Let us ask ourselves what is our idea of a ship. However we express this in words, it will be vastly different from the idea of a ship that possessed the minds of those early inhabitants of Holderness of whom we read in Chapter III. Theirs was that of a tree-trunk hollowed out partly by fire and partly by hand labour with implements of flint, until it would balance itself on the water, and could be pushed along by its occupants with some sort of paddle. Such were the ships that men first used on the Humber. Not long ago one of them was found buried six feet below the surface of the ground at Brigg in North Lincolnshire. At a time when the river Ancholme spread widely over the surrounding land, this boat had been deserted on the river bank, and as years went by it sank into the mud of which the bank was composed. Then the river gradually silted up, so that what had once been a wide expanse of water became merely a narrow water-channel. This ancient ‘dug-out’ is now one of the treasures of the Hull Museum. It has been constructed of the trunk of an oak tree, split lengthwise, and is nearly forty-eight feet long from stem to stern. Its width is from four to five feet, and its depth roughly two feet six inches. There is probably no oak tree growing in our country that would be tall enough to make a similar boat of equal length. The stern board of the boat is a separate piece of timber, fitted into a groove along each side; and originally the sides were bound across with leathern thongs to keep the board in position. [Illustration: AN ANCIENT ‘DUG-OUT’ FOUND IN NORTH LINCOLNSHIRE.] Think of the immense amount of labour that the making of this early ‘ship of the Humber’ cost. The patience that its makers must have displayed would put some of us to utter shame in our frantic haste to finish a thing in the shortest possible space of time after its beginning. * * * * * Long after the days of the builders of this boat, the Romans and the Angles came to our shores. With them the knowledge of shipbuilding had greatly increased, and their ships were propelled with both oars and sails. Later again came the Northmen, against whose attacks the Angles prayed in vain. A true sea-faring race were these Vikings of old, and they could boast, as their lineal descendants in Norway boast to-day, that they possessed more ships than any other nation in the world. _Long-ships_ was the name given to the Northmen’s ships of war, they being thus distinguished from the wider and clumsier merchant ships. But the Northmen were a poetic race, and to a Viking his ship was a ‘black horse of the sea,’ a ‘deer of the surf’ or a ‘raven of the wind.’