The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  I went over to the men. Not one of them could have been under fifty-five years old. They were uniformly dressed in baggy tweed jackets and battered trousers. They all had gaunt knobby hands, large and reddened raw faces, with strong noses and heavyset bones.

  “I am interested in going for a spin in a curragh,” I said. “I wonder if any of you could take me out in one.”

  I was met with blank looks.

  “In a curragh, your canvas boats,” I repeated.

  “Oh, you mean in a canoe,” said one man. He turned to the others and muttered something incomprehensible. He was speaking Irish, which is still the common language in the Dingle. “We have canoes all right. But the weather’s not right for it. And you need to know what you’re doing before you go out in a canoe. It would be dangerous for a stranger.”

  “Of course I will pay you for your trouble, and I’m prepared to take the risk,” I coaxed.

  “No,” said the spokesman, “it’s too dangerous today. We’d all be killed. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “What if I paid you three pounds each just for a quick spin?”

  “Ah now! That would be different!”

  So off we went to find their “canoes,” a strange little procession that kept stopping and starting and changing its composition. One old man dropped out. Another was hallooed from a field to take his place. And the fourth—a younger man with a bright yellow flower stuck jauntily in his hatband—was recruited at the cliff edge just before we started down a steep path to the landing place where a dozen curraghs lay upside down on their stages or props beside the water’s edge. The crew talked in Irish all the while, so I needed an interpreter. As luck would have it, on the road we passed a young man who was evidently a trainee schoolmaster, one of many sent to spend a few months in the Dingle to improve their knowledge of Irish before taking up their jobs.

  “Would you care to come for a boat ride?” I called out to him. “You could help me with some translation as well.”

  “Why of course,” came the cheerful reply, and ten minutes later the poor fellow was sitting nervously beside me on the rear thwart of a curragh as it bounced up and down in the spray.

  “Have you ever been in a small boat before?” I asked him.

  “No,” he replied, looking startled and clutching the gunwale. “Will we be away long?”

  The trip was fascinating. To carry the boat to the water’s edge, the crew crawled beneath one of the upturned curraghs, crouched so their shoulders pressed up on the thwarts, and then straightened their backs so that the curragh shot smartly into the air like a strange black beetle heaving itself up onto four pairs of legs which then marched off to the edge of the slipway. With a swift movement the boat was lowered to the ground, tipped right side up, and when the next wave washed up, she was swirled afloat as casually as a toy. One by one we jumped in, taking care not to put a foot through the thin canvas. The oarsmen settled in their places; one good strong heave, and the curragh shot forward into the waves faster than any oared sea boat I have ever ridden in. In a moment we were out in the sound and curvetting like a horse over the waves. Balance was critical. If the boat stayed level, she flew over the waves and scarcely a drop of water came aboard. Through my interpreter I bombarded the crew with questions. How many curraghs were still used in the Dingle? About a hundred. What were they used for? Lobster pots and setting salmon nets. Would they stand a really rough sea? If they were handled right, came the response. What happens in a capsize? The boat stays wrong side up, and you drown.

  “Can you carry heavy loads all right?” I asked.

  “Why, yes. In spring we take cattle out in the canoes to leave them to graze on the islands,” came one answer, and someone else added a comment which made the other laugh.

  “What did he say?” I asked my schoolteacher-interpreter.

  “He said the cows are less trouble. They don’t ask so many questions.”

  When we were ready to return to the slipway, I asked the curragh crew to perform a small but important experiment. I asked them to row the boat on a figure-eight course, because I wanted to learn how the curragh rode the seas at different angles. Up to that moment, I had noticed, the oarsmen had been keeping the boat heading directly into the waves or directly away from them. My request caused some anxiety. The crew muttered and shook their heads. But I insisted. Eventually they agreed, and off we went rather gingerly. Everything turned out splendidly. The curragh skimmed away through the troughs and crests, then turned handsomely as the waves curled under her. My crew beamed with pleasure, and so did I. Now I knew for certain that the curraghs of Brendan’s homeland were not just inshore skiffs. They handled like true sea boats. The voyage was one step closer.

