The next method which Ethelred had recourse to, was to lay an oppressive tax upon the land; every 310 hides of land was assessed to build one vessel, and every eight hides to furnish a helmet and breastplate. Thus a naval force was raised which consisted of seven hundred and eighty-five ships, together with armour for 30,450 men. This fleet assembled at Sandwich. But treason and misfortune seem now to have dogged every step which the Saxons took. Wulfnoth, who was appointed one of the commanders, carried off twenty ships, and set up pirate. Brihtric, another leader, pursued him with eighty vessels, part of which the tempest wrecked, while the remainder fell into the hands of the traitor and pirate, Wulfnoth, and he burnt them. Such events as these extinguished the last ray of hope that dimly gleamed upon the disheartened Saxons. The Danes had now only to command and receive. Sixteen counties were at once given up to them, together with the sum of £48,000. Ethelred was now king of only a portion of England; every day the people began to secede from him, and to shelter themselves under the sovereignty of the king of Denmark. It would only be a dry and wearisome catalogue of names, to run over the roll of cities, as they one after another, opened their gates to the Danish king. London remained faithful to the last, and it was not until Ethelred fled to the isle of Wight, and afterwards to Normandy, where he was kindly received by the duke, whose daughter he had married, that the metropolis of England acknowledged Swein as its sovereign, for the Saxons had at last become weary of being plundered by the Danes, and of the oppressive taxes which they had been constantly called upon to pay to their own king; so that they sat down sternly with folded arms, under a new sovereignty, conscious that it could not be worse than the old. Swein, however, did not survive long to wear his regal honours, but died the year after his elevation to the English throne. Where the ancient town of Gainsborough looks down upon the silver Trent, that goes murmuring for miles through the still wild marshes of Lincolnshire, did Swein, the king of Denmark and of England, breathe his last; and a majestic pile of ruins, yet in parts inhabited, stands upon the site of the Mercian castle in which he died. After the death of Swein, the Danish population of England chose his son Canute, or Knut, as their sovereign; while the Saxon nobles sent messengers over to Normandy, offering to restore the crown to Ethelred, if he would "govern them more righteously than he had done before." The king dispatched his son Edmund with the necessary pledges, demanding in return that they should hold every Danish king an outlaw, who should declare himself monarch of England; to this they consented, and having pledged himself "to amend all that had been complained of," Ethelred, the Unready, returned to England.