by Tim Severin
“Let me think.” Another agonizing pause. “It was in Summerstown, a place in Summerstown. In Summerstown Road itself, I believe.”
“Where’s Summerstown?” I asked. He looked at me in surprise.
“It’s here on the edge of Cork City.”
Scarcely believing the luck, I stayed a few minutes longer and then hurried out to my car and drove straight to Summerstown estate. Summerstown Road was easy to find, and I banged on the door of the first house in the street, trusting to the fact that in Ireland everyone is liable to know everyone living in the same street.
“Excuse me. Can you please tell me if there’s someone called O’Connell living near here?” I inquired.
“There are three O’Connells in this street,” she said. “Which one are you wanting?”
“The man I’m looking for is short and very strong, and he’s got big hands and thick strong forearms.” I was describing the classic physique of a harnessmaker.
Without a second’s hesitation the woman replied, “That’s John O’Connell. He’s at number seventeen.”
I dashed across the road, and rang the bell of number 17. The door was opened by a small keg of a man. He had the weatherbeaten complexion of an outdoor worker, and also massive hands and shoulders. He looked at me inquiringly.
“You’re John O’Connell …the harnessmaker?” I asked.
He looked stunned. “That’s right. How did you find me?”
John O’Connell, one of the most skilled harnessmakers in the craft, had come back to Ireland, failed to find harness work in Cork, and had taken a job as a construction worker. He lived not fifteen miles from the boatyard where we were working, and he had kept his skills in trim, occasionally mending leather shoes for friends, or school satchels for local children. I asked him if he had still kept his leather-working tools.
“My wife complains that I never throw anything away,” he said with a chuckle. “Just wait a minute while I go upstairs and fetch them down.”
He came back with a battered leather Gladstone bag and pulled open the top, and I found myself looking at as varied a collection of harnessmaker’s tools as I had ever seen in my life.
“I inherited most of them from my father,” John O’Connell explained. “He was a horse-collar maker. Of course you don’t find that trade now. I was apprenticed to him, and served my full term before I went to England.”
So John O’Connell was found and agreed to join us at Crosshaven Boatyard. At first he visited us in the evenings after he had finished his regular job on the building site. But later I was able to make arrangements so that he could join us full time, and our good fortune was difficult to believe. John was experienced in making horse collars, the branch of traditional leather work closest to our heavy leather work for the boat. Step by step, he began to train George and me and all the volunteers I recruited. He taught us to roll flax thread, turning a single strand into a thick fourteen-strand cord. We were started at the deep end. Clad in leather aprons we looped and twisted the flax, rubbing it with lumps of black wax mixed with wool grease and beeswax, and rolling it on our thighs like cigarmakers. At first we got into terrible tangles, finishing up with cats’ cradles of flax that had to be thrown into the dustbin. John O’Connell merely grinned at us over the inevitable cigarette stuck in his mouth, and started each man over again. Gradually we picked up the knack of spinning the thread and how to break it against the twist with a casual flick of the wrist, but we never equaled John himself. His hands moved in a blur, and he never even needed to watch the threads spinning and twisting as if by magic they rolled as neatly and regularly as from a machine. To the finish John could roll two cords for every single one that George or I turned out.
Next, John turned to the stitching of the leather. He started us on the plain back-stitch, and showed us how it was made. He taught us to thread the needles properly. He demonstrated how to pierce half-an-inch thickness of leather straight and true with a quick stab of the deadly saddlemaker’s awl and, before the hole closed up, to run through the blunt needle, its tip touching the point of the awl as it was withdrawn. Hand and eye had to match the movement exactly. A second’s delay and the advantage was lost as the leather closed around the hole. At the start we almost abandoned hope at ever being able to copy his methods. In four days of work we averaged a paltry six inches of stitching per day, and we knew that we had at least two miles to go. We broke needles by the score, split and tore the threads, snapped awl blades, and pricked our fingers till they bled profusely. Our hands were soon a mass of cuts, and we kept a large box of sticking plaster by the workbench. Even John’s hands were bleeding, but for quite a different reason. After ten years away from the saddler’s bench, his hands, despite carrying bricks, had grown soft for harness work. When John pulled the thread tight into each stitch, he did so with a massive jerk that brought into play the enormous muscles in arm and shoulder, and the thread wrapped around his fists sliced into the soft flesh like a knife. But John merely laughed. “It’ll soon mend,” he grunted as drops of blood spattered out. “Inside a week my hands will be back in trim, and then we’ll really get going.”
