In their
small galleys they roamed the trackless seas, undaunted alike by the
terrors of the hurricane as by the perils of unknown shores. On
whatever coast they chanced--finding it inhabited, they landed,
fought off the men and captured their women. They sacked villages and
plundered towns, and loading their ships with booty, they set sail
joyfully, homeward bound for the shores of the misty North Sea, the
shallow German Ocean. Here they had a number of retreats and
strongholds. There was Helgoland, the mysterious island; Cuxhaven, at
the mouth of the river Elbe; Buxtehude, notoriously known from a very
peculiar ferocious breed of dogs; Norse Loch on the coast of
Holstein, and numerous other locker, or inlets, hard to find, harder
to enter when found and hardest to pronounce. In the course of time
these rovers were visited by saintly Christian missionaries and, like
all other Saxon tribes, they accepted the light of the Christian
Gospel. They saw the error of their way and eschewed their vocation
of piracy and devoted their energies to commerce and the spreading of
the Gospel of Christ.
Piously they decorated the sails of their crafts and blazoned their
war shields with the sign of the cross.
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