The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  Today, there is once again an abbey upon Iona. It is built upon the ruins of a Benedictine abbey founded there in the twelfth century, and it is the home of the Iona Community, a brotherhood of some 130 members, bound together by a common commitment of Christian prayer and action in the world. This community includes Anglicans, Baptists, and Catholics, and carries its mission overseas and into the industrial towns of Britain. Each year as many of the members as possible return to Iona for a week’s retreat, and repledge their commitment. Very kindly, the Warden of the community invited Brendan’s crew to lunch in the abbey’s refectory, and at the end of the meal presented us with a memento of our visit—a small replica of the magnificent fifteenth-century Irish ringed cross, known as the Cross of Saint Martin, which stands outside the abbey door. It was an apt gift, because Saint Martin’s Cross was the cross we had copied onto Brendan’s sails.

  Iona also gave us a new crew member to replace Wallace Clark, who had to return to his office after the long weekend. Scarcely had Wallace left on the little ferry before a converted, rather battered-looking sailing trawler with a blue hull came into Martyr’s Bay and dropped anchor. About an hour later I was accosted on the beach by a fantastic figure.

  “I say,” he began excitedly, “are you the skipper of that strange-looking boat? I must say, it’s fascinating. I’m told you’re looking for a crew member.”

  “Yes,” I answered cautiously, looking over the newcomer. He was a big, rather gaunt fellow, with a lock of long hair which kept escaping from under his cap, falling over his eyes, and being brushed back with a nervous gesture. His face was dominated by a great beak of a nose, and he was waving his very long arms so that he looked like some sort of strange, flapping predatory seabird. Even more remarkable were his clothes. On his head was perched an army beret, which I recognized from the Officer Cadet Force. His broad shoulders were encased in a shabby naval sweater far too long for him so that it reached to the knees of his frayed jeans, which were embroidered with homemade figures of boats, flowers, and animals. Last of all, his feet projected without benefit of shoes, socks, or boots, and he was apparently oblivious to the fact that he was standing in icy-cold water. I was impressed.

  “I’m the captain of that blue yacht out there,” hurried on this apparition, with a grand sweep of an arm. “We do charters through the Hebrides. But I’d like to join your crew, if you’ll have me.”

  “What about your boat?” I asked. “What will you do with it? What about your charterers?” I imagined some hapless group of tourists marooned on this spot by this madcap.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he replied. “I’ve got two brothers. They can take over for the summer.” Then as an afterthought, he asked, “By the way, where are you going in that boat?”

  So in this scramble of rag-bag enthusiasm arrived Edan Kenneil, soon to develop into Brendan’s jester and resident live wire. With his constant high spirits Edan was a welcome addition. He was one of nature’s leap-before-you-look characters whose bravado carried him head over heels through life from one scrape to the next. He could sail and steer, didn’t mind cold or damp, and—to my delight—he was willing to share the cooking. Indeed, his only major vice in the weeks ahead turned out to be an enormous and insatiable appetite. His hunger knew no discipline. He would eat virtually anything and everything, and we soon learned that any leftovers on our plates would be speared by his darting fork. His constant hunger and his enormous flailing arms were soon to earn him the obvious nickname of Gannet, in honor of his airborne cousin whose capacity for food is legendary.

  Edan needed two days to settle his affairs before joining us, and we agreed to meet at the nearby island of Tiree. So when we slipped out of Iona and turned down the Sound, Brendan was even more short-handed, with a crew of only four. As we passed the abbey, the great bells began to ring out a farewell for us and we could see the figure of the Warden standing on the water’s edge, waving goodbye until we rounded the headland and struck out for Tiree. We sailed under a sky that seemed to press lower and lower upon us, until we were swallowed up into drizzle and murk, and ploughed forward in a world of our own.

