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| · | Building Snorri | |
| · | Sailing Snorri | |
| · | The Original Viking Ships | |
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The Story of Snorri the Knarr
Click on the images below to view enlargements
What it takes to build a Viking ship
Last summer everything started to come together for writer and adventurer W. Hodding
Carter, who was intent on realizing a lifelong dream - to retrace Leif Eriksson's
historic voyage from Greenland to Newfoundland. "Basically," Hodding admits,
"I wanted to play Viking."
Every good Viking needs a ship and a crew
After preliminary inquiries about shipbuilding elsewhere, Hodding approached Rob
Stevens, master boatbuilder from Hermit Island, Maine.
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The ship they chose to replicate is called Skuldelev Wreck #1 (not its original name, ha ha) which was excavated from the Skuldelev Channel near Roskilde, Denmark, in the 1960s. It was one of six ships that had been sunk in the channel about 1000 A.D. to prevent enemy Viking ships from Norway from entering the harbor. Fifty-four feet long and 16 feet wide, Wreck #1 was the first ocean-going merchant ship yet discovered - just the thing for Viking emigration and exploration.
"It's sort of scary," Rob Stevens reflects, "that our boat and other replicas have been built on the plans of wrecks. Skuldelev #1 was far from worn out. You have to think, 'Nobody sinks a good boat.' But other replicas that have been built do sail nicely."
Since Rob was in charge of building the replica Viking ship, we'll let him tell the story - from start to finish.
Do we have a plan?
 Rough plans from Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde |
"I got a call from a friend of Hodding, who said that Hodding wanted a Viking boat. And I was like, well, great. He sent me some plans, not very complete, and I told him I needed more information. So he sent me an article about trees and asked for an estimate. I read a few things on Viking boats and threw together an estimate. Hodding looked it over and thought it looked good and asked for a real estimate. I think I came in about three percent higher than my quick and dirty estimate.
"There are all sorts of funny stories in this project. I asked Hodding for a set of real plans. And he said he didn't know if there were any, but he gave me a phone number for the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde [Denmark] where the original boat had been resurrected. So I called up Roskilde and I said, 'I'm a boatbuilder in Maine and I've got somebody who's interested in having a replica of Wreck #1 built.' And there was this long pause and they said, 'There aren't any plans. And we won't sell them to you anyway.' They went on to say that they would not deal with Americans or Canadians because we like to sue too much.
"The guy said that it must be once a week he gets somebody approaching him about building one of these boats and he sends them off a letter saying, 'This letter will save your life: no, you cannot build this boat.' They are tricky to build and they're tricky to sail. So that's the museum's official response to when you ask about a set of plans.
"Then a friend of mine who was also considering building the ship agreed to come on as a consultant for me instead. He's such a big name in the maritime field that I then got the assistance of the Viking experts in Europe. The only problem was that about a month later my friend left, and that was the end of my getting any assistance from the people in Europe. Which caused me a bit of grief.
"But I did get sort of a lousy reproduction of a set of plans from the guy who was going to give me assistance, and I started searching every place I could find to find out about Viking shipbuilding. Then I just started ordering wood and lofting it."
 Lofting process describes hull shape |
"Lofting is, you draw the boat out full-size on the floor, I mean all 54 feet of it, and you draw it in three views - top, side, and head-on. The points from one drawing give you the points in the next. And then you take a long strip of wood and you bend it through these points and it has to give you a fair [smooth, continuously curved] line. If it doesn't give you a fair line you have to go back and re-fair everything and just keep going until you can get a batten bending and a nice fair curve in every direction. And that took forever."
Choosing the woods
"I was trying to get as close to the original as possible. We used southern yellow pine, long-leaf yellow pine. It's a tough call as to how it compares to the original Viking boat because the wood in the original would have been a lot slower-grown. But looking at modern European pine, it falls halfway between our [American] yellow pine and our white pine. So I went with long-leaf yellow pine.
"I got awful lucky - actually happened to find a guy who had just harvested a good stand like he'd never seen in his whole life. And I really got lucky because the day I called him his mill was broken down, otherwise it would have already been cut up into flooring. But he had what I needed, I mean I was getting pieces 24, 28 inches wide for the boat. Yeah, it's wide stock.
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Rob Stevens and |
Photo credit: Russell Kaye"This came from the panhandle of Florida, this long-leaf yellow pine. And
the rest of the wood was local to Maine. The oak all came from right within five,
ten miles of here. They were logging a big section of land over across the river
and we went over there and worked with the loggers and picked out the shapes we needed.
"We used white oak and red oak. Red's not as good as white, but it's an open
boat. And because ventilation isn't a problem in an open boat, you can use red.
"I also used white pine, which sounds a bit controversial, but my reason for
using it is that the original boat was built with lime, a lot of the framing. And
lime is a European basswood - it has no rot-resistance and not an awful lot of strength.
So I had to figure out why they were using this wood, you know, since it's not a
typical boatbuilding wood.
