The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  “Oh, the tannery workmen have heard about your crazy Saint Brendan idea, and everyone has been testing pieces of leather to see whether they float.”

  “And do they?” I asked.

  “Not for longer than four days,” he grinned. “You are going to need a life raft.”

  Then one afternoon, after ten weeks of tests at the laboratories, I had a momentous telephone call from Dr. Sykes.

  “I think we’ve identified your hull leather,” he said. “You were right. Oak-bark leather is the best.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’ve done every test we can manage in the time available, including putting the samples on a machine designed to test leather-shoe soles. This machine rolls the sample back and forth on a mesh kept flooded with water, like a foot walking on a wet road, and we can test how much water penetrates the leather.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “As supplied, the oak-bark leather wasn’t as good as the others. In fact several of the other leathers were much better. But after dressing with grease and extensive testing, all the other leathers began to fail; many became waterlogged, rather like wet dishcloths. But the oak-bark samples scarcely changed at all. In the end the oak-bark leather was actually two to three times more resistant to water than any other sample. If you still want to make that leather boat, then you should use oak-bark leather.”

  With a glow of triumph I put down the telephone. Once again the simple factual accuracy of the Navigatio had been demonstrated, this time in the opinion of a skilled scientist.

  There remained the problem of where to get the oak-bark leather, and here I had another stroke of luck. John Beeby arranged for me to meet Bill Croggon of Josiah Croggon and Son Ltd., the oak-bark tanners from Cornwall, at a leather fair in London. I was warned that the Croggons were a very conservative firm. “They’ve been making oak-bark leather in the same manner and in the same place for nearly three centuries,” John said. “People have been advising them to change to some more modern methods. But they won’t. I don’t know what they’ll say to your idea of a leather boat, and it’s up to you to persuade them to let you have the leather.”

  When I explained to Bill Croggon that I wanted enough oxhides tanned in oak bark to cover a medieval boat, he looked thoughtful. “I’ll have to talk it over with my brother,” he said. “And you must realize that it takes a very long time to make oak-bark leather. Every single piece is nearly a year in preparation and we might not have it ready in time. When would you want your leather?”

  “Well, I’d planned to set sail on Saint Brendan’s Day,” I said.

  “When’s that?”

  “May sixteenth.”

  “What a coincidence! That’s my wife’s birthday!” he replied, and somehow I knew then that the Croggons would be helping the Brendan project.

  So it turned out. I went down to the Croggons’ tannery in the little Cornish town of Grampound and met the Croggon family themselves, grandmother, sons and grandsons, a whole clutch of Croggons, helpful, hospitable, and soon as excited about the Brendan Voyage as I was. They took me around the tannery, starting with the lime-soaking pits where the animal hides were stripped of their hair. There I was astonished to see one workman actually scraping the surface hair from an oxhide by hand. He was using a double-handed scraper, and as he leaned over the “beam” or block he looked exactly like a woodcut illustration of a leather-worker printed four hundred years ago. We walked across a field, past a string of ducks, and went up to the tanning pits, row upon row of tanks dug into the ground and filled with a rich liquid made of ground-up oak bark and water, which looked like thick beer with a creamy froth and smelled sickly sweet. In this “oak-bark liquor” lay the oxhides, slowly absorbing the tannin in the mixture, which entered the skins and formed a tight bond with the skin fibers, turning a perishable oxhide into some of the finest leather known. “It’s a technique that can’t have changed much since Saint Brendan’s day,” commented John Croggon. “It takes good oxhides, the right oak-bark mixture, and lots and lots of time. Of course, many people say that today it’s very old-fashioned. But some of the very best handmade shoes are soled with our leather, and orthopedic hospitals specify oak-bark leather for certain uses because it is so pure that it is less likely to cause skin irritations.”

  “Do you think you could find enough medieval-sized oxhides for me? The cattle in Saint Brendan’s day were smaller than now. I need small-sized hides about a quarter of an inch thick to be authentic, maybe as many as fifty of them.”

  “You are in luck. We’ve got some hides just like that in the tanning pits now. Of course you’ll have to have the best. You’re trusting your life to them.”

  Much later I discovered just how unstintingly the Croggon brothers worked on my behalf. They and their men personally sorted through oxhide after oxhide, hauling them out, wet and dripping, from the tanning pits. They examined each hide minutely for flaws, for barbed-wire scratches, for the holes left by warble flies, for cuts made by a careless skinning knife. It must have taken days of back-breaking work, and without ever a word to me. In the end, the Croggons provided fifty-seven of the finest oak-bark-tanned oxhides I could have wanted. When a professional saddlemaker saw them stacked together, he gave a low whistle of appreciation. “I’ve never seen leather like it,” he said. “I’ve been told about it, but never expected to see so much of it in one place. We seldom see it in our workshops.”

  “That’s because it’s all been earmarked for a leather boat,” I teased him.

  From the Croggons’ tannery the hides went up to Harold Birkin to be greased. Tests at the research laboratories had revealed that wool grease was in fact the best dressing for the leather, and through a friend in the wool business I had been given the name of a wool mill in Yorkshire that might help. I telephoned one of the directors. “I wonder if you could supply me with some wool grease.”

