What were these vessels like? As it happens, we really know more about them than we do of any between their time and the days of Henry VIII. For not only have we very definite details of them and their "gear" in the long "sagas" or historical and traditional poems which have come down to us, sculptured pictures of them in stone, engravings on rocks and upon arms and ornaments, but more than one of the actual Viking vessels have been dug out of the big burial-mounds where they had been hidden for centuries. For the Viking chieftain loved his ship: he lavished ornament and decoration upon it, and regarded it almost as a living thing. When, therefore, the time came for him to take the long last voyage, from which no man ever returns, it was quite natural that he should have wished to make it in the cherished "Dragon Ship" or "Long Serpent", which had so often borne him over the waves on his way to those hand-to-hand combats and harryings and plunderings in which his soul delighted. Sometimes a funeral pyre was erected on the ship herself, and with his favourite sword by his side, his shield and his helmet, the dead chieftain set out on his final voyage, his sons and followers watching the well-known long-ship sailing into the west till she, her sails, and her dead captain disappeared in clouds of fire and smoke under the sunset. Or, again, a dying sea-king would elect to be buried in his favourite ship in some spot overlooking the glassy fiord whence he had so often set out on his piratical exploits. The ship was run up on shore over the rollers which all Viking vessels carried to facilitate beaching, the body was laid amidships with his most treasured earthly possessions, a penthouse of timber was built over him, his favourite horses were killed and placed round the hull of the vessel, and the whole was buried in the depths of a huge mound, which was erected over it. [Illustration: Noah's Ark, according to a MS. of A.D. 1000 Observe the fullness and apparent capacity of the hull of the dragon-ship on which the Ark proper is erected, and compare it with that of the Nydam ship on the opposite page.]