"I think what it is, the planks on our boat range between 14 inches and 20 inches
wide. And these wide planks were all above the waterline. If you build the boat green,
a 20-inch plank is going to shrink quite a bit. And if you run a piece of oak across
seven planks, all big, wide planks, and then put fastenings through it, there's a
good chance the planking would split because the oak isn't going to move much.
"But the pine is as soft as basswood, in fact a little bit softer, so I made
it a little heavier than the basswood dimensions, and we used white pine in the areas
that they used basswood.
"Another thing I used was hackmatack. There must be a good 50 knees [angle braces]
in the boat of hackmatack. Any place you have a knee that's close to 90 degrees,
you can get it in hackmatack.
"There's a guy in upstate Maine who I got it from and there's also a guy over
in New York, and they're the two people in the country who harvest knees. There's
enough to keep them busy with a lot of these big replica ships that are being built
everywhere.
"This ship also has willow treenails [fastening pegs]. Normally we would have
used oak or locust. Willow has no rot resistance and it's not a very strong wood,
but Viking boats were meant to move, and by having willow, you won't split the plank
as the boat moves, like an oak or a locust treenail would.
"There are Viking boats where every single thing in the boat is oak except for
the treenails, and the treenails are willow. So this is one of the major fastening
woods they were using. All the framing is held together with treenails, there's no
iron except for clenching the planks together."
Building methods, donuts as fuel
"We didn't insist on Viking building methods. Basically we used whatever was
the appropriate tool. And quite often in wooden boatbuilding, the older tools are
still the right tools to use. It would have been nice to have used more Viking tools,
but the time schedule was so short. Basically we worked seven days a week for six
months. We used any tool - Skilsaw, electric planer, hand plane, adze, spokeshave.
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Rob Stevens rounding the upper portion of the rudder with an adze |
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Dave Foster sits among the molds, shaping a floor timber |
"The governor came to see the boat. He lives in Brunswick and he called up and asked if he could come down and look. He said it wasn't an official visit, but could he bring his kids down and we said sure. Deirdre called back and said he could come but he'd have to bring donuts. And so he brought donuts down. For a couple of days afterwards when people came they'd bring us donuts too, they figured if the governor has to then they have to.
Planking the hull
"We built molds - you pick up the dimensions off the lofting - to plank her on, and the Vikings wouldn't have done that. The Vikings would have just planked by eye. They would have a little plumb bob thing that would tell them the angling they wanted, but they'd have no molds - they'd just put the planks on and bend them and force them to the shape they wanted.
"They bent the planks by thinning the wood down - they didn't steam bend, like we did. They would have started at midships with the planks around an inch-and-a-quarter thick, but by the time they got to the ends it would be half an inch, because the wood wouldn't bend any more than that.
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"That's why they had this big stem - all carved from one chunk of wood. Because even carving it down to less than half an inch, they couldn't get planks to bend right up to the stem, so they needed to carve that out. On Snorri, we built this stem piece up [from smaller pieces]. Having done that and now knowing the shape it is, I'd be happy to carve it out. I think it'd be a lot faster to do that.
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John Gardner shapes a side frame with mallet and chisel |
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Finished oak floor timbers in forward section of boat |
"The lower framing pieces were all oak because they didn't cross a lot of planks and they're also below the waterline so there's not going to be as much movement. It's when you get farther up that I started being concerned about movement. So there we used hackmatack and pine."
Old stems and new
"The stem was very time-consuming. It would have been one solid piece of wood for the Vikings, hollowed out on the inside, just as ours looked, but one piece of wood they would have seasoned for a number of years. An oak tree in the three-foot range, six feet long would do it. I'm not positive that's accurate because I don't know what the growth rings should be - how far around in the rings you can come, if you really have to be way over on one side or if you can take two-thirds of the trunk.
"I think what they did to season the piece for their stem was sink it in water after they carved it out and let it sit for a number of years. They have found Viking stems that are all done, I mean, including the fake plank lines, but there are no fastening holes. The stem had never been used, just stored in water, which is a good way to season a big piece of wood slowly.
"We didn't have time to season it and I didn't really know the shape of it at that point - it was defining its shape as we went along. But that was very time-consuming. We used a modern adhesive and screws that are hidden under bungs so it looks like the real Viking stem, in that you can't see any fastenings."
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Fastenings of willow and iron
"These willow treenails, what you do is you pound them in from the outside and then cut them off and wedge the treenail, locking it in place. Like you'd wedge a hammer handle. All of the boat is held together with these wooden nails except for the plank clamps, those are all iron rivets. The treenails are an inch in diameter.
"Treenails are actually an excellent way to fasten a boat. They're not used often because they're labor-intensive, but the best thing in the world for a wooden boat is salt water and the worst thing in the world for the fastenings in the boat is salt water. So back when they treenailed them, you didn't have to worry about your fastenings deteriorating. The treenails should last the lifetime of the boat without any problem.
