The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  Chapter 25. Sailing south for seven days, they saw the strange sight of a man sitting on a rock with his cloak suspended on an iron apparatus in front of him. The rock was being battered by the waves which sometimes broke over the man’s head, while the wind flailed his cloak into his eyes and forehead. Brendan asked who he was, and he replied he was Judas, and that the Lord spared him to sit on the rock on holy days free from the torment of Hell in the fiery mountain. At the evening hour, innumerable demons covered the sea, circling the rock and shrieking at Brendan to go away. Brendan argued with them, and the demons followed the boat as it left, then they turned back and lifted Judas up with great force and howling.

  Chapter 26. Three days to the south Saint Brendan and his companions came upon another small island. This one was circular—about two hundred yards in circumference, with sheer cliffs and no landing place. The flintlike rock was bare. Eventually they found a landing, a ledge so narrow it could just take the prow of the curragh. Brendan went ashore by himself and climbed to the top of the island, where he found two cave entrances facing one another on the east side of the island. At one cave entrance was a tiny spring of fresh water. In this cave dwelt an ancient anchorite, entirely clothed in his long white hair and beard. He told Saint Brendan that he had once been a monk at Saint Patrick’s monastery, and when the Saint died, Patrick’s ghost had told him to set out on the sea in a boat. Of its own accord the boat had brought the anchorite to the island, where for thirty years he had lived on fish brought every third day by an otter, who also brought him firewood. Then he had found the twin caves and the spring, and lived there for sixty more years. The anchorite said he was now 140 years old, and he told Saint Brendan to stock up with water from the spring because he had a forty-day journey before him, back to the Island of Sheep and the Paradise of Birds. After that, he would have a forty-day voyage to the Promised Land of the Saints, a forty-day stay there, and then God would bring Brendan safely back to Ireland.

  Chapter 27. Saint Brendan and his crew received the old anchorite’s blessing and began to sail south. They were carried hither and thither, living only on the fresh water from the island. Eventually, on Holy Saturday, they came again to the Island of Sheep. There the Steward met them at the landing place, helped each man out of the boat, and gave them supper. Then he came aboard with them, and they beached on the whale Jasconius, who took them on his back across to the Paradise of Birds. The Steward told them to fill their water vessels, because this time he would sail on with them and be their guide. Without him, he said, they would not reach the Promised Land of the Saints.

  Chapter 28. Saint Brendan, the Steward, and the crew now crossed back to the Island of Sheep to stock up with supplies for the forty-day trip. Then they sailed forty days to the east. The Steward went up into the bow of the boat to show them the way. One evening after forty days a great fog swallowed them, so they could scarcely see one another. The steward told Brendan that the fog perpetually encircled the land which Brendan had been seeking for seven years. An hour later a great light shone, and the boat came to shore. The monks disembarked in a wide land full of autumnal fruit-bearing trees. When they had gone in a circle around the land, it was still light. They ate fruit and drank water, and in forty days’ exploring did not come to the end of the land. But one day they came upon a great river, which Brendan said they could not cross, nor did they know how big the land was. Here they were met by a young man who embraced them, called them all by name, and told Saint Brendan that God had delayed them in their quest to get there in order to show them his secrets in the great ocean. He instructed them to gather fruit and precious stones, and to return home as Brendan’s last days were near. The land, the young man said, would be made known to Saint Brendan’s successors when the Christians were being persecuted, and the river divided the island.

  Brendan gathered samples of fruits and gems, took his leave of the Steward, and sailed out through the fog. Then they came to the Island of Delights, where they stayed three days with the abbot, and then Brendan went home to his own community.

  Chapter 29. His monastery received Brendan joyfully, and he told them of everything he remembered happening on his journey. Finally he told them of his approaching death, according to the young man in the Promised Land. The prophecy was correct. Shortly after Brendan had made his proper arrangements and taken the sacraments, he died among his disciples and went to the Lord. Amen.

