NAVIGATION
From Hernar in Norway one should keep sailing west to reach Hvarf in Greenland
and then you are sailing north of Shetland, so that it can only be seen if visibility is
very good; but south of the Faeroes, so that the sea appears half-way up their
mountain slopes; but so far south of Iceland that one only becomes aware of birds
and whales from it.
(Trans. from Bill 1997 : 198 )No navigation tools, apart from the lead, are known with certainty from the Viking
Age, and this description from Hauksbók, a fourteenth-century version of Landnámabók,
the Old Icelandic book on the colonisation of Iceland, is also likely to illustrate the
navigation method used 400 years earlier. It shows that crossing the Atlantic was an
‘island-hopping’ one where the course – with some luck – could be adjusted every few
days based on land observations. In between the seafarers travelled in a landscape where
any perceptible phenomenon was noticed and evaluated to provide clues about the
present position. Cloud formations, wind and smell would reveal the presence of land
Figure 11. 4 Reconstructed amidships sections of ships mentioned in the text.
(Drawings: Werner Karrasch, Morten Gøthche del.)–– Jan Bill ––