"To fasten the hull planks together, where they overlap each other, we used hand-forged, wrought iron rivets every seven inches. Wrought iron has some impurity - carbon or silica - that helps it last in salt water.
 Hand-forged wrought iron rivets hold the hull planks together |
 Gerry Galuza making one of 2,700 hand-forged rivets |
We used 2,700 rivets of varying lengths, all hand-forged by Gerry Galuza. The Vikings made charcoal to heat their forges. Gerry used coke. He got his iron from old bridges in England."
Special challenges
"Actually building the boat turned out to be very straightforward. I've been fortunate enough in building a lot of designs that are a hundred years old, and it really wasn't that different from other
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Snorri in |
"There were a couple of unusual parts. The first four planks on the hull come up in a certain curve, but with the fifth plank they start to describe a different curve. And there's actually nothing holding the bottom of the boat to the top of the boat except for the rivets along one plank lap. That looked like a very scary joint, but when we finally got to it, it really wasn't difficult. You're always beveling planks when you attach them and with the bevels put on, you didn't have to put the rivet in that unusual of an angle to make it work. So we had been worried about that up until we got to it and it was really no big deal.
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Lower hull is one shape, upper hull another. Only rivets hold the two together. |
"I think there's one other Viking boat built this way - it's not like this is even typical for Viking boats. The theory about this tunnel [the dip between the lower and upper hulls] is, they think it actually creates a cushion of air so that it creates some lift. It also cushions the boat as it pounds, it's pounding on air. It makes a sound - you can hear a sound off that plank and you see a row of bubbles coming up from underneath that plank in the stern.
"There's almost no keel on this boat, only like three inches, so another theory was that this surface acted as a secondary keel and helped you go to windward a little bit better. Again, it's the compromise of being a merchant ship - you want to be able to get in somewhere flat out on the mud because there's no docks to unload, so you can bring the boat in and just let it sit on the bottom while you load and unload it."
Decking - planks as life jackets
"Planks were the most valuable pieces of wood to a Viking. You consider that planks were all made by splitting stuff out with an ax. And so I think that with the deck, the planks are short - they only go from one beam to another - for a number of reasons. It's a good use of scrap planks, it keeps the boat flexible, it allows you easy access to the bilge for both bailing and storing cargo. And if the boat should sink, there's your life jacket when they float out.
"The other thing if the boat should sink, what's supposed to happen, you cut the shrouds on one side, the mast comes out and acts like a sea anchor, and the hull rolls over as it's sinking. You figure if you fill a boat with water and you've got ballast in the bottom it goes right straight down. But if it goes down and the mast drags on one side, it will pull that side over and the rocks will roll out, the planks will fall out, the rocks will roll out and the boat will come to the surface."
The sailing rig
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Shrouds take the place of a backstay |
"Your shrouds [lines from mast-head to sides of hull that help hold the mast in position] and your running backstay - which is really just your last shroud led aft - they take the pressure. But they're not that tight. I mean, you'll see them be quite slack. The mast slops around some. As a matter of fact, a guy in Iceland told us our mast step was too tight and we should actually make it looser so the mast moves more.
"Most of the lines are hemp, a few of them are manila. I guess the halyard for raising the mast is modern and all the blocks are replicas of Viking blocks with the exception of a couple of modern blocks up on the foredeck which hold the beiteass [tackpole] down. The original Viking plans didn't show blocks up there and so I didn't rig it up that way, but a Norwegian captain suggested we use blocks up there so we went out and bought them."
The ship's shape at present
"We left the ship outdoors at Nuuk. We built a tent over it. Within a few days of us leaving it was already snowing on the boat. We built rafters and put the tarps over it to keep the snow out of the hull. We took all the rigging down, had that all stored away. When we go back - Hodding and I are going back first - and we'll just take the tarp off of it, pine-tar the boat again, and do repairs.
"Basically we'll oil the boat and check it over, just make sure none of the wood has seasoned or split. And I have to replace the headstay. We had two headstays, and the outer one, the line from the tarp chafed away the headstay. The rigging will remain the same.
"We do have a different foredeck top for underway. The tarp we had for underway previously was knee-high and the water would come through. I plan on closing off the oar ports when we're not using them. Because we actually would get water through the oar ports and then it would run around right where your sleeping bag was. And we're having a different tarp made for the foredeck, so that will be nice, a little drier when being underway.
"But aside from the rudder repairs, that's all we have to do. There's probably two weeks of work."
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Snorri under sail |
(For a detailed discussion of Viking rudders and Snorri's rudder experiences, go to Sailing Snorri.)
Snorri Specifications
Length - 54 ft
Beam: - 15 ft, 9 in
Weight empty:12 tons
Ballast: 13 tons of rock
Depth: 6 feet
Materials:
Keel - white oak
Framing - red and white oak, hackmatack, pine
Planking - Long-leaf yellow pine
Fastening - Wrought iron rivets, willow treenails
Sail: 1,000 sq ft, 35-ft-high canvas