  The sea was about to teach us a lesson in medieval navigation. Anxiously I kept glancing at the log ticking off the miles we had covered. I peered forward into the gloom, but could see nothing. Visibility was less than a hundred yards. I glanced at the chart and calculated for the twentieth time the distance between Iona and Tiree. I asked Rolf to heave the lead line, but he could find no bottom. I didn’t trust the log, but already it was showing that we had covered the whole distance between the two islands. Perhaps the tide had slowed us down, I thought. Perhaps it had carried us off course, and we were being swirled around Tiree and would fail to see the island. The pilot book warned me that we were approaching a coast foul with off-lying rocks; and the radio began to forecast yet another gale. Brendan, I thought, had best be in port as soon as possible.

  Then suddenly Arthur gave a shout.

  “Land! Land! Dead ahead!” Through the murk a line appeared, a barely visible distinction between sea and shore, not very far away and stretching right across our bows. The wind was blowing us straight ashore.

  “Helm up,” cried George. Rolf scrambled forward to readjust the sails so we could alter course. With a rattle of its retaining chain, Arthur dropped a leeboard into the water to try to reduce our leeway. Brendan’s nose swung northward, but the line of the land followed with her. We were still running toward the shore.

  “Can you bring her up any more into the wind, George?” I asked.

  “Not without stalling her and drifting down,” he replied. “It looks as if we’re in trouble.” Rolf swung out the lead line.

  “Four fathoms!” he called out to me. I peered at the chart. Four fathoms, four fathoms, with land right across our bows. Where were we? Suddenly I saw the answer: blinded by the fog and in the grip of the tide, I had let Brendan run into a bay on the southeast edge of Tiree. There was no port ahead, only rocks which might puncture our leather hull. If we didn’t act soon, we would be trapped and caught, embayed in the classic fashion, and we were too short-handed to row out of trouble.

  “Rolf! Boots!” I shouted. “Get to the oar benches. One each side to give her direction. George, if we’re lucky, we can scrape her out of the north side of the bay. But it will mean going inside the outer reefs. Keep her as hard on the wind as you can. I’ll go forward as lookout.”

  From the steering position it was impossible to see clearly past the bows. The headsail blocked the helmsman’s view. So I scrambled up onto the forward buoyancy deck, grabbed a rope, hauled myself upright, and balanced there, calling instructions back to George, as Brendan weaved between the rocks. It was touch-and-go. We had to pick our way deftly between several groups of rocks, partly sailing and partly rowing as Rolf and Arthur heaved away, turn by turn, and George readjusted the set of the steering paddle. We were like a learner skier stumbling down a difficult slope, sliding and slipping between the obstacles, struggling to keep balance and inexorably toppling forward. The sensation on Brendan was just the same. The combinations of wind and swell and leeway, of the tide and the backwash were infinite, and it would be disastrous if we blundered, and the hull snagged the rocks.

  “Hold her steady, steady as she goes,” I called to George, as we slid past the first rock peaks.

  “Starboard! Starboard! Rolf, pull away as hard as you can,” and Brendan rounded another clump of reefs. A startled-looking seal plummeted off a rock as we went scurrying by. Fronds of seaweed swirled on the surface of the water, and showed where the reef lay less than a yard beneath the water. No keel boat would have dared go that way, but Brendan drew less than one foot of water, and I blessed the fact.This is how the curragh men manage to maneuver among the rocky shores of Ireland. We were nearing the end of the gauntlet. There was one last group of rocks ahead of us, the waves sucking and swirling majestically around the kelp-covered sides of the rocks.

  “Starboard s
ome more, George!”

  “No good,” he called back. “We can’t come any closer to the wind.” Rolf heaved frantically at his oar, eight, nine, ten quick strokes, but it was not enough. Brendan started to swing broadside to the rock and drift down on it. In less than a minute we would strike.

  “We’ll have to risk going inside. Through that kelp,” I shouted. “Hard to port, and Boots, give her all you’ve got.”

