Recreating The Viking's First Cross Atlantic Crossing, 1,000 Years Later | Episode 3

Imagine an ancient warship on a modern journey of discovery that could change everything you thought you knew about the Vikings. Drakken is the world's largest Viking ship that we could even conceive of. It was important for me to investigate are these Viking ships as good as the sources tell us. Everything on this ship can kill you. If I was a Viking I would have turned right the f**k around and come back. It's insane. The settlement in North America is only temporary. Did they die? Did they starve? Did they freeze to death? We're finding new things all the time. I think we should be able to end the debate once and for all. This is Viking Quest America. If you can believe it, it's summertime. But yeah, as you can see by the way we're dressed, it doesn't really feel that way. Off the rugged coast of Scotland's notorious Cape Wrath, these sailors are training for a dangerous mission that could rewrite history. They're pushing the limits of wood and willpower, metal and mind in a series of shakedown tests. Their ship, Drakken, aims to recreate the voyage of the ancient Vikings on the thousandth anniversary of their first North Atlantic crossing. A journey that made the Vikings the first Europeans known to set foot in modern-day North America. But today, many questions remain about how they did it and how far they went. This ship was purpose-built to find those answers. Drakken is old construction, as you know. It's not a fake. Everything is for real. The material, the methods we work, is the same as they probably did it a thousand years ago. Drakken is the largest Viking ship ever constructed in modern times. And her crew is more in awe of the Vikings than ever, given the beating they and their ship are taking. On the first leg of this sea trial, Drakken suffered a catastrophic failure. The mast was broken in the middle and one part jumped over one side and the other on the other side. The yard, one and a half ton, come flying down on deck. The two-ton mast snapped like a matchstick. Drakken's experienced captain, Bjorn Ålander, knows just how close he came to losing his ship and possibly his crew. We were facing a lot of problems all the time. I should lie if I said everything was fine. We had a lot of problems, but we always continue. That's probably what the Vikings should have done. The crisis reminds everyone on board Drakken of the Vikings' bravery a thousand years before. And it speaks to the very meaning of the name Viking. The word Viking is a noun, but it's associated with a verb. That idea of going Viking is something that you get referred to in sagas. So the idea of going off on expeditions to gain wealth and fame that then it heightens their position when they come back home. Somebody in the Middle Ages, they would not have said we're Vikings. They would have seen Vikings as something that people do. And the idea of what a Viking is, is an individual who travels. So you can think of Viking as being a job description rather than being any kind of ethnic signifier. Bjorn now steers Drakken home to Norway with a brand new untested mast made in Liverpool, England. Watch leader Woodrow Wiest keeps a close eye on that major repair. The amount of wind that we have, it's quite substantial. And we're running with it. So we can handle a whole lot of wind that way. But in a case of emergency, if we had to turn up into the wind, that's when I would get worried. The new mast poses a serious risk. Then there's another problem. Ominous sounds of creaking wood and popping metal from below deck. So far, there's no flooding. But if the stress continues, there will be. Then a triple threat. A large tear appears in the sail. Yeah, we've had quite low winds, but quite rough seas. So there's been a lot of flapping around and movement in the sail. Which kind of puts stress on everything. It wasn't the heavy wind that got it. It was the light wind, which really sucks. Worst done. Worst is done. We're just going to tie down, then we're going to take the sail off. Drakken's crew attempts to raise an emergency sail stowed on board. But the seas are too rough. We have been lucky so far. We have not got any waves overboard, but it's very, very close. And the wind forecast says it's going to be more wind. So we try to run as quick as possible to the leeland of Skötland. For the second time in Drakken's sea trials, the ship limps into the Shetland Islands, a remote archipelago off the northern Scottish coast, to safety. The repairs are critical. The Shetlands are the only landfall before Drakken faces a 350-kilometer crossing of the unforgiving North Sea to get home to Norway. The ripped sail is replaced, and the crew inspects the new mast and rigging once more. Then Bjorn orders a full clean-out of the ship. It's an entire day's work, but after a month at sea, ignoring this task could spell disaster. Just a thing like this. You have to pick it up. And somebody has to do it. And today, it's everybody. Our strainers around our pumps, the holes are quite big. So little bits of line