The Brendan Voyage (2 page)

As Tim Severin writes so beautifully in the story of the
Brendan
voyage, the ancient pre-Patrick Irish had a vision and a fairly concrete knowledge of a Promised Land far off to the west. Some of them may have popped over there over the centuries and perhaps more of them would have if it were not for the Irish propensity toward procrastination, to wit, “When God made time he made plenty of it.”

They would come to the Promised Land in the hundreds of thousands later, horrified by an Ireland crazed with thirst, mad with hunger, and staggering with disease. They traveled on what were known as “coffin ships,” where many of them are resting to this day beneath the merciful waters of the Atlantic. Tis said if there were a white cross on the waters for every Irish refugee who died fleeing the Great Hunger the Atlantic Ocean would look like a vast cemetery.

But Brendan the Navigator, with faith, a flickering flame, and, tis said, a rudder that was a gift from St. Bridget, sailed those almighty seas. Hundreds of years later, Tim Severin and his fearless four replicated the journey, wherein one quarter inch of oxhide was all that was twixt them and perdition. The detailed account Severin renders in this book draws the reader into the feeling of being there, hearing the creaking of the masts on quiet nights, and the roaring of the storm on many others. The five men on the craft were never alone; they were exhausted, sunburned, windburned, and without privacy. The power of wind and water over their flimsy curragh is only mitigated by the energy of their faith, intelligence, and teamwork. At times the exhaustion is so overwhelming that the reader can barely sustain the holding and reading of the book so great is the empathy.

To some people there is a foolhardiness to these expeditions, but the men and women, who scale the mountains, who fly the machines into the air, and go down to the sea in ships, glorify the human spirit and
give praise to a God of their choosing. They add to the store of human knowledge and leave us proud.

Having faced the perils of rubber rafting on the six-inch whitewater on the Delaware River and heroically guided a rowboat on Central Park’s lake in New York City, I can hardly write with authority on crossing the Atlantic, the ocean that vanquished the unsinkable
Titanic,
in an oxhide boat. To read of human beings at one with God, arcing the centuries, reverently utilizing that which nature provides leaves one agape at the magnificent simplicity of this wondrous and wonderful odyssey. I read
The Brendan Voyage
and am left with the absolute conviction and inspiration that all things are possible. What man has done, man can do and I, too, can sail the ship of my visions. Get aboard the
Brendan,
fasten your lifelines for the waves are deep, the waves are high, but there’s the Promised Land.

Welcome!

MALACHY MCCOURT
is the author of the memoir,
A Monk Swimming.

When
Brendan
set sail from Ireland, the enthusiasm and kindness of many people had already turned an idea into reality. By the time
Brendan
reached the New World, that circle of friends and supporters had grown even larger. So one of the most gratifying results of
Brendan
’s Atlantic achievement is that her success can be offered as a partial repayment to those people who did so much for her and the project as a whole. Several of the leading personalities will be met in the text of this book and the appendices. Others deserve special mention: In particular there were my literary agents Julian Bach, Anthony Sheil, and Gill Coleridge, who appreciated at the very start the importance and potential of the project and labored on its behalf. They in turn introduced me to the two leading editors, Bruce Lee in New York and Harold Harris in London, whose steady encouragement was the motive power to keep the project moving in the right direction through troughs as well as peaks. In Iceland Hjalmar Bardarson was always working behind the scenes and always seemed to be able to smooth our path; while the very efficient Arnor Valgeirsson made sure that
Brendan
received her supplies. Johann Sigurdsson and Icelandic Airlines held open one avenue of transport, while the Icelandic Steamship Company was equally generous with another. Finally in Iceland the British Ambassador there, Sir Kenneth East, was a most generous and thoughtful host.

