Re: Kensington Rune Stone

On Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:58:57 +0100, sprocket <bucket@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:

There is a line of continuity from the long-boats, through knarrs, to
the trading ships of north europe, on through the cog, hulk and
carrack ...

There was a fundamental difference between the Norse clinker- built type
of ship, in which the structural strength is in the skin, and the later
skeleton-framed boats, which were the type that dominated from the 14th
century or so to the end of sail. There's a very good discussion of this
in "The Good Ship" by Ian Friel, and it was this increase in strength
that made extended sea voyages routinely survivable.

But they didn't, as you said come "from a completely different
shipbuilding tradition". There was a line of steady evolution. And you
are wrong if you think the skin played no part in the strength of the
hull in what you called 'skeleton framed boats'. The difference is
only in the order of construction of the whole.

They weren't able to do much about the geography.

You should not clip out those parts of my article to which you are
replying. If you had not done that it would be clear that I was making
the point that Norse 'island hopped' for the simple reason that there
were islands to hop.

Same geography in the 16th/ 17th century... but the different
technologies of boatbuilding and crucially firearms probably made the
difference, combined with enough surplus population, with enough impulse
(financial for the proprietors, lack of alternative for indentured
servants and the like) to finally make settlements stick.

Perhaps the iron age technology of the Norse didn't give them sufficient
advantage over the stone- age natives to compensate for their shortage
of numbers.

And of course the fact that once numbers achieved a critical level, the
settlers acted as a reservoir of disease infecting the native population
and weakening their response, a kind of inadvertent biological warfare.
The "failure" of the Norse to introduce epidemics is another argument
for their presence only in the most minute numbers, in the most
peripheral areas- exactly as described in the sagas.

You are rambling way of the topic under discussion.



Eric Stevens
.

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