and other plastic and onion peels and things like that can easily be sucked in. And, you know, human hair and feathers from down bags or, you know, anything, little bits of plastic. And all those things put together, sucking in at the wrong time can stop a little pump pretty quickly. On an open-top ship like Drakken, it's impossible to keep water out. So losing the pumps isn't an option. But it's our lives. The pump is our lives. Okay, then. The return trip to home port in Høygesund, battered but alive, is one hundreds of Viking ships must have made a thousand years ago. But the North Sea is raging once more. These are the same waters that destroyed Drakken's original mast. Nobody knows, actually, how much force the ship can take. How high waves, how much wind, we was not sure. For the first time, Bjørn orders the crew to don survival suits. They provide insulation, buoyancy and visibility, and can extend survival time to several hours in these frigid waters. It's cold comfort knowing that if Drakken sinks, the chance of rescue is next to zero. The first night, I think no one was sleeping on board because the ship was moving and it's cracking and the sound... Finally, after more than a month of challenging sea trials, Norway is once again in sight. And Drakken, though shaken, is still in one piece. The crew's respect for the Vikings has never been greater. It's heavy stuff, sailing with this boat. If you sum up all these incidents, there's for sure quite a lot to keep in mind going across the Atlantic. It's going to be quite a challenge. Concerning safety, the best thing you can do is probably to stay home. That night, the entire team revels as heroes. Drakken's owner, Sigurd Asse, honors their bravery. But privately, the crew questions whether the sea trials were actually a success. And the true test of Drakken and their courage still lies ahead. After her maiden open ocean voyage, the Drakken Viking ship is once again back in the Norwegian shipyard where she was built. Drakken's designers are alarmed by what they discover. The sound of creaking wood and popping metal that the crew heard at sea is a near fatal weakness. When we get back to Norway, the carpenters had checked the hull and found that for several meters along the keel and the garboard strength, the lowest strake on the ship, the nails were all sheared off for several meters. And that's very concerning. Luckily, you have the pressure from the outside to hold it in. But if the end of a plank have come out, we have no chance. Just go straight down. We was lucky that time, but we don't want to trust luck more. So I call Sigurd and tell him we can't do it. We have to rebuild the ship and make it stronger. Bjørn's decision is a total shock to the team. Drakken was only supposed to be on blocks for the winter, just routine maintenance. A full retrofit means it's back to square one. The crew now wonders how the ancient Vikings would have dealt with a setback like a rebuild. The answer may be found at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. Here, shipbuilders and scientists work side by side in a new field of study known as experimental archaeology, helping unlock the secrets of the Viking Age. They were skilled boatbuilders in the Viking Age, no doubt about that. And we have to match them to be able to tell anything about how they built the ships and why did they look as they did. When you look at a ship like this here, it looks like quite a kind of static artifact. It's just a wooden shell, essentially. But when you rebuild it and start to see the amount of connected materials that have to go into it, you've got to smelt all your iron. You've got to go to the forest and harvest all the timber. So it starts to create a kind of a ripple effect that really shines a very bright light on production and industry in the Viking Age. This array of replica Viking tools helps to unravel the thousand-year-old mystery of how these ships were constructed. I think the most common axe from the Viking Age, it's an axe like this one, which is a beard axe, which is used for everything. This axe is very different from the other one. It's got a very wide edge and it's got a long handle. And that means it's good for felling trees. It's good when you have a good swing because of the long handle. And then because of the wide angle of the edge here, it doesn't go into the tree very hard, so you can easily pull it out again. The last very different axe is the one over here, which is very Viking Age. We call it a broad axe. It's special because it's flat here and then it's got an angle from here. And then the handle is twisted, as you can see. This is a boat building axe. It's not a chopping heads off axe. When you get skilled in using these tools, you can start wondering how did the Vikings think? How did they build these boats? The vessels that are helping to unlock this ancient mystery are called the Skuldelev ships. They were discovered here in the Roskilde fjord in the 1950s and carbon dated to the 11th century. Historians determined that they were sunk on purpose to block a sailing channel from