  Brendan began turning. The wind filled her sails, and she surged forward straight at the dark line of kelp. How deep was the reef beneath? Picking up speed, we charged at the gap. The seaweed plucked Brendan’s leather skin with a soft brushing sound, and our boat wriggled gracefully over into safe water without a scratch. Boots and Rolf cropped oars and slumped exhausted. I climbed down and joined George at the helm.

  “That was a close shave,” I muttered to him. “And another lesson. I mustn’t let Brendan get caught in a bay ever again, or we are likely to lose her.”

  Tiree was another of the Hebridean islands where the Irish monks had established themselves. In Saint Brendan’s time it had been the site of a daughter monastery to Iona. Some say it was founded by Saint Brendan himself, and such is the strength of the Christian tradition in those parts that the Gaelic-speaking islanders still point to one of the rocks in the new harbor and tell their name for it—Mollachdag, the little cursed rock. According to the islanders, this was the rock where Saint Columba, when he came to Tiree, moored his curragh to the weeds. But the weeds broke and the boat drifted away. So the Saint cursed the rock, saying that it would never grow weed again for the rest of eternity. All the other rocks in the harbor, we were told, grow a thick beard of seaweed. But Mollachdag for years was totally bald, and only recently have a few wisps of seaweed begun to grow on it.

  The Irish voyager-saints were obviously a cantankerous lot, because similar stories of their short tempers are found throughout the island. On the beach of Tiree, it was also said, Saint Columba slipped and fell when he trod on a plaice lying in the shallows; he condemned the fish to have both eyes on the same side of its head to avoid such an accident in future. And back near Ballyhoorisky an old fisherman had told me why no salmon are ever caught in Mulroy Bay, alone of all the inlets on that coast. One of the saints had sailed into the bay, he said, and asked for fish at a village. But the villagers had refused him the gift, and so he had driven the salmon from their waters forever.

  Edan joined us in Tiree and, as we were getting ready to leave harbor, he picked up an oar and took a couple of practice strokes at the water. I had spent three years at Oxford as a coxswain in college rowing eights, and so I knew an oarsman when I saw one.

  “Hey, you’ve rowed before,” I called out to Edan.

  “Yes, why do you ask?” he replied, looking surprised.

  “I expect it’ll come in handy. Who did you row for?”

  “Oh! I was captain of the Eton Boat when we won the World Schoolboy Championships in Switzerland.”

  Only Edan, I thought to myself, would have forgotten to mention this qualification before.

  From Tiree, we picked our way through a magnificent sunset, northward into the channel of the Minches, which divides the Outer Hebrides from the inshore islands and mainland of northern Scotland. This was a superb sailing ground, for we were sheltered from the full force of the Atlantic by the chain of the Hebrides, and while the gales raged outside, we could sail in comparative peace, and learn more about our strange vessel.

  I was worried about the strength of the stitches holding the oxhides of Brendan’s skin together. The collapse of our flax ropes had been a dire warning. If the flax threads in the hull were no better than our feeble rigging, then we were sailing a death trap. Brendan could fall to pieces without warning. Tentatively I gouged at the sewing threads in the hides. They seemed very soft. I could dent them with my fingernail. But they didn’t seem dangerously weak. I knew that they were of a higher-quality fiber than the ropes, but I suspected there was another reason why they were retaining their strength. When we were building Brendan, the flax-thread manufacturer had sent samples of his thread to be tested at the laboratories together with snippets of Brendan’s oak-bark-tanned leather. The laboratory had made an interesting discovery. As expected, the flax thread was actually stronger when wet than when dry, and it had been more resistant to rot after it had been stitched into the leather. The reason was that the tannin from the leather had migrated into the thread, and in effect had tanned the flax as well. This was a technique which fishermen had known for centuries; and until modern artificial fibers were available, Irish fishermen soaked their nets and lines in tubs of tanning liquor to make them last longer. But what the research laboratory could not explain was the fact that the flax thread when stitched into leather actually became stronger. Why this was so was a mystery to the scientists, and as I scratched at Brendan’s wet hide, I quietly hoped to myself that this unexplained phenomenon would endure.

