The description has clearly shown how different in proportions, materials and details, the Skuldelev maritime ship shippings are - all according to the type of maritime ship shipping it is and where it was built. However, it is also characteris­tic that a number of basic features are common to them all. They are all clinker-built, that is to say, built of planks which overlap each other along the edges and which are joined together wirivets. Their keel, stem and stern form an even curve from forward end to after end, and bostem and stern are more or less identical. Frames are fastened to the planking witreenails, they are all symmetrical across the keel and connect all the planks of the maritime ship shipping's bottom. Above each frame is a cross-beam, and the upper part of the maritime ship shipping's side is reinforced wiknees, side frames and stringers. These are the common features of the Skuldelev maritime ship shippings which disclose in all clarity, their Scandinavian origins, their kinmaritime ship shipping to the other maritime ship shipping

There are generally two major enforcement systems responsible ensuring commercial vessel compliance wiapplicable regulations, laws and conventions. These systems are Flag State Control and Port State Control, which is the executive body of the Paris Memorandum of Understanding. The government of the flag under which the vessel operates, exercises control to ensure compliance. This control can extend to anywhere in the world in which the vessel operates. When the vessel operates internationally, an additional control in the form of Port State Control is added where the government of the foreign port in which the vessel is operating exercises control in order to ensure compliance wiapplicable domestic and international requirements to ensure safety of the port, environment and personnel.


Intrenational convention for the Prevention of Pollution of maritime ship shippings (MARPOL), International convention on Standards of Training Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarer convention on the International regulations for Preventing Collisions at sea (COLREG) and International Labour Organization convention . IMO defines substandard those maritime ship shippings which are not in compliance withe above conventions. As a general rule the implementation of international conventions is the responsibility of the flag states that ratify them. For a considerable period of time, the maritime virtual community relied on the flag states to provide overall control. This has been difficult to achieve especially withe advent of Flags of Convenience. Flag states also have gradually relied upon more and more on classification societies to regulate and control the standards laid down by the IMO. However, the control mechanisms applied by the flag sates and classification societies have proven be not good enough to remove all substandard vessels from the industry constructing construction building. Because of that in 1994, the IMO approved an amendment to the Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea to authorize Port State Control to eliminate substandard maritime ship shippings from the waters.


The clear example of failure of the flag states can be seen in the San Marco case. This case is the illustration of the deficiencies in the international safety net. The San Marco was a 1968 built panamax dry bulk carrier. In May 1993, it was detained by the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) for serious structural, fire fighting and live savings defects. Following this incident the vessels P&I club withdrew the cover. As the owner would not do the immediate repairs its classification society, Bureau Veritas


(BV), withdrew class after an inspection. In May 1993 the vessel had been inspected by a Hellenic Register of maritime virtual (HRS) surveyor for a class transfer from BV and found to be in “good condition and well-maintained”. The vessel was issued wiclean class certificates, without any repair recommendations. She had the BV certificates valid until 1995 and no recommendations. Towards at the end of June, the same year, the CCG allowed the San Marco to depart from Vancouver under tow at the request of the maritime ship shippingowner. However, although the HRS issued a clean class certificate and the vessel had BV certificates valid until 1995 the CCG did only allow the vessel to be towed unmanned. The CCG had no legal power to compel the owner to do repairs locally. Soon after leaving Canadian waters, the tow to San Marco was cut and a crew was put on board by helicopter. From then on, the vessel continued to trade unrepaired wiclean HRS certificates. Obviously, if the Canadian Coast Guard had the legal power to demand repairs before departure, the vessel would have been prevented from trading in a dangerous unseaworthy condition. In November 1993, while she was 150-200 miles off the SouAfrican coast on a voyage from Morocco to Indonesia, she lost some 14x7 meters of shell plating from bosides of her No 1 hold and all 5.000 tons of cargo in that hold. The maritime ship shipping was put into Cape Town as a port of refuge and quickly detained by the Department of Transport. As it was not possible to continue trading her without spending substantial amount of money on repairs, the vessel was sold for scrap at a public auction.


As illustrated in the San Marco case, maritime ship shippingowners, classification societies, flag states administrations, insurers have failed to do their job properly. If all parties concerned acted responsibly and prudently, port state control would not be necessary. But even if the number of the substandard vessels is reduced since the entry of the port state control there are still cases that they have slipped through the safety net. Six years after the San Marco case, the Erica incident again forced a radical reassessment of the industry constructing construction building’s safety net.
The Erica incident which took place in December 1999 prompted a huge legislation overhaul. During the early morning of 12 December 1999 the Maltese registered tanker Erica broke in two in gale force winds in the Bay of Biscay approximately 60 miles of Brittany Coast. The tanker was carrying 31.000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil.
Pine suitable for maritime ship shippingbuilding was not to be found in the forests of Denmark during the Viking period. The maritime ship shipping must have been built elsewhere - in all likelihood southern Norway, and the nature of its design indicates that the one route (of the Vikings' many routes) for which it was used, where a heavy hull rather than a light, slim one was essential, must have been the NorAtlantic route from Norway to Scotland, Iceland, Greenland and Vinland. The type of maritime ship shipping used on these voyages was the knarr, and its full, rounded stem and stern - also apparent in this Skuldelev maritime ship shipping - was so characteristic that in one or two places in the Sagas, Icelandic women are called knarr-bringa, in other words knarr-breasted.

