The Brendan Voyage (28 page)

Friday the thirteenth proved to be our best day’s progress to date. A breeze of force 3 or 4 pushed
Brendan
along for sixty miles, and because the wind moved out of the north and into the east, we immediately noticed the rise in temperature. For lunch we ate an enormous cassoulet of beans and smoked sausage, after Boots had scraped the sausages clean of their green fur of mould.

“Let’s test some of our dye,” I suggested to George as we lounged replete from the meal and wondering what to do to enliven the afternoon. Some bottles of dye powder had been given to us in case of emergency. The theory was to drop the dye into the water where it would be visible to a searching aircraft. “It will color the water an iridescent orange,” George read aloud from the label on the bottle. He unscrewed the cap, and tipped the phial of powder overboard. The powder promptly turned green—not much use in a green ocean. “Perhaps the maker was color blind,” commented Arthur. “Or his stuff doesn’t quite work right in near-freezing water,” I added. Five minutes later, however, George himself turned a spectacular blotchy yellow.
Some of the powder had blown back and landed on him, and he spent the rest of the day looking like a strange species of leopard.

Next morning brought the first real snag of the second stage of the voyage—the kerosene cooker mutinied and refused to work on either burner. This was totally unexpected. All last season the cooker had functioned perfectly. Now I pulled out a box of spare parts and went to work to strip down the cooker, only to find that most of the spares did not fit. Someone at the factory must have made a slip-up when packing the spares. Superficially, this was merely irritating; but in the long run I knew that it could turn into a major setback. The kerosene was our only source of heat. If the stove failed, we would be left without hot food or drink at a time when a hot meal might make the difference between an efficient crew and an exhausted one. Of course we could sail forward, eating only cold provisions, but it was not a cheerful prospect. Even the Eskimos rely on hot food during long journeys; and we still had at least 1,500 miles to go in an open boat. After four hours of work crouching over the cooker, I finally coaxed one burner to work on makeshift replacement parts. But the other burner was never to function again, and for the rest of the voyage I was acutely aware of just how much depended upon that single blue flame.

Now the weather, after a spectacular display of the northern lights, began to flex its muscles and behave more as if we were in the far North. The wind swung to the southwest and built up ominous black thunder clouds ahead of us.
Brendan
stopped in her tracks and began to shy sideways, northward, under an overcast sky and steady drizzle. An unfriendly swell heaved up the sea and occasionally splattered aboard as wave crests. Trondur commented on the bilge water which was now surging and lapping under his sleeping bag near the bows. “I hear water,” he said, “but it is not wet … yet.” He was amusing himself by fishing for the cloud of Little Gulls which hovered in our wake. They swooped and pecked at his line, even carrying it with them into the air, but their beaks were too small to be easily caught; and only rarely did Trondur reel in a victim which he could add to the larder of seabirds hanging off
Brendan’s
stern. “Is there any gull you would not eat?” I asked him. He thought for a moment. “The Eskimo, they catch two, three hundred auk. This they put inside dead walrus and bury for many weeks, then they dig up and eat. This I have not tried, but maybe it is not so good.” Even so, Trondur looked mildly hungry at the prospect.

Saint Brendan’s day, May 16, was the last day of “normal” weather—thick overcast with occasional rain showers that were just short of turning into sleet. It was in stark contrast to our Saint’s day the previous year when, nearly thirty degrees warmer, we had waited in Brandon Creek preceding our departure from Kerry. Now in 1977, in the middle of the Greenland Sea but more relaxed and experienced, we toasted the Saint in Irish whiskey twice—once before lunch, and once in the afternoon when the wind turned, briefly, into the northeast and gave us a short push in the right direction. “Ouch!” grunted Boots when he leaned over the gunwale to dip his pannikin into the water for the washing up. “If that’s any sign, I’d say we’ll see ice at any time.”

“Cold, is it?” I asked.

“Bloody freezing,” he declared. “I wouldn’t fancy my chances of falling into that. It rains just as much here as it does in Ireland, but there’s a difference: if you touch metal in this cold, it hurts.”

All day long the rain continued to come down, and despite the improvement to the living shelter, the water seeped in. A fine fat puddle formed on the thwart near Boots’s berth; every lurch of the boat sent a trickle down on his head. Just before midnight, out of the darkling mist behind us, loomed the patrol ship
Thor.
On Petur Sigurdsson’s instructions she had come all the way to check our aircraft VHF radio, which was not giving a proper signal, and how
Thor
managed to locate us in that gloom and swell we never knew. It was near miraculous. She had to come within six miles of us before her radar could pick up an echo from
Brendan.
It was like discovering the traditional needle in a haystack. After an hour in which we tested the VHF set between the two vessels,
Thor
slid away into the darkness. She had come well off her normal patrol route, and I knew that henceforth
Brendan
had passed out from under the umbrella of the Icelandic Coast Guard unless there was a dire emergency. Ahead of us lay only the bleak coast of Greenland, whose only permanent inhabitants in those latitudes were a tiny band of meteorologists at the small weather station of Tingmiarmuit. During the last few years the sea ice had been growing worse and worse, and even the East Greenland Eskimos who had once hunted along the coast had abandoned that region as too inhospitable.

As if to underline my sense of foreboding the weather continued to deteriorate. The next day began with fog, mist, and drizzle, and the barometer began to fall rapidly past 980 milibars. A sullen swell from
the southeast warned us that heavy weather was on the way. George and I made ready. We dug out a tarpaulin, and stretched it as tightly as possible over the waist of the boat. Two oars acted as a ridge pole, and left a tunnel underneath the tarpaulin just big enough for a man to crawl into if he had to work the bilge pumps. The Irish monks carried leather tents and sheets of spare leather aboard their curraghs and presumably rigged themselves a similar shelter to throw off the breaking seas, otherwise a severe gale would have filled and sunk their boats.

