The Brendan Voyage (26 page)

We also rummaged
Brendan
at the boatyard—the old traditional practice of removing every single item from the boat, cleaning her gear and inspecting the hull. Luckily we had kept the ash legs for the steering frame, and so were able to replace the oak which had cracked. Then, piece by piece we carried the rest of our equipment into the boathouse for store, and as we emptied her,
Brendan’s
leather flanks sucked in a few inches, like a python after digesting its meal. The boatyard cat, however, was dismayed. To the amusement of the shipwrights the cat took one sniff at Trondur’s cache of whale blubber and dried lamb, and promptly evacuated the boatyard, not to be seen again until
Brendan
was reloaded and safely afloat once more.

The director of Iceland’s telecommunications center also came down to offer his help.

“I think we could improve your radio system,” he told me. “I suggest installing crystals for aircraft radio frequencies so that you can try reporting your position to overflying airliners on the aeronautical bands. There are few ships on the way to Greenland, and fewer coastal stations. In fact, once you are out of range of Reykjavik there’s only one station in South Greenland before you get to Canada.”

“But isn’t it against regulations for a boat to use the aircraft frequencies?” I murmured.

He grinned. “Perhaps, but most likely you’ll be speaking to Icelandic aircraft, or to our telecommunications center at Reykjavik, and we certainly won’t raise any objections.”

The next day a pair of white-coated technicians worked on retuning
Brendan
’s radio, and the director had another suggestion. “You’ll need a call sign, so what about using ENDA? It sounds as if it’s Irish, the Irish call signs usually begin with an E, and the letters are taken from the middle of
Brendan.”

Icelandic officialdom, it seemed, was delighted to bend the rules to help
Brendan.
It was a refreshing attitude, and to our great good fortune, the commanding officer of the Icelandic Coast Guard was the courteous and urbane Petur Sigurdsson. He was a man deeply concerned with the sea and its history, and had been interested for many years in the boats used by the Irish monks. Now, under his personal direction, nothing was too much trouble for the Coast Guard to help us.
Brendan
was given a berth in the Coast Guard base; from Coast Guard stores we were provided with a better anchor, extra warps, a spare car
battery for the radio, and an oil bag to spread oil on the water in a storm. “You can never tell; it may come in handy,” said Commander Berend Sveinsson, the Coast Guard officer looking after
Brendan’s
needs. “Our lifeboats used to carry this type of oil bag, and maybe it will help in a storm.” When I took the oil bag back to
Brendan,
Trondur nodded approvingly. “This is good,” he announced. “Oil from fish is needed, but best is whale oil.” Twenty-four hours later he turned up with a jerry can of whale oil scrounged from the whale station outside town. It was fortunate he did so. That oil bag was to assist
Brendan
when she was struggling against the Greenland storms.

“If there is anything more we can do to help, just let me know,” said Petur Sigurdsson when I visited the Coast Guard headquarters to thank him. In their control room I found myself looking at the big glass operations screen on which they marked the movements of their patrol ships. Still on the screen was the dotted line of
Brendan
’s approach to Iceland. At each noon position an artistic hand had drawn a tiny sketch of
Brendan,
and where we met heavy weather, huge waves were looming over the little boat, menacing her. “When you were coming into Iceland we were keeping an eye on you … just in case we were needed,” said Petur quietly. I felt very grateful.

But one thing the Icelanders could not do for us was to improve the weather in our favor. We had
Brendan
revictualed within a week and we were ready to set out again, heading for Greenland. But the wind had turned against us. Day after day for three weeks we waited in harbor while the wind blew strongly out of the southwest, precisely the direction we wanted to go. Every afternoon I trudged up to the meteorological station and checked the weather maps. Each afternoon’s forecast was the same—westerly and southwesterly winds, usually strong and often gale force. To assuage our impatience, Petur arranged for George and me to go on the ice patrol with the Coast Guard plane that flies off Greenland.

As the plane droned westward at a few hundred feet, I peered down at the Greenland Sea. It was a discouraging sight. Days of southwesterly winds had whipped up a long, rolling sea which left white foam streaks to the horizon. The color of the water was a bleak dull grey-green, chilly and inhospitable; and the sea itself was absolutely empty for mile after mile. Along the path that
Brendan
had to sail, there were no ferries, no freighters, not even a fishing boat to be seen. Instead, about a hundred
miles off the Greenland coast, we came to the ice, a great ledge of pack ice extending out from the land and continuing north toward the Pole. From the air the ice looked clean and inviting compared to the foul mood of the ocean. But where the two met, I could see how the great floes dipped and swirled, and their shiny white surfaces suddenly changed to a hostile blue-green as the waves washed over them. Most certainly, it was no place for a medieval leather boat to venture.

When we landed back at Reykjavik, I made up my mind: It would be wiser to winter the boat over in Iceland and return to her the following spring to continue our journey. The season was dangerously late for a westward voyage, and by the time we reached Cape Farewell, the southern tip of Greenland, there was a real risk of autumn gales which could sink
Brendan.
Also there was far too much pack ice even to think of landing in Greenland. I consoled myself that this was what the Irish monks had done. The
Navigatio
made it clear that they advanced season by season, moving from one island to the next. Saint Brendan himself, according to the
Navigatio,
had taken seven seasons to reach the land in the West.

I knew that to delay the Brendan Voyage into a second season would bring practical difficulties, but I told myself that
Brendan
was not in a trans-Atlantic race. Above all, we should not take unnecessary risks. I told Petur Sigurdsson of my decision, and he looked relieved. “I’m sure you’re right.
Brendan
has done well to get here, but now the sailing season is too late. Let the Coast Guard look after the boat for you during the winter. You can come back in the spring when we have easterly winds, and continue your voyage.”

