o strong that even the great Emperor
Charlemagne, though ruling the half of Europe, treated him on equal
terms. Here is Offa's good advice to all future kings of England: "He
who would be safe on land must be supreme at sea." Alfred the Great
(871-901) was more likely to have been thinking of the navy than of
anything else when, as a young man hiding from the Danes, he forgot to
turn the cakes which the housewife had left him to watch. Anyhow he
tried the true way to stop the Danes, by attacking them before they
landed, and he caused ships of a new and better kind to be built for
the fleet. Edgar (959-975) used to go round Great Britain every year
inspecting the three different fleets into which his navy was divided;
one off the east of England, another off the north of Scotland, and the
third in the Irish Sea. It is said that he was once rowed at Chester
on the River Dee by no less than eight kings, which showed that he was
following Offa's advice by making his navy supreme over all the
neighbouring coasts of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

After Edgar's death the Danes held command of the sea. They formed the
last fierce wave of hardy Norsemen to break in fury on the English
shore and leave descendants who are seamen to the present day. Nelson,
greatest of all naval commanders, came from Norfolk, where Danish blood
is strongest. Most of the fishermen on the east coast of Great Britain
are of partly Danish descent; and no one served more faithfully through
the Great War than these men did against the submarines and mines.
King George V, whose mother is a Dane, and who is himself a first-rate
seaman, must have felt a thrill of ancestral pride in pinning V.C.'s
over their undaunted hearts. Fifty years before the Norman conquest
Canute the Dane became sole king of England. He had been chosen King
of Denmark by the Danish Fleet. But he was true to England as well;
and in 1028, when he conquered Norway, he had fifty English vessels
with him.

Meanwhile another great Norseman, Leif Ericsson, seems to have
discovered America at the end of the tenth century: that is, he was as
long before Columbus as Columbus was before our own day. In any case
Norsemen settled in Iceland and discovered Greenland; so it may even be
that the "White Eskimos" found by the Canadian Arctic Expedition of
1913 were the descendants of Vikings lost a thousand years ago. The
Saga of Eric the Red tells how Leif Ericsson found three