The Brendan Voyage (36 page)

It was a grim scenario, and the situation did not become any more cheerful during that night. Driving rain reduced visibility to a few yards, and with an increase in wind strength, the helmsman no longer had the option to dodge potential growlers in the water.
Brendan
could only flee directly downwind, and we trusted to luck that we did not hit isolated pieces of ice, or worse yet an iceberg recently set free from the pack.

All of us were desperately tired. The constant strain of bilge pumping was a stultifying chore, which battered mind and muscle. First there was the awkward slippery climb along the gunwale to go from the steering position to the midship’s lashing in the tarpaulin. There you had to open the lashing with half-frozen fingers, drop into the dark slit, turn around to unclip your lifeline, duck under the tarpaulin, and
tug the tarpaulin shut. If you did not, the next breaking wave would cascade into the midship’s section and drop even more water into the bilge. Once under the tarpaulin, you had to strip off your oilskin jacket or wriggle half out of your immersion suit. Otherwise the next half hour’s work would drench your clothes in sweat. Now it was time to squirm down the tunnel under the tarpaulin to reach the handle of the bilge pump. Grasp the handle with the right hand, lie on one’s left side on top of the thwart, and pump four hundred to five hundred strokes. By then the muscles of the right arm and shoulder would be screaming for relief; and so you reversed position laboriously, lay on the other ribs, and pumped for as long as possible with the left arm. Then reverse the procedure, and begin all over again, pumping and pumping, until at last came the welcome sucking sound of the intake pipe, and you could begin the laborious return journey to the helm, put on oilskin top, unfasten and fasten the tarpaulin, clamber back to reach the helm, and arrive just in time to find that the water level had risen to exactly the same place as when you had started the whole operation. Only now it was the turn of your watch companion to empty the bilge.

Rocking the pump handle in the dark tunnel of the tarpaulin had an almost hypnotic quality. The steady rhythm of the pump, the dark wet tunnel, and aching tiredness combined to produce a sense of detachment from one’s surroundings. The feeling was heightened by the incongruously pretty little flashes of phosphorescence which slid aboard with every second or third wave crest, and dripped brilliantly down the inside of the leather skin of the boat in random patterns that confused one’s weary eyes and created illusions of depth and motion. The motion of arm and torso, rocking back and forth relentlessly at the pump handle, was matched visually by a strange phosphorescent glow in the translucent bilge pipes. This strange glow varied in intensity with each wave, sometimes soaring to bright sparks of luminescence, but usually a somber green pulse like a ghostly heartbeat. Under the dark tarpaulin, eyes tricked, shoulders aching, head drooping down onto the thwart with exhaustion, it was desperately tempting to drop off to sleep while still mechanically rocking back and forth. Only to be jerked awake by the rattling crash of yet another wave breaking onto the tarpaulin just above one’s head.

At 6:00 A.M. dawn came, and I looked at the crew. They were haggard with exhaustion, but no one had the slightest thought of giving
up. In the night watch I had surreptitiously stolen five minutes to lever up the stern floorboards and check the aft section of the bilge to try to find the mysterious leak. It was a job that really should have been left until morning, but I could not restrain my curiosity. When I told George what I had done, he confessed that he had made exactly the same investigation in his forward berth and already examined the bow section without finding the leak. It seemed there was no holding back
Brendan
’s crew.

“Well, here’s the battle plan,” I explained. “Each man has a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. Then Trondur and Boots work on both pumps amidships to get the water level as low as possible, and keep it there. This will allow George and me to work down the length of the boat, shifting the cargo area by area, and checking the bilge for leaks. We already know that the leak must be somewhere in the main central section of the hull.”

The others looked very tough and confident, and utterly unperturbed. We had just eight hours, I reminded myself, to find and repair the leak before I should be in touch with the Canadian Coast Guard.

Three of us had coffee and then I went forward to relieve George at the bilge pump.

