The Scandinavians to this day remain, perhaps, the hardiest race of sailors to be found anywhere. They have penetrated to the neighbourhood of both poles, and they put to sea in such leaky, ill-found merchant ships year after year, that it makes you nervous to think of them battling against a breeze of wind in craft which have been condemned by most other nationalities. Even in the Viking days they were great seamen, without fear, unfaltering. But, like the South Europeans, they used to leave the sea alone during the winter, hauling their ships by rollers up the beach in the autumn, and then make them snug in their shed till the spring tempted them again to fit out. But Harald Hairfair is recorded as having set the example of remaining all winter afloat in his warships, a proceeding which was quite contrary to the prevailing custom. But there were other times when it was fortunate that this type of ship could be moved about so easily. For example, when King Harald had learnt that King Svein “was come before the mouth of the firth with a great host of ships,” the former rowed his vessels in the evening to a narrow slip, and when it became dark he had the vessels unloaded and dragged them over the low land-neck before daybreak, and had “arrayed” the ships again, so that he was able to sail away to the nor’ard past Jutland, and thus escape out of the Danes’ hands. And there are occasions on record when the Vikings dragged their ships for two miles over ice. They loved their ships, these men of the biting north, and even in the time of personal peril dreaded that their craft should fall into the hands of the enemy. When Sigurd was being pursued by King Ingi he was careful to scuttle his ship before abandoning her. He “hewed off stem and stern of his ship, and sheared rifts therein and sank it in the innermost Ægis-firth.” So, too, they would treat an enemy’s ship. Thus Erling Askew “fared away from the land,” “arrayed them for a Jerusalem-faring and fared west over sea to Orkney,” and so to the Mediterranean, where they lighted upon a dromon and attacked her by cutting rifts in her side below, as well as above, the water-mark--“hewed windows” in her, as the old Saga realistically has it.