardly edible, their supplies of water hardly fit to drink, and comfort there never could have been. Wet through by boarding seas, all but unprotected from the cold of long sub-Arctic nights, or scorched by the sun in breathless summer calms, their beards caked with salt from the driving spray, or dripping moisture left there by the fogs, these heroes of the sea swung their oars for days, for weeks, perhaps for months, and feared the great Atlantic not at all.