As I sat by the pump, waiting for George to drink his coffee so that we could begin our search, I wondered where we should commence our hunt—aft, under the shelter? But this meant shifting all our personal gear. By the foremast? But this was where we had put the heavy stores like the anchors and water cans. Then, quite unconnected, a thought occurred to me. Last night, while pumping in the dark, the flashes of phosphorescence over the gunwale had been repeated almost simultaneously
inside
the boat and in the bilge pump tube. I knew nothing of the physical properties of phosphorescence, but imagined some sort of electrical connection was required. If so, then the phosphorescence had traveled directly from outside the hull to inside the hull, apparently by a direct link—the leak.

With a faint stir of interest I abandoned pumping and traced the line of the bilge pipe to its intake amidships on the port side. At that point I peeled back the tarpaulin and hung head first over the gunwale. There, just on the water line, was the most encouraging sight of the day—a sizeable dent in the leather hull. The dent was about the area
and shape of a large grapefruit, an abrupt pockmark in the curve of the leather. With growing excitement I scrambled back inside the hull and began shifting away the food packs which had been stored there. As soon as I had uncovered the hull, I saw the grapefruit-shaped pocket and the cause of our trouble: Under tremendous pressure from outside, the leather had buckled inward into the gap between two wooden ribs, and opened a tear about four inches long. The force of the pressure had been so great that it had literally split the leather. The skin had not been cut or gashed. Despite a tensile strength of two tons per square inch, the leather had simply burst. Now, whenever
Brendan
wallowed, a great gush of sea water spurted through the tear and into the bilge. Jubilant, I poked my head up over the tarpaulin and called, “Great news! I found the leak. And it’s in a place where we can mend it.” The others glanced up. There was relief on all their faces. “Finish your breakfast,” I went on, “while I check that there are no other leaks.” Then I went round the boat, hanging over the gunwale to see if there was any more damage. In fact, apart from that single puncture the leather was still in excellent condition. Indeed it was scarcely scratched by the ice. The other floes had simply glanced off the curve of the hull or skidded on the wool grease.

Except that one puncture. There, a combination of the curve of the hull, the wider gap between the ribs at that point, and the nipping between the two floes had driven a knob or sharp corner of ice through
Brendan
’s hull. By the same token, however, we also had room to wield a needle between the ribs and could sew a spare patch of leather over the gash. George and Trondur came forward. “The patch had better go on from the outside,” I told them, “where the water pressure will help squeeze it against the hull. First we’ll make a pattern, then cut the patch, and stitch it in place.”

“We must cut away some wood,” suggested Trondur, examining the ash ribs.

“Yes, whatever’s needed to get at the work properly.”

“I’m going to put on an immersion suit,” George announced. “This is going to be a cold job.”

He was right. George and Trondur in their immersion suits now had three hours of bone-chilling work. First they cut a patch of spare leather to size, then George hung down over the gunwale, his face a
few inches above the water, and held the patch into position. Trondur poked an awl through the hull and the patch, followed by a long nine-inch needle and flax thread. George reached for the needle with a pair of pliers, gripped, tugged and pulled, and eventually hauled it through. Then he took over the awl, stabbed from the outside of the hull, groped around until he could poke in the tip of the needle, and Trondur gathered it up from the inside.

It was a miserable chore. The top row of stitching was difficult enough, because it lay just above water level, so that each time the boat rolled on a wave, George was lucky if he went into the water only up to his elbows. With the heaviest waves, his head went right under, and he emerged spluttering and gasping. Each large wave then went on to break against the hull, and drenched Trondur who was crouching in the bilge, stitching on the inside. All this was done in a sea temperature of about zero degrees Centigrade, with occasional ice floes and icebergs in the immediate vicinity, and after nearly two days without proper rest. Inch by inch the stitching progressed, and a pancake of wool grease and fiber was stuffed between the hull and the patch to serve as a seal. Then the last row of stitches went in. This last row was completely under water, and George had to use the handle of a hammer to press in the needle.

Finally it was done. The two men straightened up, shivering with cold. George wiped the last of his protective wool grease from his hands and they had a well-earned tot of whiskey in their coffee. Even Trondur was so exhausted that he went off to curl up in his sleeping bag. Arthur pumped the bilge dry, and scarcely a trickle was coming in through the mend. I inspected the patch. “It’s almost as neat and tidy as if you had put it on in Crosshaven Boatyard and not in the Labrador Sea—John O’Connell would be proud of you,” I congratulated George.