enemy attack. Archaeologists now faced an unprecedented challenge of how to get the fragile vessels out of the sea without disintegrating. So once they had established where the timbers were, they sunk iron pilings and built a cofferdam around the excavation site. They essentially pumped all the water out and then very quickly had to begin excavating. And it's a very difficult technical process because if you imagine ships like this, they're made from wood and when they've been lying underwater for nearly a thousand years, they're incredibly waterlogged. And if they're allowed to dry out, they just turn to dust and crumble away. Approximately 50,000 fragments are collected from five different Viking ships. The remains are so well preserved and the find is so significant that a brand new museum is built to house it all. For me as an archaeologist, I couldn't have wished for five more representative different ship types because we have warships, we have a cargo ship, we have two kind of smaller trading slash fishing vessels. What you have in this one find is that you have essentially the whole Viking age encapsulated. The ship that we have here is the ship known as Skoglu 5. And what's interesting about this ship is that it's built with a mixture of new timbers and recycled timbers. They took planks from other ships and reused them when building this ship. So you get maybe an impression of a ship essentially that they just took whatever they had and built the ship. This discovery sheds a startling light on the dreaded rebuild of Draken. Viking ships of old were also prone to fail and often rebuilt, sometimes with materials from faraway places. And the work here in Roskilde points to another ominous fact. I think we can safely assume that an awful lot of ships went down at the time were lost at sea. When you stand in the aft at the back of the ship and look down along the length of the ship, you can literally see how much it twists and flex and bends. And of course, there's a kind of a magic point in terms of that design that if it's too flexible, it's a problem. And if it's too stiff, it's a problem. Back in Norway, Draken's shipbuilders have discovered that this problem of too much flex is exactly what caused the nails to break and compromised Draken's hull. Despite the alarming cost of the rebuild, ship owner Sigurd Asse says it echoes the Viking experience of a thousand years ago. It's a normal Viking ship building process from the old times. They did mistakes and they learned how the ships behave if we do that, how it behave if we do that. They did this for hundreds of years. Every new Viking ship, it becomes better, right? Here at Draken, we're working very hard on getting the ship ready to go. Every day seems to be something a little bit new happening. But the main purpose here is to strengthen the ship. The deck is coming up one layer. The old deck was below this new fresh oak beams. And one of the main reinforcements we're doing is putting a keelson in the boat. A keelson is a beam laid down the center line of a vessel to reinforce the existing keel. In Draken's case, the keelson is going into the bow section where the flex was most severe. And 400 stronger hand forged nails replace all the ones that broke off. The 300 kilogram keelson is lowered into Draken and must be placed and bolted precisely along the keel. As you can see Sune on the drill and they're drilling for keel bolts. And it's very important to get the bolts drilled straight through. The drill that they're using has a very, very long drill bit. It has to go all the way down through the timbers in the deck, down through the frames and ribs down below, all the way through the keel. And then they get cut open about 10 centimeters and bolted through the whole way. It's heavy work, especially when crawling underneath the ship and having to hammer up above you or to chisel things out. The purpose of all these retrofits is to further stiffen the ship. But too much stiffness and a heavy sea could split Draken's hull in two. The rebuild takes more than a year, costing Sigurd millions of dollars. But the delays are finally over. Captain Bjorn Ålander is back to send this massive Viking ship to sea once more. Nature defeated Draken once and hard lessons were learned. Now she's tougher. And her crew is more determined than ever to honour the thousandth anniversary of the Viking voyage to the New World. The relaunch of a completely rebuilt Draken Viking ship is underway. In the Viking age, a huge long ship like this would have been built on a sloping beach. An entire community would unite to roll this giant across logs lubricated with animal fat and into the water. This heavy lift crane makes for much faster and cleaner work. Finally, the ship settles back into the sea. But there's a new problem. A full year on land has caused the planks in the hull to dry out and shrink. Seawater pours through the cracks in between. It's a familiar sight on wooden ships, but much worse than expected. Oh, it's a wooden ship. It always leaks a little bit when you lower it down to the water. It will be