  Back ashore I paid off my curragh men, who were evidently delighted with such apparently easy money, and asked them who could tell me more about their “canoes.” They were unanimous in telling me that John Goodwin of Maharees was my man. No one else, they said, knew as much about canoes or built them so well. Yes, I had to see John Goodwin.

  So it was that I met the curragh-builder of Maharees, whose advice was to underpin a major part of my boat-building. Seventy-eight-year-old John Goodwin was the last man in the Dingle Peninsula who made curraghs for his living. He was the only survivor of an industry that had once seen a curragh-builder in every coastal village. A number of the Dingle farmers still knew how to build themselves a curragh in a back shed during the winter months, but John Goodwin was a professional. More than that, he had spent his lifetime accumulating information about curraghs because he loved them. As a young man he had emigrated briefly to America, only to return to the Dingle to take up his father’s trade and his grandfather’s trade before him. He even used the tools he had inherited, a few hand drills and wood chisels, a knife and a hammer, and a small selection of wooden battens marked like yardsticks that were all John needed to measure out his work and produce the sophisticated and elegant curraghs for which he was famous.

  Just as important for me, John loved talking about curraghs. For hour after hour he plied me with stories about curraghs and their crews, about building curraghs, about the days when every creek and cleft in the coast had its population of these small boats, hundreds upon hundreds of them, when the mackerel fishing was so rich that Dingle men living in America would come home just for a few weeks in the summer to reap the sea’s harvest. Proudly John showed me a photograph of himself and his three brothers sitting bolt upright in a racing curragh in which they had been champions of Kerry. Walking past a row of upturned curraghs, he would stop and point out minute differences between each boat; indeed, he had built most of them with his own hands. Once I showed him a faded photograph taken in the 1930s of a curragh frame, and without a second’s hesitation he identified the man who had made it. Another time I asked him about the days when curraghs were sailed as well as rowed. After a moment’s thought he began rummaging around in the rafters of the tarred shack where he built his boats and pulled down an old sail. It was a museum piece, and he let me measure and copy it, while he spent another half hour telling me how to rig and sail a curragh to best advantage. It was advice that was to prove vital.

  One story in particular stayed in my mind. On a wintry day earlier this century, John said, a steamer had been driven into a local bay by a terrible storm. The vessel was in real danger, but she managed to get down an anchor to hold her temporarily. Her master sent up distress rockets to call out the lifeboat from Fenit before the anchor broke. But the storm was so fierce that the Fenit lifeboat was unable to get out of the harbor, and had to turn back after suffering damage. Then two local curragh men decided to help. They carried their frail craft to the rocks, launched her into the raging sea, and with great daring rowed out to the steamer. One man leapt aboard and persuaded the steamer’s master to hoist anchor. Then he piloted the vessel through the shoals and reefs to safety. “A canoe will go through any weather,” John summed up. “Just so long as her crew know how to handle her, and there’s a ma
n aboard who still has the strength to keep on rowing.”

  I asked John if he would build a curragh for me, and show me how it was done. With him I spent a hot afternoon tarring and stretching the canvas hide into position, and in the end I had a small two-man curragh of my own, built to the traditional pattern right down to the place to step the obsolete mast. When I collected the boat from him, I asked John, “Do you think a big canoe could get all the way to America?” He looked at me with his old man’s grin.

  “Well, now. The boat will do, just as long as the crew’s good enough.”

  I decided to call my little curragh Finnbarr, in honor of Saint Finnbarr, the patron saint of Munster, said to have been the priest who showed Saint Brendan the way to the Promised Land. I hoped the little curragh would do the same for me, and to my wife’s chagrin, I stole the linings from the dining-room curtains to make a sail for Finnbarr, and spent all of Christmas Day stitching it by hand. Then I sailed up and down the little estuary outside our house to see how the boat behaved. It was bitterly uncomfortable, but the effort was worth it. By the end of the Christmas holidays I knew that although Finnbarr wobbled alarmingly and refused to sail upwind, she and her ancestors had been designed to carry a mast and sails.