“Won’t the cuts get infected?” I asked him.
“No, not at all. A waxed thread never leaves a dirty cut. In the old days if we cut ourselves with a knife on the bench, we always treated the cut with a dab of black wax. Nobody ever had any trouble.”
We began with the easier work, piecing together the oxhides that covered the central segment of the hull, joining each hide as if stitching together a quilt. Neighbors and friends came from my village to help us, and we learned that it was knack rather than brute strength that mattered in driving a good stitch. Some people had a true feeling for the work, others hadn’t. Our best recruit was a mere slip of a girl with less muscular strength than anyone else, but she left a neat, firm line of stitches that joined the hides as if they had been welded together.
Once we had mastered the back-stitch, John O’Connell took us on to the faster but more complicated two-hand stitch. Two needles were used to carry two separate threads down the line of awl holes, working from both sides of the leather. Normally a harnessmaker would have done the two-hand stitch by himself, holding the leather clamped between his knees. But our oxhides were too big, averaging four feet by three and a half feet, and so it was impossible for one man to reach both sides simultaneously. We had to have the stitchers working in pairs, poking the needles back and forth to one another through the leather. One stitcher stood on the outside and opened a hole with a stab of the awl. His partner, curled up inside the upturned boat, poked the needle out to the pinprick of light. Back came a second needle; then the partners gathered up the slack of the two threads in their fists; a grunt, and both tugged the stitch home simultaneously. The technique took patience, dexterity, and a sense of rhythm if it was to be done right. And if it was done wrong, John O’Connell was merciless. “Rip it, rip it!” he would say, and out would come his razor-sharp saddler’s knife and one slash would sever an entire day’s painstaking labor.
Gradually the work crept forward … two oxhides in place, four … six, and then suddenly we were working on the second tier of hides. John was satisfied with the quality of the work, but I was growing worried that we were falling behind schedule. If the boat was to be launched on time, I had to find more stitchers. I had already scoured the village and the neighborhood, and recruited every available housewife and friend. Then I had a brainwave. There was a technical college in London that gave a course in saddlery. Perhaps I could get a class of students to come over to help. I had never met the saddlery instructor, but I knew he had once been foreman at the Royal Warrant saddlers. I wrote him a letter and then telephoned him.
“Hello. This is Tim Severin. I wrote to you about a medieval leather boat I’m building. Do you think there’s any chance that some of your students would like to come over to help? It would be good experience for them, and I’ll pay their fares to come to Ireland.”
&n
bsp; The instructor sounded doubtful. “I’ve talked to my students, and they’re very keen. But what would they learn? I don’t want them picking up any shoddy techniques, and somebody will have to keep an eye on them.”
“I’ve got John O’Connell looking after the work at the boatyard,” I pleaded.
“What! John O’Connell the harnessmaker?” He sounded impressed. “Well then, you’ve got the best man. I’ll give the students permission to join you for a week.”
So nine students came across to Ireland, tumbling one morning from a battered van at the Crosshaven Boatyard to the amazement of the shipwrights. The students brought with them their transistor radios, sleeping bags, and a strange assortment of old clothes ranging from moleskin overcoats to long woollen scarves and striped sports shirts. They chattered and joked … and they worked superbly. At its peak the boat had no less than nine students, eight volunteers, George’s sister Ellen, George, myself, and John working on it; and if you peered underneath, there was our mascot: George’s dog, Biscuit, who sat all day under the upturned hull, licking the faces of the “inside” stitchers and begging lunchtime sandwiches. In the evenings we drove back, completely worn out, to the village, where kindly neighbors had cooked up vast pots of stew and left them on my doorstep.
“Good Lord, where did that lot come from?” asked a student as Ellen Molony staggered in with a four-gallon tub of Irish stew.
“Leprechauns!” was the instant reply.
The students set the timetable right, and on the day they were due to go back to college, their spokesman took me to one side.
“We are enjoying ourselves so much,” he said, “that we would like to stay on two extra days. Would you mind?”
“Of course not,” I answered. “I would be delighted. But the agreement with your college was that you would only be here for a week.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said gaily. “We’ll just arrange to miss the ferry boat, and the next boat doesn’t sail for two days.”
So the students blithely missed the boat, and by the time they roared off cheerily in their dented van, we had only to make and fit the bow and stern sections of the leather. We anticipated extra wear and tear in these areas, and so we doubled the thickness of the leather, and on the bow where it might run on a rock or onto sharp flotsam, we made it four layers thick, more than an inch of solid leather. Only John O’Connell had the strength for this work. From his Gladstone bag he produced a pair of great heavy half-moon needles and an antiquated collarmaker’s palm that was almost a museum piece. As I watched him drive the needles through the leather with his prodigious strength, I thanked our luck that we had found such a man.
Finally, the leathering was done. We had used forty-nine hides to cover the frame. Several hides had been damaged in our first attempt to sew them, but we still had an ample supply of extra material if the boat needed repairs during the forthcoming trials or the voyage itself. George and I crawled for the last time under the upturned boat. With rope cut from oxhide, we pulled down the hanging edge of the skin and fastened it upward to the lower gunwale. Pat Lake the shipwright and Murph, his second-in-command, climbed onto the upturned hull to fit on a shallow skid of oak to protect the leather when we should run the boat up on to a beach; and our medieval boat was manhandled the right way up. From the finest Glennon ash we fashioned masts and oars to the same pattern as the Dingle curraghs, and at last she was ready.
To bless our new boat there was no better person than Eammon Casey, Bishop of Kerry and the spiritual descendant of Saint Brendan himself. On January 24 the Bishop arrived in full regalia at the beach where the boat lay ready. The weather was cuttingly cold, with a sharp wind that sent the flags on the boat’s rigging snapping and crackling. On the peak of the mainmast flew the flag of Ireland, and on the foremast our own pennant, the twin-tailed Brendan banner of a ringed Irish cross in red, “the cross of glory” on a white background. I had chosen the ringed cross, not only for its Irish association, but also because this cross was found in one form or another at many of the monastic sites which the medieval seafaring monks had visited, leaving the Celtic cross scratched on native rocks or as a magnificent freestanding monument.
A bottle of Irish whiskey had seemed more appropriate than French champagne for the first ocean-going leather boat to be launched in Ireland for perhaps forty generations, but there was a last-minute hitch. How did one break a stout glass bottle against a leather hull? The bottle would just bounce off. Crosshaven’s shipwrights came to the rescue. They hung an anchor on the bow and fixed the whiskey bottle into a wooden arm that would swing down on the target. Just to make sure, one of the shipwrights hid inside the bow throughout the service, ready to tug on a cord that made the bottle descend at full speed. A sizeable crowd had gathered to witness the ceremony. Movie cameras were focused; and the inevitable Doubting Thomas bustled among the spectators, offering to take bets. “Five to one she doesn’t float; five to one she sinks within the hour,” he offered. “You’re on for fifty pounds,” called one of my friends, but by the time he got out his money, the little bookmaker had discreetly vanished. Bishop Casey was magnificent. Isolated from the gale inside his purple and lace, he spoke the traditional prayers over the new boat. He blessed her mission, her crew, and the watching audience, and he read a poem in Irish he had specially composed for the occasion:
Bless this boat, O True Christ,
Convey her free and safe across the sea.
You are like a blessing of Brendan’s time,
Bless this boat now.
Guide our journey in it to sheltered land,
To go to the land of promise is your right,
You are like a guide of Brendan’s time,
Guide our boat now.