tightened in 24 hours without any leak. For a full day, bilge pumps are cranked to full power to keep Draken afloat. The oak planks swell and the leaks have thankfully cleared themselves up. Now there's just two weeks to go before Draken sets sail and a staggering amount of work to get ready. The mast is up and now every piece of rigging on this entire ship must be put back in its place. This time around, they at least have a better idea about where everything goes. The rig is actually one of the things that we haven't done much with. The whole ship is pretty much a new ship, but mostly the rig is as it was. Tightening these ropes is a critical step in getting the angle of the mast just right, so the ship stays balanced at sea. The next step in achieving perfect balance is trimming the ship with traditional Viking-style ballast. 21 tons of grapefruit-sized stones are loaded into Draken's hull. You want to achieve two things with ballasting the boat. To get her lower in the water, so she won't fall over or tilt over, and you also want her to trim the right way, to be in the right angle. So you put stones in the middle to sink her down, and you put stones in the aft to tilt her. And the funniest part of this is that you do it with stones, so when the boat turns over, not if, when it turns over, they all fall out, so the wooden hull still floats. It's quite smart. She's trimmed now slightly to the aft. We have some anchors and some safety equipment to go in the foreship, so that's going to affect it, and then we put more stones in right in the aft of the ship to try and level her out and trim it up. As the heavy lifting continues outside, in the workshop, a much more delicate task is underway. A symbolic dragon's head will be mounted onto Draken's bow, constructed by hand and decorated with materials that the Vikings used a thousand years ago. This paint is linseed oil paint, so it's just linseed oil and some pigments. So you're putting on more oil on the paint to make that look good, and also to prevent the wood from rotting, because it's going to be sitting up on the stem. It's going to be exposed. The old Norse sagas, when it comes to dragon ships, they say that the dragon head will protect the crew and also the ship, and it will scare away enemies. They believed in magic in a way. A thousand years later, sailors remain a superstitious tribe. If Viking magic can protect them on a voyage to the New World, they'll take it. How the ancient Vikings made that journey has not been recorded. And until the last century, there was no evidence that they had. Historians held that Christopher Columbus was the first European to reach the New World in 1492. One female archaeologist helped to rewrite that history and set back the timeline by 500 years. So many sites have been proclaimed to be Vinland over the years, ever since the 18th century, actually. Brigitte Wallis is a leading expert on Viking settlement in modern-day North America. Her research revolves around a place known in the ancient sagas as Vinland. A new land, somewhere to the southwest of Greenland, where wild grapevines were said to grow. It's a very touchy subject, and the minute you don't agree, you are called a desk professor who knows nothing. In the 1960s, Brigitte's controversial work leads her to the site of an incredible new discovery. It's called L'Anse aux Meadows, and it's perched on the remote northern edge of the island of Newfoundland, Canada. The site was very isolated. I got a boat from an area south of L'Anse aux Meadows, but it was a stormy day, so I was put ashore, and the owner of a boat put out his hand and said, L'Anse aux Meadows is that way. And it was a time there was no electricity, there was no road there. I actually ended up walking in the last 15 kilometers. At this isolated site, the remains of wood-framed peat-turf buildings had been found, and they were nearly identical to other Viking remains excavated in Greenland and Iceland. The discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows was quite a sensation, but it was preceded with real skepticism. It needed to be established to the world that, yes, it is a Norse site. In 1973, Brigitte leads further excavations that reveal a treasure trove of thousand-year-old artifacts, many of which are proven to be Viking. These findings prove, beyond a doubt, that the Vikings made it to North America 500 years before Columbus. And one particular artifact found here suggests they traveled even further. Among the Norse deposits at L'Anse aux Meadows, we found a butternut, and we also found butternut wood. Butternut trees, like the grapevines mentioned in the sagas, don't grow in northern Newfoundland. The nearest place they do grow is the Canadian province of New Brunswick, more than 800 kilometers to the south. Their appearance at L'Anse aux Meadows shows that the people over there had also gone at least as far as northeastern New Brunswick and come back. Wild grapes grow in the same areas as butternuts, and they ripen about the same time. So if they had seen butternuts, they must have seen wild grapes. Birgitta's