A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (19 page)

Several of the decorative motifs have clear Buddhist significance. Having originated in India in the first millennium
BC
, Buddhism spread along the overland and maritime trade routes to China by the second century
AD
. By the time of the Belitung wreck, Tantric Buddhism had become the official religion of the Tang emperors, and Chan Buddhism – better known as Zen from the Japanese pronunciation – was also widespread. The floral representations on the bowls include the lotus, the sacred flower of Buddhism. One bowl shows a stupa – a hemispherical place of meditation – and is decorated with left-facing swastikas, symbolising the footprints of the Buddha like the bronze mirror from the wreck. Among other pottery types from the wreck, several ‘green-splashed' bowls and cups had applied pottery medallions showing a dragon chasing a flaming pearl of enlightenment, a symbol both in Buddhism and in Taoism, the other great meditative religion of China that gained official status during the Tang Dynasty – represented also by a Changsha bowl showing the Lingzhi fungus, a Taoist symbol of immortality. Other motifs are less explicitly related to one religion or philosophy but still have meaning: stylised mountains producing clouds and vapours represent natural forces and energy; and birds, beautifully rendered on several of the bowls, may include the xiangsi'niao, the red-billed leiothrix, which always flies in pairs and takes only one mate, symbolising marital happiness and fidelity.

Several of the depictions are evidence of Chinese potters looking to western markets. Changsha ewers from the wreck have pottery appliqués showing a date palm, a tree of great economic importance in the Arab world that did not grow in China. Most intriguing are bowls with patterns that may be renderings of Kufic inscriptions from the Qur'
ā
n, created by potters who could not read or understand Arabic but had seen these inscriptions and knew that they were meaningful to Muslims. By the time of the wreck, Arab and Persian merchants were living in the Chinese capital of Chang'an and the main ports and would have brought the Qur'
ā
n with them. One of the most remarkable images on a bowl may show one of those men themselves – with curly black hair and beard, wide-set eyes and a big nose, suggesting that he was Arab or Persian and giving us a glimpse at the men who
manned the ship itself, with a number of the crew probably being of Middle Eastern origin.

Although the pottery forms in the Belitung cargo were predominantly utilitarian, their decoration makes them true works of art. In China, a distinction did not exist between ‘artist' and ‘artisan', or ‘high' and ‘low' art. Painting was one of the three arts that became known as the
sānjué
, the ‘Three Perfections', along with calligraphy and poetry, a concept that developed during the Tang period. Artistic expression and sensibility were integral to the way people lived their lives and their professional careers, with the ability to write verse for example being expected of those seeking high office. The inter-relationship between these three art forms is beautifully illustrated by the bowls from the wreck. The influence of
kuangcao
, the ‘wild cursive' script developed in the eighth century, can be seen in the brushwork of the decoration – showing spontaneity, compositional freedom and speed of execution. One bowl above all represents all three aspects of
sānjué
, a rare example of a Changsha bowl with an entire poem painted on its inner surface. There could be few more beguiling finds from a shipwreck than this, words from more than a millennium ago that raise the story told by archaeology far above the day-to-day practicalities of seafaring and trade:

How far is the southern sky in the eyes of a lone wild swan?

The chilly wind strikes terror into one's heart.

I miss my beloved who is travelling afar, beyond the Great River,

And my heart flies to the frontier morning and night.

The huge eagle flying above the ship in the woodcut from Sir Richard Burton's translation of
Sinbad the Sailor
is a roc, a legendary bird of prey in Arab and Persian mythology that may have its origin in the giant extinct eagles of the region. In Sinbad's fifth voyage, the ship is destroyed by boulders dropped by rocs after the sailors had eaten the chick in one of their eggs.

… the day grew dark and dun and the sun was hidden from us, as if some great cloud had passed over the firmament. So we raised our eyes and saw that what we took for a cloud was the roc poised between us and the sun, and it was his wings that darkened the day.

