Chapter 7: Conversation

Breakfast was at 0730 the next morning, so Travis and Lars were up half an hour earlier. “Can we get showers?” asked Lars.

“I think so. I was asking the other day and we have unlimited water.”

“How’s that? They dig a well?”

“Better. The Brits brought in a supply ship. They spent the day bringing in water and supplies. I heard it was cheaper and faster than flying unlimited helo sorties.”

“So...”

“So, grab your shit and let’s get cleaned up. At some point we need to get some additional clothing, some uniforms or something. I’ll grab you a laundry bag so you can sort through your clothing. The Royal Engineers built a field laundry. By the time they get through with this place, we’ll have a whole new Buckingham Palace,” answered Travis.

Breakfast was in a massive dining tent. “How are we feeding the Vikings?” asked Lars.

Travis simply returned a blank look. “I don’t know, not for sure, anyway. I saw a bunch of folding tables and benches to one side of the warehouse. I am guessing they are being cooked for. They wouldn’t understand MREs, I don’t think.”

“What are you doing today?”

“He’s coming with me this morning to see the Viking longship,” replied Jennifer Wiltshire, coming up behind them and setting down her tray at their table.

“Good morning,” said Lars.

“Good morning,” repeated Travis. “Sleep well?”

“Very well, thank you. Are both of you coming to the ship with me?”

Travis shook his head. “Lars needs to stick with our guests. It’s more important for him to figure out how to talk to these people than to go sightseeing.”

Lars nodded. “I’d love to go, but I need to talk to them somehow. Do me a favor. Take plenty of pictures and movies. Maybe we can show that to them and see how they react.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to talk to them?” she asked.

“Probably. I have a feeling that Old Norse had several dialects, and this bunch is closer to Faroese and Icelandic than some of the Eastern versions,” Lars replied.

They continued talking about the situation until a Ranger sergeant came into the dining tent. He looked around and then came up to their table. “Excuse me.”

Travis looked up at him. “Sergeant?”

“Mister Shockley? Miss Wiltshire?”

“Yes?” the young woman responded.

“I’m here to take you over to the ship. I’ve got a driver and a Humvee outside. Do you need to pick up anything?”

“Ah! Nice to meet you, Sergeant ... Bruce,” said Travis, reading the sergeant’s nametag. “Yes, we probably do. Why don’t you and your driver grab some coffee and we’ll fetch our gear? We’ll meet you back here in ... five minutes?” He looked at Jennifer and Lars.

“Five minutes, right,” said Jennifer.

“And I’ll get over to the Vikings,” said Lars.

The sergeant commented that before they headed out, a bathroom stop might be a good idea; Travis nodded in agreement and Jennifer blushed. They took their trays to the disposal station and left. Ten minutes later Travis, Jennifer, Sergeant Bruce and his driver were in a Humvee heading for the opposite side of the island.

The driver, a Specialist named Donovan, looked over his shoulder for a second and asked, “Is this for real? Are these guys actually real Vikings?”

“Sort of why we’re here, Specialist, to figure that out,” answered Travis.

“How’d they get here? Time travel?”

“Totally different question. Let’s look at this boat first. Maybe we can find a label on it that says, ‘Made in China.’”, said Travis.

“Just drive, Donovan,” ordered Bruce.

“Just driving, Sarge. Just driving.”

It was at thirty minutes to get to the site where the boat was. It was not visible from the road, but there was a clear path created by tire tracks from the gravel road to the edge of the drop-off to the beach. Donovan slowed down as they approached the edge, but enough vehicles had gone over the edge and down to the beach that the drive was simple. He drove down and parked the Humvee near the beached ship.

As the ship came into sight, it seemed less than impressive to Travis. As they got closer, even that assessment seemed too positive. When they climbed out of the light truck, Travis said to Jennifer, “This is it? It looks more like driftwood than a ship.”

The Oxford historian looked at him in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? This is tremendous! This is a real Viking longship! This is great!” She scampered over to the wreck and tried to find a way to crawl into it. Frustrated, she gestured their driver closer, and Donovan gave her a boost over the side. “This is amazing!” she said.

Travis rolled his eyes and walked around the ship until he found a spot near the water’s edge where he could pull himself up. He found Jennifer kneeling near the bow and peering at the hull. “Find anything interesting?” he asked.