groundbreaking research has helped bridge the gap between the ancient Vinland sagas and the real world. Today, L'Anse aux Meadows is a world-famous Viking landmark, and Draken will be making her own historic stop here during her fast-approaching voyage. Then, the ship and crew will push themselves as deep into the New World as they can to prove that the Vikings could have done it too. And that further breathtaking discoveries of Viking remains may be found all over the eastern continent. But first, the ship and crew must survive the voyage. The Vikings didn't have the luxury of survival training that Draken's crew does. An inflatable life raft is capsized, and with survival suits on, they struggle to right it. Then, they learn how to pull their floating comrades out of near-frozen waters. Finally, a specialized hoist simulates an open-water helicopter rescue. These are all scenarios the crew need to be prepared for on the formidable mission ahead. The risk is worth it, because if they succeed, it will support the theory that Vikings explored deep into North America. And that the legend of Vinland is true. A crowd gathers on the shore of Norway's Karemsund Strait to mark the official start to a thousandth anniversary Viking mission to the New World. Before the Drakens should go away to America, it was important to put on the dragon head. The dragon head, according to the sagas, had some magical power to make a good voyage. Along with the dragon head, a pair of intricately carved ravens are also unveiled. In Norse mythology, two ravens named Hugen and Munen sat on the shoulders of the god Odin as his guiding spirits. On Draken, the carvings are placed on either side of the helm to help lead the ship and crew into the great unknown. Drakens owner Sigurd Asse has also arranged a symbolic gift for each member of the crew to bring them luck. We were given a symbol of the Vikings, and it's this necklace I have here. Everyone in the crew got it, and these runes are supposed to give us safety. They're supposed to give us courage and also to guide us on our way. It's now been more than one and a half years since Draken last left Norwegian waters, and a few of the faces have changed. But this modern Viking crew is still a 50-50 male to female split. On the ship, you can see that we have women doing, and they are doing the same as the males, and they have the guts as well. Having a diverse crew was a very important part of this trip. Female Viking explorers may seem historically inaccurate to some, but a recent discovery suggests gender in Viking society was just as fluid as it is today. So there was a very famous grave recovered at Birka in the late 19th century, and it was a grave of an individual who had been put in a chamber with two sacrificed horses and a plethora of weaponry, swords, arrows, spears, everything you could imagine an individual going to war would want. And then when DNA study revealed that the body in the grave had belonged to a woman, that was a source of huge debate because it really raised the question, could Viking women go to war? Did women fight in the Viking Age? But I think it was such an important discovery because it really shook up people's gender preconceptions. The woman who was buried was assigned female at birth, whether she lived socially as a man, we don't know. Modern science continues to push our understanding of the legendary Vikings, and Drakken, the largest Viking ship built in modern times, is now about to do the same. May Njord always fill the sails of Drakken, Harald Holfager. May its sails always grace the horizon, and may its keel always kiss the sea. It's now been seven years since Sigurd's original dream to build the largest Viking ship ever attempted in modern times, and sail it to the New World. It was demanding to take care of a Viking ship, I can tell you. It's a lot of work. But finally, Drakken and her crew are on their way. To make the ship stronger, we did a lot of other work. So now she is a strong Sigurd vessel I'm proud of. All right, good, we are on the roof. Now we're heading up to a starboard, and we're gonna soon be close-hauled up to try to reach the northern part of Shetland Islands. Voyage they've now begun will follow the same transatlantic route that the ancient Vikings sailed a thousand years ago. 5,000 kilometers across the unforgiving North Atlantic, facing the same dangers, with just five places to stop for safety. First, the Shetland Islands, then the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. Drakken will then sail up the St. Lawrence River into the mighty Great Lakes, proving that the Vikings could have also pushed deep into the North American continent. Finally, Drakken will sail into New York City Harbor, and the 11th century will collide head-on with the 21st. But first, Drakken must make it across the Atlantic Ocean in one piece. Historians know that countless Viking ships sank, and many more Viking explorers gave their lives in the attempt. The risk we can see, that's not what takes you down. It's what you don't see. You do your best in risk management, and then you pray.