  It was about this time that I became aware of a curious phenomenon which I could only call Brendan Luck. This was the strange way in which I began to have stroke after stroke of good fortune in my preparations for the voyage. The entire Brendan project seemed lucky. My encounter with John Goodwin was one example of Brendan Luck; the unusual circumstances of the original idea was another; and a third was when I discovered that a definitive study of Irish curraghs had been written by the man who virtually started the study of traditional craft: James Hornell, the naval historian. At one stroke I was presented with a complete record of curragh history, tracing the boats back to Saint Brendan’s day and beyond into the writings of Julius Caesar and other classical authors who had recorded the skin-covered vessels of the natives of Britain. Caesar’s army engineers had even copied the boats, building skin-covered landing craft for amphibious river crossings. But perhaps the most bizarre stroke of good fortune occurred when I was trying to work out how Saint Brendan might have rigged his ocean curragh.

  It seemed to me that such a long, slim boat must have carried two masts, but in all my research I had never seen a picture of an early medieval boat equipped with more than one. They all had a single mast, even the Viking ships. Then one day I was in the cellar stacks of the London library. I was not working on the Brendan project at all, but on quite another subject, and by chance I happened to walk through a section of the library that was little used. As I passed the stacks, a book caught my eye. It was misshelved, having been put in back to front. Casually I pulled it out to turn it the right way around, and my eye fell upon the title. It was in German, long and scholarly, and roughly translated as A Record of Ship Illustrations from the Earliest Times to the Middle Ages. My curiosity was aroused, and I flipped the book open. From the page where it fell open, one illustration jumped up at me. I caught my breath. It was a drawing of a two-masted ship! And it was undoubtedly medieval. Hastily I turned to the index to see where the original illustration was to be found. To my astonishment I read that the picture was copied from a privately owned medieval bestiary, an illustrated collection of animal descriptions. What was incredible was that the twin-masted boat came from the letter B under the Latin word Balena for whale. The picture was of Saint Brendan’s ship stranded on the whale’s back! I had not thought of myself as superstitious, but I took the trouble to count the number of illustrations reproduced in the textbook. There were some 5,000 of them, and only one showed a twin-masted boat. It was on that single page that the book which I found accidentally had fallen open.

  An important name kept cropping up in the libraries: John Waterer. He had written the majority of books and articles on the historic uses of leather. It was a subject vital to my project, so I got in touch with him and found myself invited to a most suitable rendezvous in the vaults of Saddlers’ Hall, the headquarters of one of the ancient guilds in the heart of London. John Waterer turned out to be as deep-dyed an enthusiast as John Goodwin. An energetic gnome of a man, his activity belied his eighty-three years. His twinkling eyes and huge ears, as he darted about his vault full of leather saddles and bridles, leather tapestries and book bindings, even leather mugs and jugs, reminded me irresistibly of an industrious dwarf in Snow White. John Waterer could not have been more helpful. Patiently he introduced me to the subject of leather science and leather history. He told me about the different ways of turning animal skin into leather by tanning and by other treatments. He explained how and when the various methods had first been used, why one leather differed from another according to the treatment or whether it came from the skin of ox or calf, goat or sheep, or such exotic animals as moose and buffalo. The depth of his knowledge was profound. He was not a university-trained academic, but had begun work in the leather trade as a luggage-maker. Like John Goodwin the curragh-maker, he too had been gripped by the fascination of his work and had probed deeper and deeper into its history. Now he was the acknowledged authority in the field, consulted for his opinions by archaeologists and museum curators. To me there could not have been a better guide into the esoteric subject of leather.

  A fortnight later I attended a meeting at the headquarters of the British Leather Institute. John Waterer had written to John Beeby, who handled public relations for the institute, and explained I needed help.

  “I want to build a leather boat to sail across the Atlantic,” I told John Beeby.

  “Does John Waterer think it can be done?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I think we’d better help you. I will get in some experts.”