  “Yes, of course. How much do you want?”

  “About three-quarters of a ton, please.”

  There was a stunned silence.

  The only trouble with the combination of wool grease and leather was the appalling smell. My wife complained that the leather smelled like blocked drains, and this smell now competed with the odor of rancid fat. Even the workers in Harold Birkin’s tannery—and tanneries are notoriously pungent places—complained about the stench of the grease. They claimed that they could smell the stuff half a mile away from the factory gates.

  Under Harold’s close attention, each evil-smelling oxhide was folded down the backbone and suspended in a tub of hot wool grease. Then it was withdrawn from the tub, allowed to drain, and put flat on the ground. Now molten wool grease was literally poured onto it, another hide placed on top, and the process of pouring hot grease repeated for all fifty-seven oxhides until there was a huge, sticky, multilayer sandwich of leather gently absorbing the vital wool grease.

  The project was now moving ahead rapidly, but I still lacked a vital expert. I needed someone who could produce a proper design study of my medieval curragh, complete with a set of technical drawings from which to build the boat. It would have to be someone who was a historian as well as a fully qualified naval architect, and one afternoon I sat down in the library of the Royal Geographic Society and wrote to all of the maritime museums I could think of, asking if they could recommend such a man. The replies were polite, but nobody could help. However, one museum told me that I should ask the secretary of the Royal Institute of Navigation, who personally knew most of the experts in this field. I looked up the address of the institute. It was in the same building as the Royal Geographic Society. All the time I had been writing my requests, I was sitting directly under the man who could help me! I went upstairs, and was promptly given one name: Colin Mudie.

  The name seemed distantly familiar, and then I remembered. Colin Mudie had sailed with Patrick Ellam across the Atlantic in the tiny yacht Sopranino in the 1950s. He also had designed an extraordinary balloon to cover the
same route, using a gondola that doubled as a boat when, after a record time aloft, the ballooning ended in a storm. Colin Mudie had a reputation as one of the most unorthodox designers to be found. Nothing daunted him. Arctic explorers took their sledges to him to have them made into convertible boats; he designed power craft for high-speed racing, kites to fly radio aerials, even a submersible yacht with the mast sticking out of the water. Yet he had also been selected to design a sail training brig for the Sail Cadet Corps, designed production boats built in thousands, and was chairman of the prestigious Small Craft Group of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects.

  Yet when I went to Colin Mudie’s home, a very unexpected figure opened the door. I had anticipated a bluff, bearded seadog. Instead I was greeted by a small, fragile-looking man with a darting manner, a huge mane of long hair, and the most piercing blue-grey eyes I have ever seen. For all the world he looked like a hungry and alert owl, blinking as he invited me into his study.

  In two hours I found out exactly why Colin Mudie was so highly regarded. He sat at his desk listening intently to my thesis, and absent-mindedly sketched on a pad. From the point of his pen flowed little ships and shapes, details of oars and masts, water lines and carpentry details. He was a gifted draughtsman, and a man whose thoughts literally turned themselves into pictures. When I finished, he merely looked up at me and said, “There’s nothing impossible either about a leather boat or the voyage you want to make. I can do a design study for you, and then, if you want to go ahead, follow it with drawings for a boatyard to work from. But what neither I nor anyone else can give you is the knowledge of how to handle this boat at sea. That knowledge has been long lost. It is up to you to rediscover it. Always remember you are trying to follow men who went to sea with generations of experience behind them. That may turn out to be the unknown factor in your venture.”

  In eight weeks Colin put together all the data about Irish leather boats I had gleaned in the libraries and in the Dingle. Twice he telephoned me. Once to tell me that he thought he’d found a reason for the characteristic double gunwale of the Dingle curragh, one above the other. It was, he suggested, a throwback to the days when the leather hull skin was pulled over the gunwale like a drum skin. This would require a basic frame of great strength, especially in compression, and the double gunwale is an ideal construction. On the second occasion he confirmed my hunch that the original leather curraghs had carried two masts. His calculations showed that the traditional mast position, which John Goodwin had put into my small curragh, was exactly the right place for a foremast. If so, it was reasonable to suppose that in the old days there had been a central mainmast to balance it. But Colin was also practical. He wanted to hang pieces of oak-bark leather in the sea to learn what happened. So once a fortnight the staff of the Lymington ferry pier was treated to the bizarre spectacle of a renowned naval architect solemnly standing on their jetty and hauling up slabs of very smelly leather on the end of long strings. Some of the station’s staff must have thought it mad, but soon there was also a rumor that Colin was designing a waterproof shoe. No one would have believed the truth: that he was working on a leather boat.

  In the end the drawings were ready, four large sheets covered with lines and figures in Colin’s neat hand. They were the end product of all my labor so far, and with them under my arm and fifty-seven slippery, greasy oxhides pungent with wool grease, I set out for Ireland.

  It was time to start building the boat.

  3

  BUILDING

  “What have you got there?” asked the Irish customs officer as he slid back the van door with a rumble, poked in his head, and withdrew it again very sharply, wrinkling his nose at the eye-watering smell.

  “Oxhides,” I replied. “They’re for a boat I’m building and hope to sail to America.”

  “Oh, they are for re-export then. Thank heavens for that. We won’t want that sort of smell around too long.” He laughed as he banged the door shut. I was on my way to the boatyard in County Cork where the boat would be built, and an important new stage in the Brendan project was about to begin.

  Not so long ago I had been worrying whether I could find a boatyard to do the job. After all, it’s not often that a modern boatyard is asked to construct a medieval boat. But as it turned out, I need not have fretted. Only in Ireland was it possible to stroll into the local boatyard, spread out a drawing, and casually ask, “I wonder if you could help build this for me? It’s a sixth-century design, and I’ll be covering the hull with oxhides myself, but I want an expert to build the wooden frame.” The boatyard manager’s eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. He took two slow puffs on his pipe, and then he murmured, “That shouldn’t be any trouble. I’ll check with our head shipwright if he’s got space.”

  This was no run-of-the-mill boatyard. The Crosshaven Boatyard was where the Irish lifeboats were sent for overhaul; where Sir Francis Chichester built his record-breaking Gypsy Moth V; and where I heard it stated that they preferred never to build two boats to the same design because this was “too dull.” Crosshaven was a boatyard in the old style: no fiberglass, scarcely any steel, but masses of timber and a cheerful confidence in their ability to build anything that was meant to float. Above all, it was a boatyard that didn’t mind my bringing smelly oxhides onto the premises, to be followed shortly afterward by a medley of saddlers, leather-workers, students, amateur helpers, and a mascot dog.

  Pat Lake was the head shipwright. With his spectacles and rubicund face he looked more like a country doctor than a boatbuilder. He was what County Cork called a “flier.” When he got started into a job, it simply flew along. To my delight Pat himself elected to build the frame for the boat, working in the evenings in his spare time and helped by a pair of picked assistants. “Pat,” I told him, “what I would like you to do is to build me the wooden frame according to Colin Mudie’s drawings. Can you do it in such a way that the frame is held together temporarily? Once you have shaped the main structure, I will then replace your fastenings with authentic medieval fastenings of the type Saint Brendan would have used to hold the wooden frame together.”

  “What were those fastenings made of?” he asked.

  “Strips of leather thong were most probably used to lash the frame together. In those days metal was too valuable to be used where other materials would do the same job. Besides, I think if we lash the frame together like a wicker basket, this ought to make the hull more flexible.”

  “What sort of timber do you want me to use?”

  “Oak for the double gunwales, and ash for the frames and the longitudinal stringers. We know from the analysis of hearth ash that these types of wood were growing in Ireland in Saint Brendan’s day.”

  “Oak sounds fine to me,” commented Pat. “We’ve got some oak here in the yard that has been seasoned for eight or ten years and is as hard as iron. But I wouldn’t be happy about using ash. It’s not a timber that goes well in a boat. If ash keeps getting wet in sea water and then drying out, it begins to rot. Before long you’d be able to poke your finger through it.”

  “I’m sure that ash is the right timber,” I repeated. “No other wood available in medieval Ireland was supple enough to follow the sharp curves of the hull frames.”

  “Right then. But it’s going to be difficult to find ash in the long straight lengths we’ll be wanting.”

  Here was an unexpected snag. I found that very little ash is now used in the timber industry. And when ash trees are felled, they are cut up into short lengths to make it easier to haul the logs from the forest. But for my boat I had to have trunks of ash thirty feet long and straight in the grain. These were rarities in the timber trade. It looked very much as if I was going to have to begin yet another hunt for my medieval materials, and I feared that I had no time for such a quest.

  But I had forgotten Brendan Luck. I was given the name of a consultant expert in the timber trade, and I went to see him at his office. By now I was thoroughly accustomed to opening such meetings with
a long introductory explanation about my project for a leather boat. So I took a deep breath and began. “This may sound strange to you, but I want to build a medieval boat made of…”

  The timber expert held up his hand to stop me. “Some years ago a man called Heyerdahl came in to us for advice about balsa wood,” he said. “I believe we found some for him. Just tell me what timber you want, and we’ll see if we can help.”

  Through his contacts I found myself in County Longford in the very heart of Ireland, at a timber yard run by a family called Glennon. Had it not been for the flat Irish countryside and the strong Irish accents, I could have imagined myself with the leather-making Croggons in Cornwall. The two situations were strikingly similar. In each case there was a small family business specializing in a traditional material. In Ireland it was Paddy Glennon who ran the business, supported by Glennon brothers, Glennon children, and Glennon cousins. And once again it was a family that gave to the Brendan project a huge enthusiasm that no money could ever have bought. The Glennons took me on a tour of their timber yard, providing a running commentary much like that of an art connoisseur showing a visitor around his picture gallery. Here was the trunk of an oak tree that had been hand-picked to make a keel for a new wooden trawler. It was a massive giant that had flourished for about four hundred years. “Aren’t you sorry to cut down such splendid trees?” I inquired. “Oh, no. You see this black mark here near the root? That’s rot. The tree has entered its old age. It was sick, and in time it would have rotted right through and been destroyed.”