  APPENDIX II

  THE NAVIGATIO AND BRENDAN

  The Brendan Voyage was in some ways a detective story. One might imagine the medieval text of the Navigatio as the list of clues which aroused the first suspicion that a felony has been committed. The “felony” was, of course, the discovery of North America several centuries before the date that is generally accepted; and the suspects are the seafaring monks of early Christian Ireland. Cast in this classic detective format, the building of a replica skin boat to follow the trail of clues around the North Atlantic to see where they led is the well-tried technique of reconstructing the suspect’s movements to see if they were physically possible, and what light may be shed on the suspect’s motives and methods.

  The best detectives, in fiction anyway, begin by trying to establish the exact time of the crime, and here the historical detective dealing with Saint Brendan’s voyage must start out cautiously. The earliest date at which such a voyage, or voyages, would have taken place if they were made by the Christian Irish, as seems likely by the consistently Christian tone and style of the Navigatio, is after the conversion of Ireland to Christianity in the early fifth century A.D. Very probably the voyage(s) would not have taken place before Saint Brendan’s own lifetime, c. 489–c. 570 or 583. At the other end of the scale, the latest time for the voyage(s) is obviously the date that the Navigatio was composed. But when was that? Scholars who have tackled the problem disagree by a very wide margin. The most conservative estimate is that at least three of the surviving manuscripts of the Navigatio are from the tenth century. But this is only the date of the writing down of the manuscripts themselves; the actual composition of the tale is clearly much older. One view maintains that the Navigatio was actually composed in the ninth century, but Professor James Carney of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, certainly one of the most eminent Celticists to have looked closely at the problem, would go much further back. He argues that the Navigatio, much as we know it, was produced in Latin around A.D. 800, and that a primitive version of the story probably existed within Saint Brendan’s lifetime. He has even found reference to the fact that Saint Brendan himself was recognized as a composer of poems.

  These literary scholars are the forensic experts called in to assist the historical detective, and it is clear that even their disagreements on the date of the Navigatio do not detract materially from the importance of the case: Even by the most conservative dating, the “Promised Land” described in the Navigatio is earlier than any known Norse reference to the New World. And it is therefore worthwhile investigating whether the Irish had reached North America before Leif Eriksson.

  Traditionally, the detective’s next step is to try to weigh up the value of the list of clues as a whole. With the Navigatio this means deciding whether the text is sufficiently reliable to warrant a full-scale investigation of Saint Brendan’s alleged voyage. Here the first point to remark is how consistent the different manuscripts of the Navigatio are, one to another, in the areas that concern the investigation. Considering that there are some 120 surviving manuscripts in Latin, not counting other languages, it is remarkable how little they vary. Put another way, the witness tells the same story over and over again, and cannot be shaken. Even so, the detective has again to be cautious. Used as geographical or historical evidence, the contents of a medieval manuscript can be notoriously tricky. Usually the texts are vague on details, or, when the details exist, they are contradictory and erratic. The truth of the matter is that a medieval text like the Navigatio was not intended to be read as a practical handbook o
r an Admiralty Pilot. So the historical detective must simultaneously strain out all the religious, allegorical, and mystical matter in the text, while still remaining alert to the chance of finding a useful nugget of practical information.

  Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Navigatio’s use of numbers and points of the compass. The Navigatio is full of numbers when compared to most contemporary texts. It gives the number of days sailed in different legs of the Saint’s voyage, the number of crewmen at different times, the dates of some departures and landfalls, even the number of yards an island monastery lies from the boat harbor. But the numbers quoted in any early text are unreliable. Numbers are the first items to be misquoted or misread in transmission from one storyteller or copyist to the next. Then, too, the medieval author was often tempted to use his numbers symbolically—perhaps three to reflect the Trinity, twelve the apostles, and of course that vague favorite of “forty days” to represent “a long time” which is used regularly in the Navigatio. Consequently the skeptical investigator must look for numbers that have no such symbolism, and even then place little trust in the figures unless they make some sort of sense in context.