As a threat to ships, the roc can be compared in Indian and Chinese mythology to the makara, a sea-monster often depicted with the trunk of an elephant and the body of a crocodile. In the
Great Compassion Dharani Suˉ tra
, translated into Chinese by the Indian monk Bhagavaddharma in the mid-seventh century
AD
, a sailor on a ship about to be swallowed by a makara fixes his mind on the Buddha and prays to him, causing the makara to cease its attack. Remarkably, just such a scene is depicted on another Changsha bowl from the wreck, showing a makara emerging from darkness and about to engulf a ship sailing towards it. The ship may be Arab or Persian, just like the Belitung ship – possibly the earliest such depiction known. Poised between light and darkness, the image of the makara is reminiscent of its appearance in Hindu and Buddhist iconography as a gate-guardian, demarcating boundaries in space and time, between this world and the next. It can also be read as a universal narrative on shipwreck, similar to a woodcut of the
Royal Anne Galley
wreck seen later in this book – the ship moving from light to darkness, from life to death, with the makara signifying the irresistible power of nature, whimsically choosing between engulfing the ship in its jaws or letting it pass. With the cause of the Belitung wreck and the fate of the crew unknown, this image, as well as the lines of poetry on the other bowl, allow us to imagine the experiences and emotions of those whose ship went down nearly 1,200 years ago in the South Java Sea, mid-way between the great cultures of Abbasid Islam and Tang China.

This passage in Old English comes from the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, the annals of British history begun under King Alfred the Great in the late ninth century but incorporating earlier chronologies going back to the Roman period. I had done my own transcription of the chronicle as a boy and was thrilled to be able to handle the oldest extant copy, the Parker Chronicle, in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, when I was a Research Scholar of the college as a PhD student. On the yellowed vellum pages I saw the first-ever reference to the
scipu densicra monna
, the ‘ships of the Danish men', and to the activity for which they came to be known in Old English as
wicing
, or sea-raider, in the entry for 787, describing the arrival of three ships on the coast of Wessex and the murder of the local man who rode out to meet them.

This may have been the earliest appearance of Vikings on English
shores, but it was the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 that caused widespread shock and came to define the Vikings in popular imagination. The Monastery of St Cuthbert on the isle of Lindisfarne was one of the holiest in Britain, the place where the famous Lindisfarne Gospels had been created and illuminated earlier in the eighth century. Alcuin, a Northumbrian scholar in the court of Charlemagne, King of the Franks and the Lombards and soon to be Holy Roman Emperor, wrote to the king of Northumbria:

… never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments …

Some saw it as divine retribution for sin and the fulfilment of an Old Testament prophecy: ‘Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land' (Jeremiah 1:14). Lindisfarne was not the only monastery to be desecrated: a year later it was Jarrow, where the Venerable Bede had composed the other great work of Anglo-Saxon history, the
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
, the
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
; and a year after that Iona, from which the Irish monk Aidan had departed to found Lindisfarne in 634. These were the first in a series of raids and migrations that led to the establishment of Danelaw, the area of northern and eastern England occupied by the Norse, to the rule of England by the Danish king Cnut in the early eleventh century and eventually to the Norman conquest of 1066, a process that saw settlement and integration, but also much destruction and bloodshed in the wars between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Danes.

The reality of what happened at Lindisfarne on that day in 793 can be seen on a ninth-century tombstone found at the site – the so-called ‘Domesday' stone – showing a cross in the heavens with men bowing before it and on the other side seven warriors brandishing swords and axes. But it was the ships themselves, the
fyrenne dracan
, that struck the most fear in people, with their dragon-shaped prows, their sails striped blood-red and their lightweight hulls twisting and flexing like serpents on the sea. The discovery in the late nineteenth century of a Viking ship burial in Norway gave substance to that image, especially
when a replica was sailed across the Atlantic to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Another Viking ship came to widespread attention in 2014 when it was the centrepiece of a special exhibition in the British Museum, this time not from a burial but a wreck – a longship excavated in Roskilde Fjord in Denmark in the late 1990s and displayed in the Viking Ship Museum there along with other hulls discovered nearby. The date of the Roskilde ship, about 1025, places it in one of the most fascinating periods of Norse history, a time no longer of plunder and pillage but of trade, settlement and exploration – when Vikings went down the rivers of central Europe to trade with Byzantium and the Arab world, and when the ‘land-hunger' that had led them to the British Isles had seen them settle in Iceland and Greenland and reach the shores of North America, linking people for the first time in recorded history across the span of the planet.

