Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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The Danes, having once a foot-hold, were never thoroughly expelled till the Norman conquest, and as a maritime race excelled all the nations of the north of Europe. They had two principal classes of vessels, the Drakers and Holkers, the former named from carrying a dragon on the bows, and bearing the Danish flag of the raven. The holker was at first a small boat, hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, but the word “hulk,” evidently derived from it, was used afterwards for vessels of larger dimensions. They had also another vessel called a Snekkar (serpent), strangely so named, for it was rather a short, stumpy kind of boat, not unlike the Dutch galliots of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their piratical expeditions soon increased, and Wales and the island of Anglesey were frequently pillaged by them, while in Ireland they possessed the ports of Dublin, Waterford, and Cork, a Danish king reigning in the two first cities. But a king was to arise who would change all this—Alfred the Great and Good, the “Father of the British Navy.”