Then came the moment. My daughter Ida stepped forward with the scissors, and in a small clear voice she announced, “I name this boat Brendan” and cut the ribbon. The whiskey bottle, propelled by its hidden shipwright, whipped down with a tremendous crash. Shards of glass showered everyone within range, and the cloud of atomized Irish whiskey swept over the crowd. “That’s the real stuff!” shouted a hoarse voice, and Brendan began to slide down toward the water. With scarcely a ripple, she floated lightly off her cradle; her crew of shipwrights heaved at their oars; and Brendan pulled away, floating high with her bunting rippling and the crowd applauding. The boat of leather was afloat.
It was much too stormy and cold to risk Brendan at sea, so one of Paddy Glennon’s giant timber lorries trundled her up to the shallow lakes of the River Shannon for trials. We stepped the masts, hung the steering paddle over the starboard quarter, and pushed off to see what happened under sail. It was an idyllic morning. A gentle breeze filled Brendan’s two square sails; the hull canted slightly in response, and the long slim boat glided over the peaty brown Shannon water. We were deep in the countryside, with not a house in sight. The broad river curved past deep green meadows. Swans took off before our bows, paddling with their feet and undulating their long necks to gain speed and height as they left behind the powerful rushing sound of their wings. Clouds of ducks rose from the winter-brown reeds on each side of the river, and a cart horse that had been grazing in the water-meadow came galloping down to stop and stare in amazement at the strange, silent gliding craft before it suddenly wheeled and galloped away with soft sucking splashes in the mud, halting again at a safe distance and turning to watch the boat once more. The whole scene—the square white sails moving silently over the brown reeds—had an unreal air.
We glided into Lough Corry, scarcely more than an embayment in the river’s course. A puff of wind struck us, and suddenly everything became alive. The boat heeled more steeply; the water began to surge against the steering oar; a rope jerked adrift from its cleat; suddenly there was chaos. Each sail needed four ropes to control it, and each rope developed a life of its own. When one rope escaped, the others began to wriggle and slat. The heavy crossyard swung over; the sail slapped against the mast; and without warning
we found ourselves grabbing at unidentified ropes and hauling in hopefully, trying to discover which rope would quell the riot. But the wind had got stronger, a good solid puff, and Brendan shot forward. The crew clung on, ropes burning their hands. Brendan whizzed forward and the far bank of the little lake loomed up. I leaned hard on the steering oar, and Brendan began to turn. But it was too late. With a splintering of dry stalks, we went hurtling spectacularly into the reed beds and found ourselves condemned to half an hour of prodding oars into the peat bottom to punt Brendan free.
A dozen times a day we crashed into the reeds, which served as handy buffers, and gradually we got to know the boat. Brendan, we discovered, had her limitations. With only four oarsmen on board she was too unwieldly to row against the wind, because her bows were blown downwind and we hadn’t the strength to get her back on course. More ominous was the fact that when left to her own devices, Brendan lay broadside to the wind at a dangerously exposed angle. We dropped marker buoys in the lough, and by sailing between them learned that Brendan refused to go against the wind like an ordinary yacht. She pointed her bows bravely enough to the wind, but lacking a keel she slid sideways across the water like a tea tray. On the other hand she was far more stable than we had anticipated, and running with the wind astern she went famously. She twisted and turned at a touch of the great steering paddle so that I was reminded of surf boats.
This was how Brendan would be at sea, a one-way exhilarating ride with the wind on the stern. A pair of ash shovel handles extended the breadth of our main crossyard so we could carry more sail; and after a day on which it snowed, we rigged the two tent structures that would give us shelter on the voyage. We practiced hauling Brendan up onto the bank, and we covered her with a thick layer of wool grease like a long-distance swimmer. And always we watched the leather hull for signs of leaks. We knew that 30,000 stitches pierced the hull, most of them made by amateur leather-workers. Any of them could leak with dire results. At first the water did trickle in, perhaps ten gallons a day, but then the trickles gradually slowed to half the rate and we found it scarcely necessary to bail Brendan unless it had rained.