  My faith in Irish flax received a boost at our next port of call in Loch Maddy on the island of North Uist. There the harbor master delivered to us a coil of new, improved flax rope. An Irish yacht, he said, had come hurrying up from Ulster with the coil, and had asked that it be delivered to Brendan with all speed. Later I learned that as soon as Wallace Clark had got home from Iona, he had told the same flax-spinning firm that made Brendan’s stitching thread about our difficulties with Brendan’s poor-grade rope. Jim Henshall, director of the firm, had bundled a consignment of the stitching thread down to the Belfast Rope Works. Could the ropewalk make the yarn into rope at once? It was badly needed for Brendan. Twenty-four hours later the rope was ready, and speeding north by yacht. It bore no resemblance to our previous stuff. The new rope was silky and strong, and a delight to handle. Gratefully we rerigged Brendan with less risk of the sails falling on our heads.

  We left Loch Maddy with five splitting headaches, the result of too much whisky and a ferocious dose of the bagpipes at short range, because North Uist is a famous breeding ground for Scots pipers. But superb sailing weather soon cleared our heads. There was a fine strong wind blowing clear up the Minches, and raising very little seaway.

  “Well, George, here’s our chance to see just how fast Brendan goes.” He grinned with delight.

  “Not worried about breaking the mast?”

  “No. It’s our last chance before the open Atlantic to try out her paces.”

  “Splendid. We’ll put up every scrap of canvas we’ve got—the lower bonnets and both side panels, and we’ll rig a backstay to hold the mast, just in case.”

  Edan gave a great whoop of joy.

  “Now we’ll see her go,” he said, rubbing his hands with glee, and he and Rolf began lacing on the bonnets, the strip of extra canvas on the foot of each sail, which increased our sail area to maximum.

  At first we were in the lee of the island, and sheltered from the wind. But once we were clear, the enlarged sails began to drive Brendan forward. Smoothly she gathered speed, the water curling back along her leather sides.

  “Haul up the leeboards,” ordered George, and they came clattering aboard, wet and dripping. With less drag and no keel to hold her back, Brendan fairly tore along. I glanced at the log indicator. We were traveling at six and seven knots, and going like an express train. Under George’s hand the shaft of the steering paddle was bending noticeably under the pressure of the water rushing past. If he turned the paddle slightly, a plume of spray shot up like a tail. Rolf was fairly dancing with delight.

  “Look! Look! Brendan’s racing!”

  A swell was entering the channel between the islands, and when we hit it, we began to sway up and down on the waves. The effect was like riding a roller-coaster at the fairground. Brendan began to toboggan on the waves, running down the wave fronts at eight or ten knots. From time to time she actually broke free of the main mass of water and began to surf, up on top of the main body of the wave and racing forward. Then the log would spin up to its maximum of twelve knots, and
the needle stuck there, hard against the end stop. The ride was exhilarating and breathtaking. Here was a boat from the Dark Ages sailing as fast as many modern yachts, and the sensation was unique. The flax cords and leather straps of the ancient rigging thrummed under pressure; the massive H-frame of the steering oar clanked and flexed as each wave passed us; and the spread of the sails bulged and trembled under the pressure of the wind. After two hours of this headlong progress, I reluctantly gave the order to reduce sail, for fear we’d tear the boat apart or run her under. Later I found out that a coast guard observer had been watching Brendan through binoculars as she hurtled up the Sound, diving in and out of the rain squalls of the gale. He telephoned his headquarters with an estimate of our speed, and forecast that Brendan would take six hours to reach the port of Stornoway. But as he watched her sliding past the marks, he could scarcely believe his eyes. He checked his calculations again, and then called Stornoway back.