The Brendan Voyage (39 page)

What sort of men, then, were these monks who deliberately launched out into the Atlantic in small open boats? Many must never have returned, but perished at sea. Aboard
Brendan
we had the advantages of being in touch with the outside world by radio, and we knew that if they could reach us fast enough, the Coast Guard or the deep-sea fishermen of the North Atlantic would have tried to rescue us in an emergency. But the Irish monks and their curraghs had none of these advantages. A dozen or more men would have been packed into a boat the size of
Brendan
and would have endured far greater discomfort. They would have been colder, wetter, and—in one sense—more isolated than we were aboard
Brendan.
Such men must have been special people, even by the exacting standards of their own day. They were directed by a sense of dedication which had to have been the single most important factor in their success. Out of this dedication came much of their suitability as open-boat sailors on long northern voyages. As monks they were inured to hardship. Life in a medieval monastery with its meager food, seasonal shortages, stone cells, abstinence, long hours of tedium, obedience, self-mortification and discipline, was an ideal training for a long journey in an open boat. Equally, their mental preparation must have matched their physical readiness. The outlook of their leaders, if not of the rank and file, was a bold combination of intellectual curiosity and a fearless trust in God. This trust encouraged them to launch their voyages and, once at sea, to sustain their efforts through adversity. The journey itself was regarded as important in its proper execution as reaching a landfall. To venture out in a boat was by its very nature an act of faith in a God whose divine providence would show them wondrous sights and, if He so wished, bring them safely to journey’s end. Should adverse winds or currents beat them
back, that too was His will. If their craft foundered underneath them and the crew perished, then they reached their divine reward doubly blessed because they had died in God’s service.

God’s service on these voyages did not have its modern sense of an overseas mission to go to convert heathen lands. On the contrary, the territories that the Irish monks sought were the unknown and uninhabited lands beyond the horizon, the special places, the wondrous lands to be revealed by God. In the apt phrase of the time, they were the Promised Lands. To reach these farthest territories was a heavenly gift; to be able to live in them, isolated from the evils of the world, was an even greater prize. There can seldom have been a stronger drive to probe the unknown in the entire story of human exploration. It was the quintessential motive for exploration at almost any price, and there is no reason why it should not have brought them across the Atlantic.

Brendan
had also shown us that the quality of medieval boat equipment was easily equal to the task of promoting the ocean-going ambitions of the sailor-monks. Indeed, it was an interesting fact that the medieval equipment on
Brendan
was often a match for its modern equivalent, and occasionally superior to it when used in the grindingly harsh conditions of an open boat in the North Atlantic. Timber, leather, and flax proved to be more durable in many instances than metal, plastic, and nylon; and certainly the former were much easier to work with and could be adapted for day-to-day requirements. This was vitally important when, aboard our small craft, we were only able to carry a few hand tools and a very limited stock of spares. The modern equipment worked better, until it broke, but then the traditional gear, clumsy and inefficient though it was, managed to survive the adverse conditions—and this is what mattered. Perhaps historians do not realize just how well the medieval seafarers were equipped for their endeavors with bronze fittings, handpicked timbers, leather, and flax cordage; and the modern seafarer forgets the tremendous advantages of flexibility and durability in the traditional materials which are all-important when the crises occur, as they always do at sea.

Similarly, there is little that the medieval sailor would want to borrow from the modern sailor to improve his personal comfort and sustenance. Apart from modern waterproof outer clothing, the medieval sailor was better clad in his woollen trousers, shirt, and cloak than in garments of synthetic fibers. And when he embarked on a cold, wet
voyage in an open boat, his diet of dried meats and fish, oats, fruit, and nuts was unsurpassed. It was more nutritious and palatable, and lasted better, than the dehydrated packaged foods of today. His supply of drinking water could be carried in leather flasks, and replenished in emergency by the ample rainfall of northern waters collected in upturned sheets of leather, or topped up by landings on the islands of the Stepping Stone Route. For extra food the medieval sailor could fish or take seabirds from the wealth of the sea around him. Saint Brendan and his monks were lucky to salvage a dead whale, which gave them enough meat for three months, but it is equally clear that they were accustomed to picking up fresh provisions at every inhabited island they visited, and they were using what amounted to a chain of supply places along the Stepping Stone Route to ease their logistical problems.

Perhaps one reason why the medieval Irish voyages have been so little appreciated for what they were is because they have been described by storytellers whose tales of distant lands and fantastic monsters seem naïve to the modern critic. Such yarns appear overblown, simple-minded, incredible. But the real fault lies not with the medieval author for his writing, but in the modern perception of the older experience. It is easy to dismiss such tales as worthless and childish when they are viewed from the commanding heights of twentieth-century knowledge. But
Brendan
taught us to look at them otherwise.
Brendan
helped us to understand them by placing us back in situations similar to the original. Time and again we too found ourselves deeply impressed, and sometimes awed, by what we encountered at sea. Some episodes were unforgettable because their visual splendor was combined with the excitement of physical danger. For example, the breath-taking advance of
Brendan
toward the stark and looming cliffs of the Faroes in mist and tide race; or the long engagement among the ice floes of Labrador, incredibly beautiful in their shades of color, will stay long in our minds.

Other memories were more—perhaps the beauty of the slow northern sunsets, or the damp half world of the Greenland fog banks when one’s vision focuses on the tiny, near objects like the glistening droplets forming on a woollen sweater. Or there were the moments of total surprise like the first wondrous rush of a school of pilot whales surfacing around our leather boat in a puffing and wallowing mass,
surrounding us with glimpse upon glimpse of our ocean companions. One may have read in advance of such scenes, half imagined them, or even seen excellent photographs of them. But the reality was far greater than the expectation, and stirred us even with our twentieth-century attitudes. How much more impressive these same scenes must have been to medieval sailors who were eager and expectant to see God’s marvels. In a sense even their vivid prose fails to capture the splendor of the occasion, and it is scarcely surprising that they should have come back and reported so extravagantly and with such wonder.

This appreciation of their medieval outlook was one of
Brendan
’s most valid lessons to us, a balance to the more scientific data of laboratory reports on flax and oak-bark leather, the rowing and towing tests to try to fix the boat’s theoretical performance, the daily records of winds and sea states, leeway and miles made good, as we assessed the oceangoing behavior of our leather boat for nautical archaeologists. And running parallel to the medieval aura was a modern lesson: from the moment we first sailed from Brandon Creek to the day when we put ashore in Newfoundland, we had a privileged contact with the seafaring communities around the North Atlantic as they still exist today. When we moved
Brendan
from her landfall at Peckford Island across to the little fishing port of Musgrave Harbor on the mainland, the local fishing boats returning from their day’s work escorted us home. As we drew near the harbor entrance, we saw the pier was thronged with spectators. They had come down to the harbor from the neighboring fishing hamlets and from the scattered line of wooden frame houses which curved around the bay. Now they stood and waved, and cheered, and greeted
Brendan
with the same generous enthusiasm which had met us all along the route the leather boat had sailed.

Among the first to scramble aboard as we tied alongside the fishing boats was a deputy from the community. Would we attend a little celebration? Of course we would. All next day the fishermen’s wives cleaned and prepared the food that their menfolk brought in from the sea and donated—piles of lobsters, heaps of crabs’ legs, and the local delicacy of cod tongues fried in batter.

That evening I found myself gazing down the long table piled with food and reflecting to myself how lucky we on
Brendan
had been with all the people we had met on our long path to the New World. With their
encouragement we had achieved what we had set out to do, and we had very many happy memories of our landfalls around the North Atlantic.

Then the band, three men who themselves worked by day as fishermen, began to play the local songs of the Newfoundland coast, many of their tunes based on traditional Irish airs that were brought to Newfoundland by the Irish immigrants who came there in the last century. The dancing began. Listening to the swirl of the music and watching the spontaneous gaiety of the dancers, I thought of what lay ahead for us. George would be returning home to England with his wife Judith and looking to start a new job very different from his role as
Brendan
’s sailing master. Trondur had his ticket back to the Faroes, where he would be working up the sketches that he had made aboard and taking up his sculpture once more; and Arthur, as easy-going as ever, planned to tour the United States and Canada. I had the reports and results of the entire project to correlate and develop back at my desk and in the libraries where the preliminary work had been done so very many months ago.

It seemed a good time to ask myself the question that I knew we would be asked many times in the future: Would we go on the Brendan Voyage again, knowing the discomfort and difficulties that faced us? For my own part I was sure of my answer: If the venture would help our understanding, if it would increase our appreciation of the past, and if there was the same enthusiasm and help—and good luck—available from the beginnings of the project to its journey’s end, the answer was—yes.

So many manuscripts of the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
have survived that it took an American scholar nearly thirty years to track them down—and even then he admitted that he had not found them all. Nevertheless a great debt is owed to this scholar, Carl Selmer, for his painstaking labors in compiling a much-needed comprehensive edition of the
Navigatio
in its Latin version. He used eighteen of about 120
Navigatio
manuscripts to produce his edition, which was printed by the University of Notre Dame Press as Number IV in their Publications in Medieval Studies (1959).

Until Selmer’s work there was no good composite edition generally available to scholars of the
Navigatio’s
Latin test. Since then, both Penguin Books in
Lives of the Saints
(1965) and Professor John J. O’Meara of University College Dublin, with his
The Voyage of Saint Brendan
(1976), have produced English translations. Their translations, particularly the latter, catch the flavor of the original narrative with all its important religious, scholarly, and maritime overtones. The following synopsis is only intended as a paraphrase. It is the bare bones of the
Navigatio,
rendered down into the factual narrative of a remarkable venture by sea:

Chapter 1.
Saint Brendan was living at Clonfert as the head of a community of 3,000 monks when he was visited by a monk named Barrind. Barrind told Brendan how he had visited Saint Mernoc, a former disciple who had gone to live as an anchorite and was now the abbot of a monastery on an offshore island. Saint Mernoc had invited Barrind to go with him by boat to the Promised Land of the Saints. Setting out westward, they passed through a thick fog and reached a wide land, rich in fruit and flowers. For fifteen days they walked around the land, until they reached a river flowing from east to west. There they were met by a man who told them that they should go no farther, but return home. He told them that the island had been there since the beginning of the world, and that they had actually been ashore for a year, though they had not needed food or drink. This man accompanied the travelers back to their boat and they re-embarked. Then he vanished, and the travelers sailed home through the fog back to Saint Mernoc’s monastery. There the monks told Barrind that Saint Mernoc often sailed away to the same Promised Land and stayed away a long time.

Chapter 2.
After Barrind had left him to return to his own cell, Brendan picked fourteen monks from his own community, and told them that he dearly wanted to visit this Promised Land of the Saints. Promptly they volunteered to accompany him.

Chapter 3.
After fasting, the Saint and his companions paid a three-day visit to the island of Saint Enda (Inishmore, Aran Islands) for his blessing.

Chapter 4.
Then Brendan and his monks pitched tent on a narrow creek under a mountain called Brendan’s Seat. There they built a wood-framed boat, covered in oak-bark-tanned oxhides, and smeared the joints of the hides with fat to seal them. In the boat they put a mast and sail, steering gear, supplies for forty days, spare hides and fat for dressing leather.

Chapter 5.
Just as they were about to set sail, three monks came down to the beach, and begged to be taken aboard. Brendan agreed, but he
warned that two of them would meet a hideous fate, and the third also would not return from the voyage.