It is interesting that before
Brendan
had covered a single yard of her Atlantic crossing, the project itself was half over. Her departure from Brandon Creek was the halfway point in the time span of the venture. Thus many of the firms whose names follow had helped
Brendan
long before she came to any public notice, and even longer before there was any chance to recognize their involvement. Often the help was the result of personal decisions made by individuals within the firms concerned, and although these individuals have not been listed person by person they themselves will know who they are. To all of them I should like to say—thank you:

B & I Line and Blue Peter Shipping (St. Johns) for transport; Brookes & Gatehouse, Lucas Marine, Flint & Brown, Incastec, Royada, John Gannon, Wiggins Teape, Earnshaw Ltd., Rolex, Ronson, Taylors Para-Fin, Morelands and Mallory Batteries for chandlery and equipment; Dr. David Ryder and Bandon Medical Hall for medical advice and equipment; Irish Distillers, Jordan Mills, Glynn Christian, Guinness, Rieber & Son, and Tiedemanns Tobaksfabrik for stores; Henri-Lloyd, Helly Hanson and Underwater Instrumentation for clothing; Bord Failte, Lloyds Intelligence Unit, Meteorological Office at Bracknell, U.S. Parks Service at Charleston Navy Yard, M. J. Higgins, Gomshall Tanneries, Emerald Star Lines, and Tanners Council of America for a great variety of vital services.

A glance at this roster of the Friends of
Brendan
shows just how complex and diverse a project like the Brendan Voyage can become. While in one sense it may be exhilarating to tackle new and bizarre problems day after day (where, for example, does one find a horse-collar-maker’s palm on twenty-four hours’ notice?), the office work can be a nightmare. Throughout, there was just one desk for the whole unlikely system; and there, keeping track of the enterprise, was the poised figure of Brigid Aglen who, working only part time, was utterly indispensable. To her and all the others I hope that this account of the Brendan Voyage is a worthwhile record.

The author wishes to thank the National Geographic Society for material aid and assistance.

Maps by Eugene Fleury.

Schematic diagram of
Brendan
by Peter Cook.

The seventh wave is said to be the worst, the one that does the damage in the turmoil of an ocean gale. Modern oceanographers know this is just a superstition of the sea; they have complex wave-train theories and the laws of wave mechanics to prove it. But still the notion of the seventh wave lingers on; and, clinging to the helm of a small open boat in the heaving waters of a bad Atlantic storm, one’s temptation to count the waves is irresistible. The mind longs for anything which might impose a pattern on the jumble of destruction unfolding each time the boat rises to the crest of a roller. A frightening grey vista stretches endlessly to the horizon, rank upon rank of massive breaking waves, each one capable of swamping, destroying, or capsizing. So always, at that brief moment before the boat drops into the next trough, the eye seeks to pick out the seventh waves, real or imaginary, the monsters lifting their heads in menace above their companions, altering the whole line—even the level of the horizon itself—before they too then sink down to hide in ambush.

On that wind-torn evening in late May 1976, it seemed to my tired mind that the wave pattern was changing. Instead of the seventh waves, the sea appeared to be collecting its strength in random groups of three. The leading wave of each group would come rolling down on us, steeper and steeper by the moment, until it could no longer support its own mass. Its crest toppled forward, and then came sliding
down the wave front in a self-generated avalanche of foam and released energy. When it struck, the boat shuddered and faltered. The helm twisted savagely in my hand, then went slack, and we were picked up bodily and rushed forward in the grip of the white water. In that dangerous instant the gale clawed at us, striving to slew the boat sideways so that she would be parallel to the advancing wave crests. Should that happen, we were lost. Then the second or the third great wave would sweep over the vulnerable length of the hull, and each time I feared it would be the last wave my crew and I would ever face.

No one could tell us how to steer our boat through the gale. No boat quite like her had been afloat for the past thousand years or so. To a casual observer our craft looked like a floating banana: long and slim, with her tapering bow and stern curved gently upward in an odd fashion. Yet her most extraordinary feature was only apparent if one examined her closely: the boat was made of leather. Her hull was nothing more than forty-nine oxhides stitched together to form a patchwork quilt and stretched over a wooden frame. It was this thin skin, only a quarter of an inch thick, flexing and shifting as the boat moved—just like the skin over a man’s ribcage—that now stood between us and the fury of the Atlantic. Watching the waves, I recalled the bleak warning of one of the world’s leading authorities on leather science before we started our voyage: