supremacy. In this manner the people of the Baltic and the North Sea
ravaged or settled in every country on the sea-shore, from Orkney,
Shetland, and the Faroes, to Normandy, Apulia, and Greece; from Boulogne
and Kent, to Iceland, Greenland, and, perhaps, America. The colonisation
of South-Eastern Britain was but the first chapter in this long history
of predatory excursions on the part of the Low German peoples.

The piratical ships of the early English were row-boats of very simple
construction. We actually possess one undoubted specimen at the present
day, whose very date is fixed for us by the circumstances of its
discovery. It was dug up, some years since, from a peat-bog in Sleswick,
the old England of our forefathers, along with iron arms and implements,
and in association with Roman coins ranging in date from A.D. 67 to A.D.
217. It may therefore be pretty confidently assigned to the first half
of the third century. In this interesting relic, then, we have one of
the identical boats in which the descents upon the British coast were
first made. The craft is rudely built of oaken boards, and is seventy
feet long by nine broad. The stem and stern are alike in shape, and the
boat is fitted for being beached upon the foreshore. A sculptured stone
at Häggeby, in Uplande, roughly represents for us such a ship under way,
probably of about the same date. It is rowed with twelve pairs of oars,
and has no sails; and it contains no other persons but the rowers and a
coxswain, who acted doubtless as leader of the expedition. Such a boat
might convey about 120 fighting men.

There are some grounds for believing that, even before the establishment
of the Roman power in Britain, Teutonic pirates from the northern
marshlands were already in the habit of plundering the Celtic
inhabitants of the country between the Wash and the mouth of the Thames;
and it is possible that an English colony may, even then, have