“Look here,” she said, pointing to the boards of the hull. “This ship is clinker-built. The hull boards aren’t butted against each other but overlapping.” She used her hands to demonstrate the difference. “And the boards, they’re not saw cut. They’re made by splitting oak logs with wedges, making radial splits, then they were smoothed with an axe. Look at these nails! They’re handmade! They were so expensive that the sagas report that wrecked ships were often burned, and the ashes sifted for the nails. There is nothing here that was made in a factory.”

“So, this is real? A real Viking longship, not a modern copy?” he asked.

“I’ve seen a few copies, but they were all made after cut timber became available. Look here, see this gap? They used moss or hair or twine mixed with tar and pitch to seal the gaps. Using cut timber, the gaps would be smaller. Ships like this tend to twist a lot, which makes them relatively leaky. During a storm, half the crew would probably be bailing it out.”

“Huh. Not sure I’d want to be sailing one around in the North Sea,” commented Travis.

“In good weather they were fine but, in a storm, you’d have to sail with the wind or into the wind. You take the wind on the side, you’d roll over. On the plus side, their draft is practically nonexistent. They can sail or be rowed up almost any river in Europe. Viking traders went into the Mediterranean and all the way into Russia,” she answered.

“Is there any way this thing is ever going to float again?” The stern of the boat was full of water.

“I don’t know. I’m not a sailor or a carpenter. If your friend can figure out how to talk to the Vikings, maybe we can ask them.”

Travis shrugged. “Maybe we should check with the engineers. Maybe they can pull it out of the water further.” He looked around some more and said, “Let’s take some pictures and movies.”

The pair pulled out their cell phones and began taking shots of the ship. The ship had been emptied already, with the contents stored in a tent at the base camp. “Where’s the seats?” asked Travis.

“The seats?” she repeated back.

“Well, there’re oars, and oar holes in the side. So where did they sit?”

“They probably used their sea chests as rowing benches. That was a common practice in the age of the rowed galley,” she answered.

“And they’re back at the base,” he finished.

“This is great!”, she reiterated.

“Any way to test to see if this thing dates back to Viking times? I mean, not with carbon dating, you said that wouldn’t work. Any other method?”

She thought about it for a second. “Ummm ... maybe dendrochronology.”

“What’s that?”, asked Travis.

“Tree ring dating.”

“What?”

“Tree rings.” Travis continued looking at Jennifer curiously. “Okay, if you cut a tree down and look at it closely, you see that the wood is a series of concentric circles. Every year the tree is alive it grows a new layer of wood on the outside.”

Travis nodded. “Okay, right, tree rings.”

“The thing is lots of things affect how the tree rings form. Drought, temperature, even forest fires. It leaves a pattern of thin and thick rings that is almost a fingerprint. If you were to do a core sample of a log, you can compare it to other cores and figure out when it grew.”

Travis still wasn’t getting it. “And?”

She pointed at the bottom of the ship. “The keel of a longship was a single long oak tree, cut and shaped. The same with a mast. If we can get a cross-section of the wood, we can try and compare it to historical samples and see if the fingerprints match.”

Travis nodded. “So, you are comparing tree fingerprints.”

“After a fashion. If we find tree rings that correspond to samples dating from the Viking period, maybe we have wood from that period. On the other hand, if we have tree rings from the 1800s and 1900s, we’ll know it’s fake.”

“Okay, that I can understand. Can you do this?”

Jennifer shook her head. “No, sorry. It’s very specialized. At a minimum you’d need some sort of boring tool capable of drilling in and extracting wooden cores, and a technician to operate it. Then the samples would have to be sent to a lab and measured and then compared to libraries of tree samples. It could take months.”

“Okay, we’ll table that for later.”

At that point Sergeant Bruce’s head appeared above the side of the boat. “How we doing?”

“Doing fine, Sergeant. I think we’re done here. Let’s help Miss Wiltshire down and we can finish up outside.”

“Roger that, sir.” He dropped back down to the sand, and then caught the historian as Travis helped her over the side of the ship. Travis clambered down by himself.

“Let’s finish with shots on the outside, and then we can head back to the base,” he said.

“Could the ship be pulled out of the water without destroying it?” she asked.

It was Specialist Donovan who answered the question. “Yes, ma’am. The engineers could bring in a dozer and some cables and pull it onto the beach. It might be tricky, but it can’t be all that heavy, right? It’s made of wood. I’ve seen them haul heavier stuff than that.”

Sergeant Bruce nodded. “He’s right. We’d need to check with the engineers, but I’ve seen them pull tanks. This thing has to weigh a lot less than a tank.”

“Something else to add to the things-to-do list,” commented Travis. “Come on. Let’s finish the photos and then we can head back.”

