Long time ago the unknown defined the maximum “Navigare necesse est” – “Navigation is necessary”.

The monument to these determinate and enterprising earliest explorers, merchants and warriors is the world`s largest fleet standing at the bottom of Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland and Ladoga Lake. We called it the Naglfar squadron in the name of the ship of the dead that came from the epic created on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

Perhaps, here is stored the world`s largest collection reflecting all the forgotten history of the Northern European shipbuilding. It is hard to make an exact computation of what percentage of the ship types specified in the surviving sources is known today to the scientists by its structures. What is known for sure is that the percentage is tiny. Judging by the reference books there are about 400 ship monuments around the world of which 80 percent refer to the 20th century. The structures and parameters of overwhelming majority of ships that sailed across the seas and oceans for the rest 19 centuries are in fact obscure. What were the most ancient Scandinavian “leather vessels” or “long ships” and “merchant ships”? Certainly, there were dozens of structures of which we know just a few. How did a schnecker look like? What was a three-master cogh? What were hulk and nave? Today humanity knows almost nothing about it. A whole layer of the history of world culture is practically lost. And we hope that there is a chance to retrieve the missing knowledge by finding the ships navigated by the ancestors of modern Germany, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Italy, the United States of America, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belgium and Spain.