The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are by Michael Pye Page B

for the sun to rise before he could see the
     old-fashioned lighthouse up ahead, probably the Roman tower at Boulogne that Charlemagne
     had rebuilt. Only then did he hoist again the sail that must have been lowered hours
     before. 26
    All this was a gloriously alarming muddle of
     the practical and the fearful. On one hand fresh water was supposed to be Godly and
     good, renewing and refreshing life itself, while salt water was a desert, a cliff off
     which ships could fall; it was an abyss where Leviathan lived with other terrible
     creatures, ‘a king over all the children of pride’, according to the Book of
     Job, ‘made without fear’ and able to make ‘the deep boil like a
     pot’, with terrible teeth, breath to kindle coals and the power to lay a trail of
     phosphorescent light behind him on the water. 27 On the other hand, you could always
     hunt the smaller terrible creatures and eat them; St Bridget of Kildare fed her guests
     fresh seal, the same St Cuthbert who was famously kind to ducks sometimes existed on the
     flesh of beached dolphins, and St Columba prophesied the coming of a gigantic whale off
     the island of Iona but said God would protect his fellow monks from its terrible teeth.
     He did nothing to save the whale. 28
    For Christians, as you can see in the vivid
     pages of some Psalters designed on Frisian territory, the land was almost Heaven and the
     sea was Hell, full of beasts and tortures and also temptations to sin; the coastline was
     a kind of battleground between the two, and inland was where good people could get on
     with their industrious and virtuous lives. 29 Sea was where holy men might go and
     put away the rudder and trust to God, knowing they were at risk. The sea, after all, was
     where pagan heroes went, where unfamiliar and unholy things abounded. But it was also
     the Frisians’ workplace, and they saw no reason to rush conversion to Christian
     attitudes. They were used to working together on their boats so they held to the old
     view that shipping out implied all sorts of virtues: loyalty, trust and competence.
    They used anchors on their boats, as the
     Romans did, with heavy chains to pull them up and let them down in shallow water or on
     the sands. Once the anchor was raised, their flat-bottomed boats might still be settled
     in the sand, so they carried a gaff in the shape of a metalV at the end of a wooden pole to push themselves clear. 30 The
     main power was muscle power, rowers sitting on sea chests, which was the kind of power a
     captain could control; but there were also sails to help out the oarsmen, and since
     nobody could yet tack into a headwind, each journey had to wait for the right wind to
     blow the ship forwards. Boniface shipped out from England on his mission to convert the
     Frisians in 716, clambered up the side of a quick ship with the sailors bustling about
     and had to wait for the great sail to be puffed out with the right winds; 31 or so
     Willibald says in his life of the saint. Willibald refers to the sail as
     ‘
carbasa
’ in the Latin, which more usually is a word for
     linens, even though we know most sails were sewn from lengths of woven wool. When
     Boniface’s body was shipped over the Aelmere on a more ordinary ship with
     ‘swelling sails’, the word used this time was ‘
vela
’,
     the more common word. 32 Did fast ships need a different kind
     of sail?
    Since the sea was not a barrier like the
     land, the world had a different shape. We would find it hard to recognize.
    Suppose you crossed from Domburg to the
     trading port at Ipswich on the east coast of England, newly opened in the seventh
     century; your cargo might be pots from the Rhineland or glass or the hefty lava
     quernstones used for grinding grain in mills. 33 Stand on the banks of the River
     Orwell and look out at the world. If you think in terms of the time it takes to get to
     places, then Bergen in Norway is closer than York in England, even if your boat