  Exactly the same is true of the Navigatio’s compass bearings. It is gratifying how often the Navigatio gives the direction in which the Irish monks are sailing here and there in their leather boat. But once again it would have been very easy for a copyist to have made a slip, changing north to south or a similar careless error. As before, the basic check is to make sure compass bearings agree in context, and even then to be a little hesitant about accepting them. Thus, one criticism of the Navigatio is that when Saint Brendan sets out on his final and successful run to the Promised Land, he is said to sail from an Atlantic island and head toward “the eastern beach”—i.e., eastward. This, the complaint maintains, shows that the monks were not sailing west across the Atlantic at all, but in the opposite direction. But this criticism is misplaced. The whole notion of the Promised Land throughout the text is that it lay far away in the West across the ocean. This is where it is stated to be in Chapter 1 of the Navigatio; then, to try to get there, Saint Brendan sets out in a specially built curragh westward “toward the summer solstice” and when he actually finds the Promised Land and comes home, he makes a direct course by sea and lands on Ireland’s west coast, presumably having come from the West. In fine, the whole context and trend of the story is that the Promised Land lay to the west, and this must be the deciding factor in trying to interpret a medieval text into a modern idiom.

  It is here that the exercise of practical reconstruction like the Brendan Voyage can help. If all goes well, a field experiment of this type can put the details of a text like the Navigatio into a perspective which is obtainable in no other way. Thus the Brendan Voyage in 1976 and 1977 not only established the basic fact that it is entirely possible to sail from one side of the North Atlantic to the other in a skin boat built to medieval specifications, and by a rugged northerly route; but it also established criteria against which to measure the original voyage tale. The results are interesting.

  In the first place, the flavor of the medieval text now seems wholly authentic when judged against our experiences aboard Brendan. The author of the Navigatio obviously knew—as we now know—what it was like to be in an ocean-going curragh. He knew that it is impossible to row upwind in a boat which sits so high in the water that a foul wind blows you down on a hostile shore, however much you want to get clear. And when the Navigatio describes how a big curragh beaches, or how Saint Brendan’s crew pulled their craft up a shallow stream using tow ropes, we now understand what was involved and that this was feasible. Even the spectacular incident with the iceberg—the floating “pillar of crystal” in the Navigatio—found its parallel with the twentieth-century skin boat. Certainly we were not expecting to have to seize onto ice floes when coaxing Brendan through open pack ice off Labrador; but when we had to do this, it was very like the Navigatio’s description of Saint Brendan’s crew manhandling their craft through a “net” made of “marble” to get a closer look at an iceberg. In this case the exercise of reconstruction did not merely check on a detail which was previously untested; it brought to light an item which was previously unrecognized. The same could be said of the Navigatio’s information that Saint Brendan carried spare oxhides and grease on board. We expected to have to regrease Brendan, as we eventually did in Iceland, but without the spare oxhides to rig as a wave defector off East Greenland, we could well have been swamped and foundered. Perhaps the moral of the tale is that every detail on practical matters in a medieval text ought to be noted, however trivial it might appear.

  On a more scientific level, a project like the Brendan Voyage can also be productive. Brendan has made some advance in our ideas about medieval seafaring. With a crew of only four or five, Brendan was chronically undermanned. Saint Brendan’s fourteen-man crew (a figure, incidentally, that has no apparent symbolism and is a sensible one) would presumably have been able to do better under oars. Even so the Navigatio makes it clear, just as we found, that long ocean passages in northern waters are best made under sail and not by rowing. The medieval crewman may have been more disciplined and patient, especially if he was a monk, but he was not so dull that he would not prefer to sail his way when out of sight of land rather than row in broken water. Equally, we can hazard an estimate that an ocean-going curragh—and perhaps other unwieldy early ships too—would have been content with a daily average log of forty or sixty miles a day during a long passage. Exceptionally, perhaps, a light boat in the hands of an experienced crew might have covered 150 miles in the ideal conditions of a following gale. But claims for 200 miles, day after day, are over-optimistic; and if Brendan’s performance is anything to go by, one should increase passage distances by 40 percent over the great circle route to allow for wander.