By noon our lack of freeboard was growing dangerously apparent.
Brendan
was so heavily laden for the long passage direct to North America that, as the wind and waves increased, she promptly heeled over and began to scoop water aboard. Bilge pumping became a regular chore; and when the watches changed, Arthur and George climbed forward to reduce sail, rolling up the foot of the mainsail and tying in the reefs. Then we ate a hot stew of sausage, and waited for whatever the gale would bring.

By now I had abandoned any attempt at a westward course. The wind was too strong for
Brendan
to do anything but run away from it. On the charts I could see we were being driven farther north than I had planned. In a sense we were being embayed, just as we had been embayed on Tiree in the Hebrides. Only now it was on a giant scale. Ninety miles ahead of
Brendan
lay the pack ice off the east coast of Greenland. From there the ice edge ran north and then curved east, sweeping back toward Iceland, so that we were being pushed into a great embayment of ice. For the moment, we had plenty of sea room, but a day or two of gales would put
Brendan
into the pack ice. It was not a prospect I relished, but there was nothing we could do about it while the heavy weather lasted.

We were not the only victim of the strong winds. Another migrating bird landed on
Brendan.
This time it was a small brown-and-white water pipit traveling its long migration route to a summer home in Greenland. The high winds must have sapped its strength, because the exhausted creature dropped into the sail, slid down, and lay quivering on the cabin top. It was too tired to protest when George picked it up, and put it out of the wind until it regained its strength. When the bird felt active enough, it hopped curiously about the steering area, perched briefly on George’s hat, and then, still wary of humans, decided to spend the night on a coil of rope lying on top of the cabin
shelter. There it stayed all night, where the helmsman could see it, balancing and bobbing to the swing of the boat, and unperturbed by the slap and rattle of the mainsail above its head. The little fluffy shape made a companionable fellow creature in the dark loneliness of the night watch; but the bleak conditions were too much for it. By dawn it was stiff and cold, dead of exposure.

Our next radio contact was encouraging. My radio call to Reykjavik was picked up and answered by the coast station at Prins Christianssund on the southern tip of Greenland. Prins Christianssund is a lonely outpost lying only a few miles from Cape Farewell and it handles the radio traffic for vessels rounding the Cape, so
Brendan
was now, in radio terms, at the halfway point between Iceland and Greenland. The weather also gave us a brief respite. The wind eased, though it left a heavy swell behind it, and we could prepare another hot meal. As I reached for the pressure cooker, Boots called out from the cabin, “Careful of the camera!” I thought he was talking in his sleep because as usual he was snug in his sleeping bag.

“Watch out for the camera,” he called again.

I stopped, puzzled. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s in the pressure cooker.”

“What!” I couldn’t believe he was properly awake. “What did you say?”

“In the pressure cooker,” he repeated as if it were the most natural place in the world to keep his camera. And in a sense it was. I removed the lid of the cooker, and there nestling in the vegetable cage was his precious camera, dry and safe, if smelling of onions. Thenceforth no one filled the kettle or put a saucepan on the stove without first checking that it did not contain our photographer’s equipment.

Soon, for the third time in as many days, the wind turned against us, and picked up strength. Our spirits fell with the barometer. For three days now we’d been struggling in circles, covering the same patch of ocean with no progress. It was very disheartening. Enhanced by the almost constant rain, the sea took on a permanently hostile look. From one point of view the huge swells were impressive. They came as great marching hills of water, heaped up by the wind blowing counter to the main ocean current. They were grand monuments to the power of Nature. But seen from a small open boat, they depressed the spirit. It was difficult to judge their height, but whenever
Brendan
sank into the
troughs, the swells were far higher than her mainmast. The entire mass of the wave loomed over us, and became as much of our surroundings as the sky itself. If I was talking to George at the helm, it was disconcerting to see a great slab of water loom up behind and above his head not more than twenty yards away as if to topple on him. Ripples wriggling down its face, the water wall rushed toward the boat; then George’s head would suddenly begin to lift against the backdrop as
Brendan
rose to the swell. Abruptly the skyline would appear, and all at once there was the broad unfriendly vista of Atlantic rollers stretching all the way to Greenland, before
Brendan
sank once again into the next trough and the grey-blue water closed in about us.

At 6:20 A.M. on May 20, we picked up a faint signal from Prins Christianssund which gave the weather forecast I had been dreading: we were due for a southwest gale, force 8 rising to force 9 of about forty-five miles an hour, precisely from the direction in which we were headed. We scarcely needed the warning. The ugly look of the cloudy wrack ahead of us was enough to advise us that we were in for heavy weather. Sure enough, within an hour, we were struggling first to reef the mainsail, then to lower it altogether and lash it down. Only the tiny headsail was left up to draw us away downwind and give the helmsman a chance to jockey the boat among the ever-larger seas which now began to tumble and break around us. Even as we worked to belay the mainsail, it was clear that we had left one precaution too late; the heavy leeboard should have been taken in earlier. Now the weight of water had jammed it solidly against the hull. Each time the boat heeled to the pressure of the wind, the leading edge of the leeboard dipped into the sea and, like a ploughshare, carved a great slice of water from the ocean, over the gunwale, to pour solidly into the bilges. In ten minutes the water inside the boat was swirling above the level of the floorboards, and the watch—George and I—could feel
Brendan
growing more and more sluggish. This was dangerous, because she was no longer rising properly to the seas; and the loose water was heaving back and forth, unbalancing her.