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 Haeggeby, 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 established itself in the modern Lincolnshire.