On 27 May 1893, an image appeared off Newfoundland that had not been seen from those shores for almost 900 years – a Viking ship, complete with dragon prow and striped red and white sail, making landfall after a month crossing the Atlantic from Norway. Two weeks later after battling gales off the coast of Nova Scotia she reached New York, where she was met by a warship of the United States Navy and a flotilla of yachts, tugs and steamers, ‘… a beautiful sight which whoever saw it will not soon forget, when the little Norse craft, with its golden dragon flashing, was towed into New York harbour at the head of that imposing marine procession.' She was destined for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, after being towed along the Erie Canal and across the Great Lakes to form the main attraction of the Norway exhibit – ironically for a Fair that was meant to celebrate 500 years since Christopher Columbus discovered America, having proved by her voyage that Norse ships could have crossed the Atlantic just as described in the Icelandic sagas half a millennium before Columbus set sail.

The
Viking
was a replica of a ninth-century ship found in 1880 in a burial mound at Gokstad in Norway, and was therefore a true archaeological experiment in which much was learnt about the seaworthiness of ships of this type – ‘It was simply wonderful to see how she eased herself in her joints, as if she had been alive, and slid away from seas high enough to bury her,' the mate wrote afterwards; the captain recorded that the ship's bottom flexed almost 2 centimetres
and the gunwale twisted up to 15 centimetres out of line, a result of her lightweight shell-first construction in which the lower planks were thinner to give flexibility in heavy seas. She was clinker-built, with overlapping planks edge-joined by iron rivets and sewn withies close to the keel, a steering oar on the
styrbord
side – the side from which the vessel was steered, one of many nautical words, including ‘skip' for ship, that Old English shares with Norse – and a single stepped mast with a square sail, with provision for thirty-two oarsmen. The experiment proved that rather than being solely a ceremonial vessel, the Gokstad hull was a proper seagoing ship, one befitting the image of the Vikings that had been passed down since the time of the Lindis- farne raid and Norse expansion in the west from the eighth century onwards.

In 1904 another spectacular Viking ship burial was discovered nearby at Oseberg, similar in design but beautifully decorated with carvings on the stem and stern. The fact that both ships dated from the ninth century, the period most associated with sea-raiding, and that both appeared to be ‘royal' burials – the Gokstad ship of a king or chieftain, the Oseberg vessel of a high-status woman and her female companion – placed them firmly within the established view of Norse history. That view became tied up in the increasing nationalism of Europe in the early twentieth century, and the longship became part of the Nazi attempt to create a past for themselves in which the Vikings played a role – for the first time, nautical archaeology was enlisted for ideological ends. A 1939 issue of the Nazi magazine
Frauen Warte
, ‘Women's Sentinel', with an article entitled ‘The timeless heritage of our ancestors', has a cover image showing Viking ships sailing off to war while a woman stands proudly watching with her son and daughter. A 1943 poster aimed at recruiting Norwegians into the Waffen SS shows a Viking longship with SS runes on the sail and a helmeted Nazi soldier standing amidships; the same image of a longship became the badge of the 5th SS Panzer Division ‘Wiking'. The most explicit evocation of the ship finds was in a lavish coffee-table book entitled
Europa und der Osten
, Europe and the East, based on a propagandist exhibit at the 1938 Nuremberg Rally, in which a photograph of the Oseberg vessel under excavation is shown as part of a false narrative in which the Vikings are represented as ancestors of the German people and their sea-raiding an assertion of racial superiority that the Nazis wished to emulate.

