Turning from eugenics to more practical matters, it was the brain and the manual skill of the Viking that invented and perfected our modern sailing ship.  Stripped of its barbaric excrescences at stem and stern, and of its rows of shields and ornaments, the lines of the Viking ship of Gokstad[17] found there buried but entire, are the lines of our herring boats of fifty years ago.  Sharp and partly decked at stem and stern only, like those boats, the Viking ship could live, head to the waves, even in the roughest sea.  It was, too, a living thing, a new type of vessel handy to row or sail, and far in advance not only of the early British ship and Pictish coracle[18] but also of the Roman galley with lines like those of a canal barge, and also far in advance of the Saxon ship of war or merchandise.  The only points of difference between the older type of herring boat and the Viking ship were the stepping of the mast further forward and the use of the fixed rudder in the modern vessel.

Not only did the Viking brain invent our modern ship, but it was the Viking spirit that impelled us as a nation to use the ocean as a highway.  The Norseman had discovered America and West Africa many centuries before Columbus or Vasco di Gama.  The Norse colonised[19] Greenland, Labrador, and possibly even Massachusetts, and it was on a voyage to Iceland that Jean Cabot heard of America, on whose continent he was the first modern sailor to land, and it is said that it was through him that Columbus, after he had discovered the West Indian Islands, first heard that North America had been proved to be a continent by Cabot’s coasting voyage along its shore from Maine to Florida.  The Vikings, too, taught us the discipline without which no ship can live through an ocean storm.  Their spirit, too, when piracy had died out, led us into trade; for, as we have seen, the Viking was no mere pirate, but ever a trader as well.[20] Their sea-fights live in story, though their traders found no skald or bard, and it is thus that we hear less of their trading or of their civic or domestic life.

This spirit of theirs, like their blood, is ever with us still.  It has gone into our race, and it keeps coming out in unexpected quarters.  Hidden under Celtic colouring and Highland dress, the Viking warrior is there in spirit, glorying in battle, though often apparently no more of a real “Barelegs” by race than was kilted King Magnus.  The Berserk fury and stubborn tenacity of our Highland regiments derive their origin from the Viking as well as from the Celtic strain.[21] Our sailors too, had they been Celts, would not readily have left smooth water.  It was Viking not Celtic blood that drove them to the open sea.  It was Viking skill that built the ships, managed them in storms through Viking discipline, navigated them across the ocean, and gave us the naval and commercial supremacy which founded and preserves our empire overseas.