I assembled the crew aboard
Brendan
where she lay in Reykjavik harbor and, feeling depressed and worried whether the project would hold together, explained the situation to them. “Of course I would like to invite each of you again to be aboard
Brendan
next year. It has been an excellent crew; we all know one another; and I think we all agree that
Brendan
has shown that she can make it to the New World.” George, Arthur, Trondur, Edan did not hesitate. Each said promptly that he would be back next year.

Winter nearly broke the back of the venture. We all returned to our separate homes—George to an office in Brighton, Arthur to Ireland, Trondur to begin building a house for himself on the farm near Kirkjubo, and
Edan to help his brother overhaul their charter boat for a new season.
Brendan
sat forlornly in the hangar of the Coast Guard airplanes in Reykjavik. But the costs of running into a second season were crippling. The book publishers who had originally advanced the money to help make the project possible agreed to increase their financing. But funds were desperately low. To buy more stores and better equipment, renew insurance premiums, and all the other items of expense, I had to sell my twenty-seven-foot sailing boat
Prester John
—the car had already gone—and scrape the very bottom of the financial barrel. By the time the 1977 sailing season opened in northern waters, I had scarcely enough money to buy the crew’s return tickets if we ever did manage to reach North America.

At the beginning of May it was time to muster the crew. I telephoned George and Arthur to tell them a rendezvous date. Edan I reached via the harbor master of a small Scottish port, who had to row out to Edan’s boat to deliver the message. It turned out that Edan’s charter business needed his attention, so while he could come up to Iceland to help us get
Brendan
ready, he decided he could not sail with us. Trondur’s summons was suitably matter-of-fact. I telephoned the family farmhouse in Faroes, and when Trondur came to the phone, I said simply, “Trondur, this is Tim. Please catch the Tuesday plane to Reykjavik and bring some whale blubber with you.”

“Jaoo,” he replied simply, and hung up. Five days later the crew contingent from the British Isles was filing past the immigration desk at Reykjavik Airport—George as brisk and efficient as ever; Edan in a shaggy tweed jacket, jeans, and homemade shoes, still without socks; Arthur in a disreputable-looking Irish cap. The immigration official peered doubtfully at Arthur.

“Where is your return ticket from Iceland?” he inquired.

I intervened: “He is a member of the crew of the skin boat,
Brendan.”
There was immediate understanding. “Then he won’t need a ticket,” said the official. “Good luck and have a good voyage!” And he handed back Arthur’s passport with a smile. The following day Trondur arrived, as hairy as ever, bearing in one hand a stout brown paper parcel containing about forty pounds of whale blubber and dried lamb, and in the other a harpoon.

We went immediately to the Coast Guard hangar to inspect
Brendan
to see how she had fared the winter. My real concern was the danger
from rats and mice. I had heard several stories from tanners about the damage done to leather left in store, particularly if the leather was greased. Rats and mice, it seemed, liked to gnaw the fat for food. But
Brendan
was unharmed. She lay just as we had left her. The Icelandic winter had been exceptionally mild, and the rats and mice had foraged well in the open air. The only evidence of their presence were some mouse droppings and piles of torn-up paper between the double gunwales where several families of mice had built their winter nests.

Brendan
was in such good condition that we did not even need to regrease her hull before we lowered her straight back into the water and began loading. After our previous summer’s experience, there were one or two changes. We loaded 160 gallons of water, nearly twice as much as before, because there was still no chance that the pack ice would permit us to land in East Greenland and I planned to attempt the voyage to North America in a single long run. We also included two small VHF radios to increase our chances of talking directly to the commercial airliners overhead; and we took much greater care in wrapping our daily food packs, heat-sealing them in double sheets of plastic. Our diet, too, had been altered. After the previous season’s trouble with the dehydrated foods ruined by sea-water leakage, I had decided to revert to a more medieval diet. We discarded the bulk of the dehydrated stores, and in its place loaded smoked sausage, smoked beef, and salt pork which a Polish meat curer had prepared specially for me in London over the winter, together with a large supply of hazelnuts, oat cereal, and a splendid truckle of cheddar cheese. These were the foods the Irish monks would have eaten, and I decided to take them too, not for authenticity, but simply because they were the best food for the job. Oat cereal was what Trondur called “good work food,” and the smoked and salt meats were to meet every requirement of the voyage. We found it did not matter if they were swamped by a wave or soaked by rain. They survived without special care and tasted just as good. In fact, the medieval content of our diet was to prove a major success throughout the weeks to come.

Our clothing too showed the lessons we had learned. The 1976 season had demonstrated so clearly the advantages of woollen clothing in an open boat in high latitudes that we each brought extra wool stockings, wool hats and mitts, woollen trousers and scarves. Our friendly Icelandic boatyard presented each of us with a superb woollen Icelandic
sweater, and now Trondur collected a mysterious-looking package from the airport. “Iceland gave
Brendan
sweaters,” he announced, “so Faroes gives clothes too. They send this from factory. This is what Faroe fishermen wear.” Digging into the box he pulled out five sets of splendid grey woollen underwear, twice as thick and warm as anything I’d ever seen.

It took only five days to return
Brendan
from her stripped-down state to full seagoing readiness. It was simplicity itself to re-equip a medieval boat. We merely propped the masts in their steps, lashed down the oars, attached the steering paddle by its leather strap, took on food and water, and by May 7
Brendan
was ready to begin the second and major stage of her odyssey. A few minutes past five in the evening, the Reykjavik harbor master’s tug towed us out of port, dropped off the line, waved goodbye, and a light wind wafted us gently to the west. We opened a bottle from our fresh supply of Irish whiskey, charged our mugs, and I proposed a toast: “Fair winds!” “Fair winds,” the others replied. We knew that the most difficult and potentially dangerous stage of the voyage lay ahead of us.