By James Heinz
Most ships that sailed the Great Lakes in 1893 can only be visited with SCUBA gear, if they even exist. This is the story of one such ship which can still be visited.
On dry land.
We all remember the saying we were told in grade school: “In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” And in 1893, the world remembered it as well with the World’s Columbian Expedition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair. Wikipedia tells us it “was a world’s fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The exposition was an influential social and cultural event and had a profound effect on American architecture, the arts, American industrial optimism, and Chicago’s image. More than 27 million people attended the exposition during its six-month run. Its scale and grandeur far exceeded the other world’s fairs, and it became a symbol of the emerging American Exceptionalism.”
And right in the middle of it a reminder of another, earlier voyage to America arrived.
In 1880 the sons of a farmer in the Norwegian town of Gokstad decided to dig into a mound on their farm which had long been known as King Mound. Digging down their frozen soil, they found the bow of a wooden boat. A Norwegian archeologist was summoned, and he excavated the mound from the side.
What he found was the first fully preserved Viking ship, forever known as the Gokstad ship. The Vikings had several different types of ships, but the Gokstad ship is an example of the type of ship that struck terror into the hearts of those the Vikings raided: a warship, known as a longship or a dragon ship, due to the dragon figureheads they carried.
The longship had a number of features that made it an ideal raiding vessel. Wikipedia tells us: “The longships were characterized as graceful, long, narrow and light, with a shallow-draft hull designed for speed. The ship’s shallow draft allowed navigation in waters only one meter deep and permitted arbitrary beach landings, while its light weight enabled it to be carried over portages or used bottom-up for shelter in camps. Longships were also double-ended, the symmetrical bow and stern allowing the ship to reverse direction quickly without a turn-around; this trait proved particularly useful at northern latitudes, where icebergs and sea ice posed hazards to navigation.”
The design of the Viking ship means they could attack anywhere along a coast, and go far up most rivers. They did not require landing at a port. They could appear suddenly from the sea without warning. No wonder that “From the fury of the Northmen, deliver us, Oh Lord” was a common prayer in the Middle Ages.
Shortly after the Gokstad ship was excavated, Norwegian shipwrights constructed an exact replica, which they named, appropriately enough, VIKING. And in 1893 a crew of Norwegians sailed it to Chicago.
Where you can still see it today.
Recently I journeyed to the Chicago suburb of Geneva IL, where VIKING has been preserved by the Friends of The Viking Ship https://vikingship.us/ I spoke with President Bjorn Rektorli, a native Norwegian who has found himself stranded in the American Mid-West for many years. Bjorn also referred me to the book: “Viking: From Norway to America” by original 1893 VIKING crew member Rasmus Rasmussen.
Bjorn told me that VIKING was built in 1892 to 1893 in Sandefjord, Norway, expressly for the purpose of sailing it to the Columbian Exposition and proving that voyages to America by Leif Erickson, as reported in the Viking Sagas, were in fact physically possible.
The ship is currently housed in a building that resembles a World War II Quonset hut, if a Quonset hut were made of sheets of white plastic stretched over metal hoops.
The first thing you notice about the VIKING is its color: black. Photos of other modern replica longships show them being basically the same color of as the wood they were made of. Bjorn explained: “The ship was originally preserved with a tar-based “boat soup”. A renewed treatment of the ship was applied two years ago consisting of 1 quart of pine tar – 2 gallons of turpentine – 2 gallons of raw linseed oil. These repeated treatments have darkened the wood to a blackish color.”
Bjorn told me that the ship is 72 feet long and 17 feet wide. Wikipedia describes her as a “karvi” class longship, which is the smallest type of longship. It weighs 20 tons. It is clinker built, which means that the planks overlap each other and are fastened together with iron rivets. The keel is shaped like an upside-down letter T. The ship is made of oak. The oak for the keel had to be imported from Canada because Norway had no oak trees tall enough. It is equipped with a mast that is 50 feet tall and a single spar which held a square sail. The mast and spar lie alongside the ship.
On its 1893 trip the ship carried a captain and 11 sailors. At that time, she carried 16 oars of varying length, which are also on display. The oars vary in length due to the curve of the ship’s hull at both ends. In Viking times Bjorn said it would have carried 30 to 40 warriors.
Wikipedia says that she would have had 16 rowing positions, which consisted of crewmen’s sea chests, which they sat on to row. The oar holes on the side of the ship are not perfectly circular, but rather shaped like an old-fashioned keyhole, with a slot below a round hole. Bjorn explained that the slot was for the blade of the oar to fit through. The oars would generally been used for propulsion in special circumstances, such as battle, shallow water, and as noted above, rapidly reversing away from icebergs.
Too bad the TITANIC did not have oars with which to reverse away from her iceberg.
For voyaging across open water, the sail was usually used. Rasmus Rasmussen described VIKING being becalmed several times while crossing the Atlantic, and the crew did not resort to the oars. Wikipedia describes the average speed of a longship as between 5 to 10 knots, with a maximum speed under ideal conditions of 15 knots.
And appropriately enough for a dragon ship, VIKING had two nine feet tall Viking figureheads, which would have been mounted on the bow and stern. Bjorn told me: “The head and tail had been stored for about 50 years at the Museum of Science and Industry before being removed one month ago… The head and tail will be restored and delivered to the Geneva History Museum in January for a Viking Exhibition that will be open from February through December 2023.”
The ship was steered by a steerboard, or steering oar, hung off the right rear of the ship. Steerboard is thought to be the origin of the word starboard, referring to the right hand side of a ship facing forward. So, in effect, the Vikings hung the steerboard on the starboard.
How does she sail? Wikipedia tells about VIKING: “The skipper recorded that the keel bowed upwards as much as 20 mm (0.79 inches) and the gunwale flexed inwards as much as 150 mm (5.9 inches) in heavy seas.” Rasmus Rasmussen did not describe that, but he did say “She was so limber and easy that it seemed that she could adjust to any weather.”
Rasmussen went on to say: “She kissed the seas as only a Viking ship can…The steering was quite easy…I have never had an easier or better ship to maneuver…We continued to marvel at the ship’s seaworthiness…She turned her nose calmly against the waves…”
Of course, not everything was smooth sailing. She leaked at the stern and the pump proved useless, requiring the crew to bail with buckets. The cooking fire burned continuously, making everyone and everything smokey. And it was cold, despite erecting a tent on deck every night in which to sleep.
Rasmussen’s description of the voyage indicates that other than the difficulties mentioned above, their transatlantic crossing went fairly smoothly with only a periodic lack of wind to slow their progress. They arrived in America at St. John’s, Newfoundland. From there they sailed to Cape Cod and Newport, Rhode Island, and then on to New York City. From there they were towed up the Hudson River by a tugboat to Albany, and then towed through the Erie Canal to Buffalo, New York, and then on to Cleveland. They sailed alone from Cleveland to Detroit, making a speed of 14 knots.
From Detroit she was towed by the steamer ALBANY all the way to Milwaukee, arriving at 4 pm on July 9th just in time for a hailstorm with hail “as large as bullets.” They anchored behind the breakwater. The next day the revenue steamer ANDREW JOHNSON brought dignitaries out to them. They weighed anchor at 11 am and sailed to the mouth of the Milwaukee River, where, accompanied by the fireboat CATARACT, they furled the sail and rowed up the river to Grand (now Wisconsin) Avenue, where they got off the ship. They then rode in a parade to the statue of Leif Erickson that still stands in Juneau Park.
After speeches by local dignitaries, they were driven around Milwaukee in carriages and then taken to a banquet at the Pfister Hotel and more speeches. Their appearance was so popular that one of the crew found he could not return to the VIKING, still moored at Grand Avenue, due to the crowd.
The next day they rowed down the river and then were towed to Racine by the ANDREW JOHNSON. After another stop in Evanston, Illinois, they arrived at Lincoln Park on Chicago’s lakefront. After a brief sojourn up the Chicago River, VIKING arrived at her destination in the lagoon at the Jackson Park exposition grounds south of downtown on July 12, 1893. She was placed on display for Exposition visitors.
After he was paid for the voyage on July 22, Rasmus Rasmussen hung around Chicago for a while before returning to Milwaukee for a visit with none other than Captain Frederick Pabst of Pabst beer fame. He eventually returned to the East Coast and went home to Norway in a modern ship.
But VIKING’s adventures had not ended.
In October 1893, VIKING left the Jackson Park lagoon and sailed north up the shoreline and then into the Chicago River, where she sailed via the Illinois and Michigan canal to the Illinois River all the way to the Mississippi River and down the river to New Orleans. She remained there over the winter and then returned to Chicago in 1894 the same way she had come. Later that year she returned to Racine and Milwaukee and then on September 5th, she returned to Chicago, where a heavy rain filled her with water and she sank. She was pumped out and raised the next day.
On October 13, 1894, VIKING and over 200 objects which had been brought with her, including a huge copper cooking cauldron and six small signal cannons, were donated to what was then known as the Field Columbian Museum. Everywhere she had gone in America, VIKING had drawn huge crowds of enthusiastic spectators, fleets of ships and yachts, and the attentions of prominent persons of all types.
And then everyone promptly forgot about her.
The ship was kept outside next to the museum and apparently all 200 artifacts were simply left inside. All of them disappeared rather quickly. Her captain reported, “The ship’s condition gradually deteriorated and became more dilapidated. Year by year VIKING became a sad sight to behold.”
In 1920 the museum moved into a new building and renamed itself the Field Museum. The VIKING was left where it was. In 1919 Norwegian-Americans had sponsored a restoration of the ship, and it was moved to a shelter in Lincoln Park in November 1920. The shelter had a roof but no sides, and the ship continued to deteriorate. By 1991, 16 of the 32 Viking shields along the side of the ship were missing and she had accumulated a four inch thick layer of bird droppings inside.
In 1996 she was placed on a moving cradle and moved to Good Templar Park in Geneva, Illinois, where she was placed under the same vinyl structure she is under today. She remained on the moving cradle, which did not support the hull properly, with the result that the ship started to literally fall apart.
In 2007 the National Trust for Historic Preservation made a grant of $52,000 to stabilize the ship. The moving cradle was replaced by a system of wire cables and turnbuckles that pulled the hull back into alignment and many other repairs were made to the ship and its shelter.
In 2008 Friends of the Viking Ship was formed and continued the quest that had begun in 1893: finding a sheltered, permanent home for VIKING. Bjorn told me that every Chicago area museum has rejected the ship, claiming that it “does not meet their long term strategic goals.” So, FOVS has decided to build their own museum in Geneva. They are currently in discussion with the city about construction of a museum and educational center for VIKING. And so ends a story which we all know must be unique in the history of the Great Lakes.
And we would all be wrong. VIKING was just the first.
I remember seeing another Viking longship in Chicago in 2016. She was tied up at Navy Pier for a Tall Ships festival. I remember one of the crew telling me that they almost didn’t make it to Chicago, because when they got to the Great Lakes via the St, Lawrence Seaway, they discovered that they were required to hire a Great Lakes pilot, for which they had not budgeted. Bjorn told me that the crew of VIKING had had the same problem in 1893. This ship is called DRAKEN HARALD HARFAGRE, and she is currently docked at the Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. https://www.drakenhh.com/
She got considerably less public attention than VIKING did, but as the second man to set foot on the Moon said, no one remembers the name of the second man to set foot on the Moon.
If you long to see another Viking ship sail the Great Lakes, Bjorn informs me that in a couple of years a French organization plans to construct another longship replica and sail it to the Great Lakes. https://drakkardevendee.fr/
According to the Wikipedia page devoted to replica Viking ships, VIKING was the first of what are currently 12 replica Viking ships in America. Two are located in Minnesota, which seems appropriate for a state that named its football team the Vikings. One of the Minnesota ships reversed the usual procedure by being built in Duluth, Minnesota, and sailed out of the Great Lakes to Norway. Others are in such places not usually associated with Scandinavian ancestry, such as San Antonio, Texas and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
VIKING was also the first to prove that Viking voyages to America were in fact possible and that the old Norse sagas could be true, even if she had proved that the Vikings could have done what we know they did not do. They did not sail directly to American across the Atlantic, but came by way of Iceland to Greenland, around the southern tip of Greenland, across the Labrador Strait, and then down the Canadian coast to Newfoundland to a place today called L Anse aux Meadows.
VIKING has one other first. There is a branch of modern archeology called experimental archeology, in which modern archeologists attempt to understand the past by recreating ancient technologies and artifacts in the present. And once again, VIKING seems to be the first example of that. She is a recreation of ancient Norse seafaring technology that proves that that technology really worked.
As Buzz Aldrin said, only one can be first, and that honor goes to VIKING.
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
Photo at top of page: The color of VIKING is black. She was originally preserved with a tar-based “boat soup”. Photo by James Heinz.
Other Photos:
