The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  So too, it occurred to me, Brendan might defeat the sea. Perhaps this was one of the secrets Saint Brendan had known when he started out on his voyage to the land in the West. We still had more than 3,000 miles of sailing through some of the trickiest waters in the world to find out, but I felt a quiet satisfaction that we had survived our first gale of the voyage and could at least claim to be a few more steps toward our goal.

  2

  THE IDEA

  “There’s something odd about the Saint Brendan text,” remarked my wife Dorothy one evening. Her casual comment immediately caught my attention.

  “What do you mean by ‘odd’?” I asked her.

  “The text doesn’t match up with much of the other literature written at about the same time. The best way to explain it is that it doesn’t have the same feel. It’s a curiosity. For instance, it is the story of a voyage by a saint, so one would normally expect to find a long list of miracles performed by him. But Saint Brendan doesn’t perform any miracles. His only special skill is that he possesses extraordinary wisdom, almost clairvoyance. He knows exactly what is happening and going to happen at any stage of the voyage, when his crew are simply puzzled or frightened. And of course he has complete faith that God will look after them in the end.”

  I pressed her further. “What else seems unusual about the text?”

  “Well, the story has a remarkable amount of practical detail, far more than most early medieval texts. It tells you about the geography of the places Brendan visits. It carefully describes the progress of the voyage, the times and distances, and so forth. It seems to me that the text is not so much a legend as a tale that is embroidering a first-hand experience.”

  My wife’s critical judgement was worth listening to. As a specialist in medieval Spanish literature, she had a wide knowledge of medieval texts. In fact, we had first met in the library at Harvard University where we were both doing research: she for her doctoral thesis, and I into the history of exploration. In our own ways we had both known about the tale of Saint Brendan since undergraduate days. “Saint Brendan has certainly puzzled the historians of exploration,” I commented. “No one seems to be able to make up his mind whether the saint’s voyage was fantasy or fact. Some scholars have tried to show that he actually reached America; others dismiss the idea as highly conjectural.”

  “Well, I don’t see why Saint Brendan couldn’t have got there,” said my wife firmly.

  “No, neither do I. You and I know that it’s possible to cover enormous distances in small vessels. We’ve done it ourselves. Perhaps it’s time someone tried to find out whether Saint Brendan’s voyage was feasible or not. But it would mean using the boats and materials of that time to make it a fair test.”

  So the idea of the Brendan Voyage was born. It happened during an after-dinner conversation across the kitchen table in the house in Courtmacsherry where we spend our holidays in the southwest of Ireland. As I look back on that conversation, it was uncanny how our separate views of Saint Brendan’s text had overlapped. To my wife the text was “odd” as a work of literature; to me the whole Saint Brendan story was equally unusual in terms of the history of exploration. And, by a very important coincidence, both of us shared the experience of sailing our small sloop Prester John, usually with our three-year-old daughter Ida aboard, as far afield as Turkey. Thus we knew there was nothing theoretically impossible about Saint Brendan’s voyage in a small boat from one side of the Atlantic to the other, and back again. In our personal backgrounds in literature, history, and sailing were three polarized lenses that had swung onto the same axis. Suddenly we found ourselves looking through at the possible solution. There we were, sitting in the west of Ireland, not so far from the area where Saint Brendan had been born and lived, preached, and been laid to rest. In that evocative atmosphere it seemed entirely logical to research and to build a replica of Saint Brendan’s vessel, and see if his famous story could have been true.

  Of course there would be an immense amount of work to do before the idea could be advanced. First, I had to satisfy myself that the scholarship behind the project was sound. I was determined at all costs not to let the Brendan Voyage, as I had already chosen to call it, become a mere survival test. I was under no illusion that it would require many months of painstaking preparations to prepare the voyage, followed by a fair amount of physical risk during the Atlantic passage itself. To warrant such risk and effort the endeavor had to produce worthwhile results. It had to strive toward a precise and serious purpose; at no time must that serious purpose be shaken.

  The obvious place to begin was in the British Museum Library, and here I worked for several months, carefully dredging up all the data I could find about Saint Brendan, about early voyages across the Atlantic, and about the key text itself, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot. The background of Saint Brendan gave me useful clues. He was one of Ireland’s most important saints, classed as a saint of the second order. He was a man who had a profound influence on the Celtic Church. The date and place of his birth are both uncertain, but most probably he was born near the lakes of Killarney in County Kerry in the west of Ireland about A.D. 489. He was baptized and educated by Bishop Erc of Kerry, later studied under the famous teacher Saint Enda, and in due course rose to become an abbot. At that time the Irish church was organized almost exclusively into monasteries scattered around the country, and Brendan was responsible for the foundation of several of these monasteries: at Ardfert in County Kerry, Inishdadroum in County Clare, Annadown in County Galway, and Clonfert—also in County Galway. Indeed, it was at Clonfert that he was buried sometime between A.D. 570 and 583. But what struck me most about Saint Brendan’s career was his proven reputation as a traveler. Again and again I found references to journeys made by him. He sailed on several voyages along the west coast of Ireland. He also voyaged to the Western Islands off Scotland to hold an important conference with Saint Columba, who founded the great monastery at Iona. Then, too, it was said that Saint Brendan had traveled to Wales, where he became the Abbot of Llancarvon and tutored Saint Malo, the Breton saint. Other less well-documented reports spoke of Brendan going to Brittany, to the Orkney and Shetland islands, and even as far afield as the Faroes. These were all boat journeys, and the real Saint Brendan had obviously been a man who spent a great deal of his time traveling around the northwestern perimeter of Europe in small vessels. In short, Saint Brendan was a sailor’s saint, so it was hardly surprising that he had come to be known as Brendan the Navigator.

  But it was the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, more usually known as the Navigatio or Voyage of Brendan, that sealed his reputation. This was the text which my wife and I had both read as students and remembered as something remarkable. It had been written in Latin, and it described how Saint Brendan, living in the west of Ireland, had been visited by another Irish priest who described to him a beautiful land far in the West over the ocean where the word of God ruled supreme. The priest advised Brendan to see this place for himself, and so Brendan built a boat specially for the voyage, making a framework of wood on which he stretched oxhides for the hull. Then he loaded ample stores, spare oxhides and fat to dress the hides, and set sail with seventeen monks to find this Promised Land. They had a long, hard journey. They wandered from one island to another and had many adventures until they finally won through to their destination, and managed to explore the fringe of the Promised Land before setting sail once again for Ireland. Some of their adventures were obviously fabulous. For instance, they were said to have landed on the back of a whale, mistaking it for an island. The monks lit a fire to cook themselves a meal, and the heat of the fire woke the whale, so that the monks only just managed to scrambled back into their boat before the whale swam off with the fire still burning on his back like a beacon. Other episodes seemed equally unlikely: the Navigatio described how Brendan and his crew came upon a huge pillar of crystal floating in the sea. Later they were chased by a sea monster breathin
g fire from his nostrils. At one island they were pelted with hot rocks; at another they discovered Irish monks living under the rule of silence in a monastery. So it went. The Navigatio, some scholars said, was a splendid collection of seafaring yarns, a farrago of wild fantasy, one tale more colorful than the last.

  But several eminent authorities disagreed. They pointed out that, seen in another light, the episodes in Brendan’s voyage bore a striking resemblance to geographical facts. The floating pillar of crystal could have been an iceberg which the travelers had met at sea. Perhaps the sea monster was a pugnacious whale or a walrus. The burning rocks hurled at them might have been molten slag thrown up by an eruption in Iceland or in the Azores, which are both seats of volcanic activity. As for the monks of the silent community, it has long been known that groups of Irish holy men formed religious colonies on outlying islands around Britain. But there was one great stumbling block: how could Saint Brendan and his monks have made such a huge journey, which lasted, the text said, for seven years, in a boat made of perishable ox skins? Everyone knew that leather disintegrates in sea water, and one would no more contemplate going to sea for several months in a leather boat than standing in the sea in a pair of good leather shoes. The results would be catastrophic.

  I pulled out modern atlases and sea charts, and tried to match up these theories with the practical realities of the North Atlantic. The way Saint Brendan’s itinerary fitted the various Atlantic islands was certainly startling. A single similarity like, say, the volcanos of Iceland as the basis for the story of the hot rock could have been explained as a coincidence. But it would have required a whole string of coincidences to explain the complete run of other similarities—from the Islands of Sheep, which Brendan visited early on in his journey and which sounded very like the Faroe Islands, right through to the thick white cloud he encountered just off the Promised Land and might have been the notorious fog zone off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. As a practical sailor, I knew that it was awkward to sail by a direct route from Ireland to North America. This track is contrary to the prevailing southwesterly and westerly winds that blow across the Atlantic. It would have been easy enough to sail from the Promised Land straight home to Ireland with the wind behind the oxhide boat. But outward bound, Saint Brendan would have had a more difficult time. Unless he was very lucky with the wind, he would have been forced to go around the westerly wind belt, either to north or south. And on the way out he would experience great difficulty, battling his way from island to island and working his way west by stages.

  Excitedly I consulted the navigation charts that marked the winds and currents of the North Atlantic. The logical route leaped off the page. Using the prevailing southwest winds, one could sail north from Ireland and up to the Hebrides. Then north again, slanting across the westerly winds to the Faroes. From there lay a tricky passage to Iceland, but after that the currents were all favorable, helping the boat across from Iceland to South Greenland, and then sweeping down to the coast of Labrador, Newfoundland, or beyond. On the map this route looked very roundabout, but that was an illusion of map projection. It was very nearly the shortest way between North Europe and North America and, above all, it was the Stepping Stone Route, the same route taken by early aviators in short-range aircraft, also by the Vikings, and earlier still … perhaps by the Irish.

  It dawned on me that the Brendan Voyage was going to be a detective story. I had the clues before me in the text of the Navigatio. One by one they might lead toward a solution, providing I could find out how to follow them. But how? Again, the obvious answer was with a boat exactly like the one Saint Brendan had used. Such a boat would take me to inspect the places along the Stepping Stone Route that might conform to the places recorded in the Navigatio. At the same time it would also show whether such a boat could survive an Atlantic voyage. But what exactly did the Navigatio mean by a boat made of oxhides stretched on a wooden frame? Could such a vessel make an Atlantic crossing? The Stepping Stone Route is comparatively short, but it is notoriously stormy. Few modern yachts would attempt this northern passage, and to try it in an open boat seemed suicidal. It would take a strong sea boat to complete this route. A boat of leather certainly did not sound very promising.

  So it was one March day that I found myself walking down a steep track leading to the spot from where Saint Brendan was said to have set out for the Promised Land. I was deeply affected by my surroundings. This was Saint Brendan’s own country, the Dingle Peninsula of County Kerry and the farthest point of Ireland reaching out into the Atlantic, a place where the sweep of green hills and moorlands ends in the blue-grey ocean, and the air is so clear that one almost has a sense of vertigo as the land seems to tilt toward the distant horizon. Here Saint Brendan is still commemorated in almost every natural feature. His name is spelled by the older version of Brandon, and one has Brandon Head, Brandon Bay, Brandon Point, the little village Brandon, and Mount Brandon itself, to whose summit on Saint Brendan’s Day a pilgrimage is made in honor of the Saint, and in past years strong young men carried on their shoulders the altar table to the peak as an act of worship.

  Brandon Creek lies on the north side of the Dingle, a cleft in the line of massive cliffs that guards the coast. To reach it one crosses bog country, marked by clumps of brown peat stacked for drying and occasional tiny fields rimmed with walls of loose rock. It is a place of few inhabitants, though where the road finally runs out on the lip of the creek I found two houses, one on each side of the narrow road. The second house could have been cut from a picture postcard. Its rough stone walls were beautifully whitewashed. A water pump stood by the half-open door. There were flowers in tubs, and the neat thatched roof was held down against the ferocious blast of the winter gales by a lacework of cords, their ends weighted with smooth oval rocks gathered from the sea, every rock as neatly whited as a pearl in a necklace.

  Just beyond the cottage was Brandon Creek itself, a sheer drop where the Atlantic heaved and swirled in the constriction of the cleft, even on a calm day booming among the sea caves near the mouth of the creek.

  It was an unforgettable day, with brilliant sunshine alternating with stinging showers so typical of west Irish weather, and the aquamarine waters of Brandon Creek would not have looked out of place in a tropical island, so clear was the color. As I gazed away from the mouth of the creek to the northwest, my feeling of vertigo was even more pronounced. Out there, I thought, lay North America. Tradition dies hard, and if this is where tradition says Saint Brendan started on his voyage, this is where my boat will start too.

  I began walking down the track leading past the thatched cottage, curving down to the base of the creek where a stream emptied out the water it had collected from the slopes of Mount Brandon above us. At that instant, with a thrill of excitement, I saw them. Drawn up on the side of the road were four strange black shapes. They were boats, turned upside down so that their hulls were pointing to the sky. They were the traditional canvas-covered boats of the west of Ireland called curraghs, a type found nowhere else in the world. They are relics of the Stone Age, and believed to be among the last surviving descendants of one of the oldest types of boat in the world—the skin boat. Here, in Brandon Creek, I first laid eyes on the heirs to the craft Saint Brendan was said to have sailed.

  Crouching down, I peered underneath a curragh to see how it was made. Inside was an elegantly beautiful cagework of thin laths, frail-looking but in fact capable of withstanding great compression. Stretched over this frame was a tight skin of canvas, tarred on both sides to make it waterproof. Later I learned that this canvas, which has replaced the original leather skins, is still called the “hide” in some localities. Tucked under the curraghs were sets of oars of a pattern I had never seen before. About nine feet long, they were so slender that they had no blade whatever, and they were fitted with curious triangular blocks of wood, pierced with a hole that matched a pivot pin when rowing. I judged the curraghs too small for anything more than inshore skiffs, yet to my e
ye they were perfect. They seemed so delicately engineered and so gracefully curved. After I had climbed out of Brandon Creek, I turned back to look down on the four curraghs once again. A rain shower had slicked their hulls so that the four black shapes glistened and glinted in the sun. They looked as sleek as porpoises rolling through the sea.

  I yearned to go for a ride in a curragh, not just for my research but because I was captivated by them. A cheerful woman at the thatched cottage directed me on to the village of Dunquin, where, she said, I was likely to find a number of curragh men in the bar, as the weather was too rough to take the curraghs out fishing. I drove there, and asked the barman for advice. He pointed out a group of three elderly men sitting in a corner. “Any of them could take you,” he said, “but the sea’s no good today. Too rough.”