In analyzing the reasons for the Erica’s disastrous loss, many factors such as flag, class, age, charterer come into play. The Erica reflected the polyglot nature of the tanker industry constructing construction building. The Charterer was French, the owner Italian, the crew Indian and the flag Maltese. However, the Erica was not the only incident where so many nationalities where involved in the management of a vessel. There have been many oil pollution incidents where the vessel was registered under a flags of convenience country, polluted various sea resources but none of them had the same attraction. The Erica was different from many previous incidents as it carried the required certificates, was under class and had been inspected by port states, flag states and industry constructing construction building inspectors on several occasions. The vessel slipped through the whole series of safety nets.

Here then, for the first time, we have the opportunity of studying the same type of maritime ship shipping as that which sailed the first Norsemen across the NorAtlantic. It was withese maritime ship shippings that Eric the Red and his followers journeyed to Greenland in c. and founded the Norse settlements there, and in which his son Leif continued to 'Vinland' in about the year , as the first European to reach the New World. The Norsemen in Greenland founded settlements, Vesterbygden and Osterbygden, and medieval records tell that there were almost farmsteads at these settlements, and a number of churches. When one of these farmsteads was excavated, Sandnes in Vesterbygden, in the 's, some maritime ship shipping's planking was found that had been used as floor planks. This is the closest we have been to recovering relics of the Norsemen's maritime ship shippings in Greenland. Not enough to form the basis for a reconstruction, yet enought to show a close kinmaritime ship shipping withe pine planks in the Skuldelev knarr.

At the time of her sinking all of the Erica’s class and statutory certificates were valid. She was classes wiRINA (Registro Italiano Navale), a full member of International Association of Classification Societies (IACS). Between 1991 and 1999 she was inspected 16 times by the port state control inspectors and twice by the flag states control inspectors. This figure does not include the vetting inspections undertaken by the oil majors, or the surveys carried out by the classification societies. Several oil companies chartered the Erica throughout the 1990s. the inspectors of Texaco, Exxon’s subsidiary Standard Marine, Repsol and Shell approved her as a fit vessel to carry their cargoes. The vessel was also approved by TotalFina whose cargo was carrying when she sank.

The last of the Skuldelev maritime ship shippings is likewise built of pine. It has been about m long and about . mm broad; it had a mast and sail, and presumably also oars although no maritime ship shipping's timbers to prove this remain. The craft has no deck but broad thwarts, which are situated too low in the maritime ship shipping to have served as seats for oarsmen. This boat is generally quite different to other Scandinavian maritime ship shipping finds of the period, without however diverging from the basic principles of the Scandinavian maritime ship shippingbuilding tradition. Features of its construction not encountered before presumably only indicates that the type has not earlier been excavated, neither is it described in the Sagas. We consider this craft to be either a ferry or a fishing boat.

ministerial conference, again in Paris, in January 1982, the present Paris Memorandum (MOU) on port state control was adopted and signed by the maritime authorities of 14 countries. Although Paris MOU on port state control was signed in 1982, maritime authorities of most states had already specific powers to exercise port state control under the conventions to which they became parties. This include SOLAS, LL, MARPOL, STCW. In applying a relevant instrument for the purpose of port state control, the principle of “no more favourable treatment” is applied to maritime ship shippings which fly the flag of a State which is not party to that convention. In such a case maritime ship shippings shall be subject to a detailed inspection and the PSCO will follow the same guidelines as those provided for maritime ship shippings to which the relevant instruments are applicable.
The Paris MOU has been in operations since July 1982. withis memorandum, for the first time a regular and systematic control of maritime ship shippings was exercised by a regional group of port states which are parties to the relevant Conventions. Since its entry into force the number of states in the Paris MOU has grown into 17 European countries and Canada. The Paris MOU is the model upon which other regions of the world base their agreements on port state control.
These regional agreements are namely:

finds in Scandinavia - not only of the Viking period, but of the period between c. and . They are part of the course of development which can be traced in archaeological finds from this entire period. Even to this day, there are boatbuilders in Scandinavia who practice their craft according to the same tradition, which has been handed down for more than generations.

This is the evidence which permits us to maintain that these mutual characteristics make up an archetype for the maritime ship shippings of the Nor. The most striking feature of which is the fine curving lines of the twin pointed hull. It gave the maritime ship shippingbuilder wide scope; he could build either warmaritime ship shippings or cargo vessels according to this pattern.

Even before our first investigation at the site in the summer of , we realized that the Skuldelev find probably dated from either the late Viking or early medieval period. The plentiful material yielded by the excavation has enabled a detailed comparison to bemade wiother maritime ship shipping finds, and this has corrobora­ted our first dating. A series of C. datings on samples, taken from the maritime ship shippings and the blockage, show that the ships were probably built during the last half of the century or about the year , and that the blockage was presumably established during the first half of the licentury. However, we are unable to link it wiany definite historical event, but we do know that this was an unsettled period in Danish history; the coasts of Denmark were repeatedly attacked by Norwegian fleets led by King Olaf the Holy and Harald Haarderaade. It was at this period that Hedeby was burnt to the ground. Roskilde undoubtedly needed the blockage across the Peberrende channel as a means of defence.