Gone Viking II by Bill Arnott

Author:Bill Arnott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

From the eight-by-five no-name journal, itself now as well travelled as an old steamer trunk, the only thing missing being destination stickers and labels:

No nightingale sang, but we enjoyed a leisurely stroll through Berkeley Square en route to a London train.

Watching the Thames slide by in dirty green-grey under pale blue sky, pockmarked in dusty white cloud. We were aboard a mildly grungy commuter train, rattling us along elevated tracks from Waterloo Station east through the city past the glass and steel of Canary Wharf to Greenwich.

The district of Royal Greenwich was the birthplace of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, Greenwich Castle roughly in the centre of town, and where Henry stored mistresses for a time. The property then became the home of the Royal Observatory – a neat, octagonal building topping a rounded hill overlooking the river. The observatory served as a centre for scientific research, astronomy and navigation and is the location of the prime meridian. It was from here England set the world’s clocks, then left it to the Swiss to keep them accurate.

The interior of the observatory had, I felt, an intellectual energy, the facility never having lost its sense of discovery. We lined up with other tourists for a photo atop the meridian line, where you can’t help but ham, balancing on the line like a grounded tightrope walker.

Maritime history here’s a rich mosaic, centuries of viking for king and for queen. I wandered through the National Maritime Museum, touted as the largest in the world. The library houses 100,000 volumes of maritime reference books and features fine exhibits of Captain Cook and Admiral Nelson, their logbooks monstrous leather-bound beasts.

One display explains how Nelson effectively utilized England’s superior technology (copper-hulled ships) to lead his outnumbered fleet to trounce the combined armadas of Spain and France at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, repeating Drake’s work from 1588. The admiral’s coat is on display, the seemingly innocuous bullet hole that killed him visible through the shoulder of the garment.

“Oh, sod,” I suspect he said, upon noticing he’d been shot, before commending the men on a job well done, going below decks to clean the blood from his jacket, enter the day’s events in the ship’s log, salute King George and then expire.

The small hole in a child-sized naval jacket juxtaposes the enormity of that turning point for much of the world, paving the way for the Duke of Wellington to finish off Napoleon’s cannons once and for all at Waterloo with sound tactics, audacious courage and Irish infantry.

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