The Way of a Viking

A thousand years ago the Vikings of Scandinavia sailed and rowed their great open boats across the seas to Normandy, Iceland, Ireland and America with no protection but that of a huge dragon's head prow. There were no insurance companies then to tell the Vikings that their ships were poor risks, no spoilsports to cry "careful!"

When stocky, blue-eyed Sten Schroder was 24, he saw a real Viking ship in a museum in Bygdoy; from that moment Sten knew what course he must sail. Last year, when Sten was a 37-year-old lamp factory worker in Stockholm, he saw his chance. A big sports exposition was to be held in Stockholm's deer park and the committee wanted to build a gondola to take visitors round the lake. Sten went to the committee meeting, pleaded history's cause and sold them on the idea of a Viking craft instead. The committee granted him 5,000 kroner ($1,000), and he went to work.

Friends pitched in to help Sten chop down sturdy pines. A maritime museum director offered to research the design and an artist went to work carving a dragon's head. By June of last year, after three months' work, Sten's craft, the Lusty Snake, was ready for its maiden voyage--a trip to Tullgarn Castle to congratulate King Gustaf V on his 91st birthday.

That, however, was just a shakedown cruise. This year Sten had hoped to sail to the U.S.,* but he found it hard to raise the money. He settled for Rotterdam. Three weeks ago, with a crew of 15 stalwart young Swedish tram conductors, miners, plumbers, bakers and clerks to man the oars, the 80-foot Lusty Snake set off across the Baltic for the Kiel Canal.

The seamen of Ystad and Tralleborg shook their heads as the frail craft headed southwest. "They'll never clear a storm," they murmured. Eight days later the Lusty Snake passed through the Kiel Canal into the North Sea. Young Navigator Boerje Persson, 26, who had just got his master's papers and quit his job on a trawler to join the voyagers, set the course for Rotterdam.

Last week high winds lashed at the sandbanks along the German coast. The winds brought bits of planking from the Lusty Snake and the drowned bodies of Sten Schroder, Viking, and one of his crew. No survivors have been found.

-In 1893 a Viking craft, built along the lines of Leif Ericsson's 10th Century vessel, sailed from Norway to New York en route to Chicago's World's Fair. Her welcome to the U.S. was so lavishly staged by the Norwegian Society of Brooklyn that six of her crew, including Captain Magnus Anderssen, ended up in Brooklyn's Butler Street police court charged with being drunk and disorderly. The presiding magistrate, James M. Tighe, who happened to be president of Brooklyn's own Celtic Varuna Boat Club, was not impressed with the difficulties of the Norsemen's voyage. "A boat like that," he said, "will float like a chip on the water and never go down. I myself would be ready any day to make one of a crew to row her back to Norway."

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