They got back to the camp in time for lunch, and Travis and Jennifer headed over to the bunkhouse to see how Lars was doing. They found him in with the Vikings, sitting at the tables where lunch was being served. At the far end of the room, on the other side of the tables, was another set of tables set up like a cafeteria line. “Let’s have lunch,” said Travis.

“Can we?” asked Jennifer.

“Yes, ma’am. Mister Ropstad said to let you come in if you showed up. I think he wants to introduce you both,” answered the head guard. He moved the barrier and allowed the pair entry.

They went over to where Lars was sitting with a large, bearded man. Lars turned to them and said, “Heil.”

“Heil,” replied Travis.

“No, change the pronunciation. It’s not like hile, as in Heil Hiitler. It’s more like hail, like a hailstorm.”

“Heil,” said Travis.

“Heil,” said Jennifer.

“Heil,” said the bearded man. “Ek em Torvald.”

“That means, ‘I am Torvald.’”, said Lars. He pointed at Torvald and added, “Torvald Gunnarson,” then pointed to Travis and Jennifer. “Travis. Jennifer.”

Torvald repeated the names and then said to Lars, “ Getur hann fá okkur bjór?”

Lars began laughing at that, but Travis and Jennifer stared at him. “Was it something I said?” Travis asked her.

Lars laughed again. “Torvald asked if you were the guy who could get them beer.”

“Beer?”

“They want beer. They don’t want water.”

“Øl,” said Torvald.

“Ale?” asked Travis.

“There are two words in Old Norse for beer, øl and bjór. It isn’t hard to figure out they mean ale and beer,” explained Lars.

“You’re actually able to talk to them!” exclaimed Jennifer.

“Enough for a beer bash., anyway,” replied Lars.

“You get any further than partying with them?” asked Travis.

“Working on it, Travis, working on it.” He nodded towards the cafeteria table. “Go get some lunch.”

Travis rolled his eyes and led Jennifer to the cafeteria line. There was a steam table with several hot entrees and soups, as well as bread and cold cuts for sandwiches. Interestingly, in front of each pot or tray was both a written label, in English, and a sheet of paper with pictures of animals and vegetables printed on it. The ham had a picture of a pig, the beef stew had a picture of a cow and pictures of a potato, a carrot, and an onion. “That’s actually a pretty smart idea,” he commented.

“Thank you, sir. We weren’t sure if anybody had any religious problems, like pork with Jews and Muslims, or beef with Hindus,” said the British mess attendant behind the table.

“Like I said, it makes a lot of sense. Anybody have a problem with the food?”

“Just that they want beer. I guess they normally drink a lot of beer,” he was told.

Jennifer said, “They do, or did, anyway. The thing is, because of the way they brew beer and the alcohol in it, even a weak beer was safer than drinking water. That was common around the world until the industrial age. There are a lot of bacteria and diseases in surface water.”

A more senior mess attendant came up to them. “Excuse me, but you’re the folks who are experts on the Vikings, right?”

Travis shook his head. “Not me but Miss Wiltshire here is an expert.”

“Right.” He turned to face the young woman. “You know about Vikings, Miss?”

“I’m up here from Oxford to figure things out.”

“You’re a boffin then, right-o! Maybe you can tell us, what do Vikings like to eat? We want to make sure we are feeding them proper.”

She looked back at the serving tables. “What’s wrong with what you’re serving them now?”

“Well, nothing, but if they have any foods they’d prefer, my guys want to know, so we can make it for them.”

“Well, northern European diets of the time were pretty normal. Beef, lamb, and pork were all common meats, and they certainly would have hunted for deer and rabbits and wild boar. And there were all the common vegetables - peas, beans, onions, cabbages, and so forth. They didn’t have tomatoes or potatoes, since those originated in the Americas...”

“It’s nice to know we were good for something,” commented Travis.

Jennifer stuck her tongue out and blew him a Bronx cheer, then continued, “Bloody Yanks! Same with corn. It came from the Americas. You can cook with it, but they just won’t know what it is. They would have had wheat, barley, and rye, so breads from them would be fine. Uh, fish would have been a big part of the diet. Most of the population centers in Scandinavia would have been close to the ocean, and the Norsemen were excellent sailors. They would have done a lot of fishing. Shellfish, too, clams, mussels, oysters, and the like.”

Travis added, “By fish, I would suggest real fish, not fish sticks or patties. Not sure they’d understand McDonald’s.”

The attendant made a wry face at that. “Not sure I would, either. Still, fish and chips might make a nice addition. I’ll look into it. Thank you.”