After the Second World War the picture of Norse seafaring was greatly expanded by new archaeological discoveries, especially in Roskilde Fjord in Denmark. Located on the island of Zeeland between mainland Denmark and Sweden, close to the channel between the Baltic and the North Sea, the fjord extends some 40 kilometres south to the town of Roskilde – founded by Harald Bluetooth, King of Denmark and Norway, in the 980s, elevated to a bishopric in 1020 and a major royal and ecclesiastical centre by the middle of the eleventh century. As elsewhere in Scandinavia, the geography of the fjord helps to explain the early development of ships and boats, with seaborne transport a necessity in many areas and more efficient than overland travel between places on the coast. Some boats were adapted to the sheltered conditions of the Baltic, others to the rigours of the North Sea and many to drawing up on tidal flats, resulting in relatively flat bottoms and shallow draughts that also allowed them to navigate the rivers of eastern Europe as far as the Caspian and Black Seas and to trade with Constantinople and the Muslim world.

In 1962 the remains of five hulls were discovered in shallow water some 20 kilometres north of Roskilde off the village of Skuldelev, at the narrowest point of the fjord where they had been deliberately sunk to constrict the entrance at a time when Roskilde was under threat of attack. Rather than being excavated underwater the hulls were surrounded by a cofferdam from which the water was pumped to allow them to be uncovered as if on land, and today the surviving sections of hull as well as reconstructed replicas can be seen in the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. They represent a remarkable cross-section of the types of vessels used by the Norse at their floruit in the early to mid-eleventh century. Skuldelev 1 was a deep-bellied, wide-beamed ship suitable for carrying people and cargo on the North Sea, and probably closer to the type of vessel that would have made the voyage to Greenland and North America than the Gokstad and Oseberg ships. Skuldelev 2, by contrast, was very much the traditional image of the Viking longship, some 30 metres long, designed for a crew of 60–70 oarsmen and shown by tree-ring analysis to have been made from timber felled near Dublin, a major Norse settlement from the ninth to the twelfth century. The other three hulls comprised a smaller cargo vessel, perhaps for use mainly on the Baltic, a smaller warship – with holes for shield straps in the top planks, showing that shield-lined
longships really did exist – and a smaller vessel that may have been for fishing or coastal transport within the fjord.

A remarkable addition to this assemblage was made when a small harbour was constructed for the Viking Ship Museum in 1996–7. The remains of several vessels were found where they had been abandoned on the foreshore, including the longest Viking ship ever discovered – at 36 metres, more than 12 metres longer than the Gokstad ship, 6 metres longer than Skuldelev 2 and 4 metres longer than King Henry VIII's flagship the
Mary Rose
of the sixteenth century. Dendrochronology – dating from tree-rings – shows that the timber used to build the ship was felled about 1018–32, probably in the middle of that period, with a repair made some time after 1039; the tree rings also indicate that it was built in Norway in the area of Oslo Fjord. The ship represents the ultimate Viking longship design, longer and narrower than the ships of the ninth century from Gokstad and Oseberg and with a crew of at least 78 oarsmen. The hull was built from oak with the keel in three sections and planks up to 8 metres long, and the frames and joinery displaying a high level of skill in carpentry. The Roskilde ship was a supreme conjunction of beauty and functionality – a combination that would have been appreciated at the time, among a people for whom ships were not only utilitarian but also their greatest works of art and cultural expression.

Assembled for temporary display in the British Museum in 2014, and for other museums worldwide as a travelling exhibit, the metal frame representing the original ship seemed an analogue of archaeology itself – the surviving timbers allowing the shape to be extrapolated with near certainty but still leaving much to the imagination and to conjecture from other finds, including a shield rail based on Skuldelev 5 and a prow that may have had a dragon figurehead like the Gokstad ship. Just as at the Chicago Fair in 1893, many thousands of visitors were able to see a Viking ship close up, with a richer and more varied presentation of Norse culture than had been possible in the late nineteenth century but still with the main weapon of the Vikings as its centrepiece.