  I was elated. Brendan Luck was still with me, and forty-eight hours later I found myself at the Institute explaining my ideas about Saint Brendan to three men whose expertise could help to turn my dream into reality. Dr. Robert Sykes was head of the Research Association of the British Leather Manufacturers and had an international reputation in leather science. He was precise, sensible, and at first a bit skeptical. Next to him sat Carl Postles, tanyard manager from the firm of W. & J. Richardson in Derby, a family business making saddlery and other fine leathers since the seventeenth century. Finally there was the burly figure of Harold Birkin, whom I was to get to know and admire very much over the next few months. Harold was the direct opposite of the scientific Dr. Sykes. Harold lived, talked, and doubtless breathed the business of making leather for special purposes. From a small tannery in the delightful town of Chesterfield, overlooked by the crooked wooden spire of St. Mary’s Church, he sent a variety of exotic leathers to customers all over the world. His leather was used deep in the coal mines for air pumps or out on the snowfields for dog-team harnesses in the Antarctic. Harold was a one-man thesaurus on the best sort of leather for any job. He could tell you the right leather for a naval fire hose, a sewing-machine drive belt, or an industrial safety glove. One of his prize possessions was a two-inch-thick chunk of walrus hide that sat on his desk like a petrified slab of wasps’ nest. Yet he could also make you leather for a tiny airseal, 0.8 mm thick, on a pocket tyre pressure gauge.

  “Saint Brendan is said to have built his boat from leather tanned in oak bark,” I told these experts. “Do you think this was right, and would it have survived an ocean crossing?”

  “Oak-bark-tanned leather is certainly authentic,” said Dr. Sykes. “The normal way of tanning leather in western Europe right up to this century was some form of vegetable tannage, usually oak bark if it was available, and taking as long as twelve months to tan fully.”

  “At Richardson’s we still do a vegetable tannage,” added Carl Postles, “but not in oak bark any longer. It’s too difficult to get and it takes too long.”

  “What about dressing the leather?” asked Harold. “It sounds to me as if the currying or dressing of the leather hull is goin
g to be just as important as the leather itself.”

  “The Navigatio merely says that the monks rubbed the skins with a grease or fat before they launched their leather boat,” I told him. “The Latin word that’s employed for grease doesn’t define what sort of fat it was. But the text does add that Saint Brendan took along a spare supply of this fat to dress the leather during the voyage.”

  “Sounds very sensible,” commented Harold. Turning to Dr. Sykes he asked, “What sort of fats would they have had, Bob?”

  “Tallow, or sheep’s fat, beeswax, perhaps cod oil, and for waterproofing …,” and here Dr. Sykes paused, “possibly the grease from sheep’s wool. It’s virtually raw lanolin, and has been known since Pliny’s time; people have used it for waterproofing shoes right up to recent times.”

  For about an hour we talked the problem over, and finally agreed that Carl and Harold would send to Dr. Sykes samples of all the suitable sorts of leather they had in their tanneries. Dr. Sykes would then test these samples at his laboratories. There they would be soaked in sea water, rolled and dried, flexed and stretched, measured and weighed, to see what happened.

  “What about oak-bark leather?” I demanded. “We must have some of that.”

  “Of course,” agreed Dr. Sykes, “but it’s very rare nowadays. In fact, I only know two, perhaps three tanneries who make oak-bark leather. There’s one in particular down in Cornwall in the West Country, a very, very old-fashioned place, almost a farm really. They supplied genuine oak-bark leather to the British Museum when the museum was restoring a leather shield from the Sutton Hoo burial ship. I’ll ask them to send up some of their leather, and we’ll test it in with the other samples.”

  So began a delightful period of work. The British leather industry took the Brendan project to heart, and what splendid people the leathermakers turned out to be. It was a close-knit industry in which everyone seemed to know everyone else in friendly rivalry, but with a shared appreciation of leather. While Dr. Sykes and his technicians exposed various leather samples to every test they could devise, I visited tanneries, saddlemakers, and luggagemakers who still worked with leather. At the Richardsons’ tannery in Derby I found that they even made drinking tankards out of leather, and I noticed small scraps of leather floating in jam jars and saucers of water on several windowsills. “What on earth are those?” I asked Carl.