  Conversely, Brendan amply supported those theorists who claim that early boats were capable of making new discoveries by being blown off course by heavy weather. In July 1976, while trying to sail from the Faroes to Iceland, we experienced a spell of such persistent and strong east winds that we would have been blown clear across to Greenland, if we had not made special efforts to heave-to and keep our original landfall in Iceland where we needed to resupply.

  As for the geography of the Navigatio, the Brendan Voyage succeeded in linking together the different locations which have been suggested as the places mentioned in the medieval text: the Faroes as the Island of Sheep; Mykines or perhaps Vagar, also in Faroes, as the Paradise of Birds; southern Iceland as the region of the Fiery Mountain and the slag-throwing Island of Smiths; and the identifications of iceberg and curious whales with the “Column of Crystal” and the Great Fish Jasconius. More original, perhaps, is the fact that Brendan showed how these landfalls could be made in a logical progression around the North Atlantic using the wind patterns of the summer sailing season, and that in every case local folklore, as well as current archaeological research, is firmly based on the tradition of the Irish visits. Again, the significant factor is the overall agreement between the modern Voyage and the original tale. A single identification between one of Saint Brendan’s landfalls and a present-day location would be overly subjective, but an entire progression of such identifications seems to be more than mere coincidence.

  At the same time the Brendan Voyage did not expect nor try to explain every locality mentioned in the Navigatio. Some of the places are too vaguely defined by the text to be identified; others lay off our route. Indeed, if the Navigatio is an amalgam of several voyages carried out by other monks besides Saint Brendan, as seems likely, there is no reason that some of these places should not lie in other directions. The general trend of the Navigatio, however, is north and west, and as Brendan demonstrated, this is also the route to take a skin boat to America.

  Another question which Brendan has left in her wake concerns the Norsemen themselves. There are three references in the sagas to an Irish connection, however faint, with th
e New World. Erik’s Saga has a report from two American “Skraelings,” or natives, that they knew of men near their tribe who wore white clothes and marched in procession bearing poles before them to which cloths were fixed, and yelling loudly. At the time, the Norsemen thought the reports referred to Irishmen. Then secondly, the Icelandic Landnamabok talks about a country “which some call Ireland the Great. It lies west in the sea near Vinland the Good.” A Norseman who was driven there by bad weather, it says, was unable to escape and was baptized by the inhabitants. Finally there is a report from an Icelandic trader named Gudleifr Gunnlaugsson, who was gale-driven across the sea from the west coast of Ireland, and made land on an unknown shore where he thought he recognized the natives using Irish words in their language. As usual the details are casual and, by themselves, light-weight. Taken together they gain a little more substance, and after the successful Atlantic crossing of Brendan it may be worth considering the whole attitude of the Norsemen toward North America. It is interesting how the saga writers readily accepted the idea of Ireland the Great in the far West. After all, when the Norsemen arrived first in the Hebrides, in the Faroes, and in Iceland they found that Irish seamen had been there before them, and that Irishmen had settled these islands. And if the Norsemen resembled any other explorer-navigators in history, they would have gone to great lengths to obtain local seafaring knowledge and to employ pilots who had sailed the unknown waters before them. Thus even the choice of the land scouts the Norse employed is interesting. Erik’s Saga says that when Thorfinn Karlsefni reached the western land he set on shore two Scoti (i.e., Irish) who were very fleet of foot and could explore the new land effectively. Under the circumstances one wonders if the Norsemen did not also carry Irishmen on their exploring ships for pilots as well as scouts.