“Well, that’s a job I would not like to have to do again,” he replied with quiet understatement.

That afternoon I reported our success to the Coast Guard radio station at St. Anthony’s. The operator’s voice revealed his delight. “Well done,” he said. “I’ll pass on the information to Rescue Coordination. I believe they want to move a Coast Guard ship into your area as a precaution, anyhow. Good luck with the rest of your voyage.” I switched
off the set and reflected that the Canadian Coast Guard were worthy colleagues for our friends in the Icelandic Coast Guard Service. Then for the first and only time in the entire voyage we let
Brendan
look after herself. We dropped all sail, lashed the helm, and all four of us retreated to our sleeping bags and took a few hours of well-earned rest. My last thoughts before dropping off to sleep was that we had been able to repair
Brendan
because she was made of leather. If her hull had been made of brittle fiberglass or metal, or perhaps even of wood, she may well have been crushed by the ice and foundered.

Neatly patched and safely clear of the pack ice,
Brendan
began the last lap of her voyage toward Newfoundland. Every day, we still saw icebergs drifting athwart our track. But after our recent escapade we were content to admire them at a distance, and at night keep a sharp lookout for their tell-tale ghostly shapes in the gloom. By now our chief feeling was the growing anticipation of finishing the voyage. We had been at sea for six weeks and were feeling worn. The constant strain of keeping alert for bad weather, the perpetual confines of our tiny boat, and the monotony of our daily seagoing routine had imposed its own form of mental strait jacket that became daily more constricting. It was more than just good seamanship that made us scan the horizon for signs of land: we were eager for our landfall. We knew that the icebergs meant that the New World could not be far away, because the bergs were drifting south in the Labrador current which runs close to the Canadian coast. We began to see other evidence of land—logs floating in the water, occasional patches of weed, and an increase in bird-life. But
Brendan
seemed to be dragging herself forward with deliberate sloth. She stalled in the calm weather and light airs, and drifted aimlessly in the current.

There was plenty of time to reflect that
Brendan
was not the first Irish leather boat to have reached the fringes of the Arctic sea ice. The monk Dicuil at Charlemagne’s court had said that Irish priests had
sailed to the edge of the frozen sea, a day’s journey beyond the land where the sun scarcely sank below the horizon. And the
Navigatio
itself spoke of a “coagulated sea” which Saint Brendan reached during his voyage, a place where the sea was uncannily so still and flat that it seemed coagulated. Perhaps he had reached an area of frazil ice, one of the first stages of pack-ice development, where spillicules of ice hang in the water in total calm and then coalesce into lumps which resemble the curds floating on the surface of coagulating milk.

But there is a more spectacular description of sea ice in the
Navigatio.
One chapter seems to tell how Saint Brendan and his crew sighted a great iceberg drifting along at sea, surrounded by its halo of broken ice. They sailed over to investigate this marvel, rowed around it and even coaxed their curragh into the natural caverns and arches of the drift ice which surrounded the iceberg.

“One day after they had celebrated Mass,” the
Navigatio
says of this episode, “there appeared to them a column in the sea which did not seem to be far away. And yet it took them three days to get near it. When the Man of God had come near, he looked for the top, but could see very little because it was so high. It was higher than the sky. Moreover it was surrounded by an open-meshed net. The openings were so large that the boat was able to pass through the gaps. They did not know what the net was made of. It was silver in color, but it seemed to be harder than marble. The column itself was of clearest crystal.” Stripped of the storyteller’s imagery, the incident is not difficult to interpret: Icebergs are visible from very far off because of their size and color, and the fact that they stand up from the horizon in clear weather. Apparently the crew of Saint Brendan’s curragh were deluded by this, and they underestimated the distance to the iceberg when they began to row after it. More important, they failed to realize that the iceberg itself would be moving along with the current, perhaps at one or two knots, and this would greatly extend the time it took them to catch up. When they did reach the berg, they then seem to have run into the ring of broken ice which often surrounds a major iceberg recently released from the pack, and they were puzzled that this “net” was made of a different substance than the main “crystal” of the berg. Probably the outer floes were of opaque sea ice in contrast to the pure-white glacier ice of the main berg.