by Tim Severin
St. MacDara’s Island made it easier to appreciate another strand that lay behind Navigatio. Many of the early Christian monks in Ireland had felt an overwhelming urge to seek solitude on the islands of the west coast, where they could contemplate and pray. They took their inspiration from the Desert Fathers of the Middle East, who had retreated into the deserts to serve God as ascetics. But of course Ireland offered no deserts for retreat, and so these hermits had found their isolated homes deep in the forest or on the islands in the sea. They coined a happy phrase for it: they sought, they said, “a desert in the ocean.” In cases of extreme devotion some of these men pushed themselves out in small boats, deliberately threw away their oars and rudder, and let the wind blow them where God decreed. There, accepting divine intervention, they established themselves and led their lonely lives, relying upon divine providence to supply them with food, perhaps fish from the sea or, as on Saint MacDara’s island, with a supply of gulls’ eggs at hand. According to a nice story in Brendan’s Navigatio, one hermit even depended upon fish brought to him daily by a friendly otter.
Full-fledged monasteries grew up on some islands, and Saint Brendan visited one of them during his long quest for the Promised Land. The Navigatio called the place Saint Ailbe’s Island, and when the crew landed it said they were met on the beach by a dignified and white-haired old man who bowed to them, embraced each of the visitors, and taking Saint Brendan’s hand led the newcomers to his monastery. At the gates Saint Brendan stopped and tried to find out the name of the abbot and where his monks came from. But the old man refused to answer, gesturing with his hand that he and his fellows observed the rule of silence. In a human touch, Saint Brendan, the Navigatio says, told his crew to hold their tongues and respect the rule of silence “or you will destroy the spirit of recollection of the monks here with your chatter.” At that moment a party of monks arrived in procession bearing crosses and reliquaries, and greeted the visitors with psalms. Then the abbot himself, Saint Ailbe, came forward to invite the guests inside. Brendan and his crew shared a simple meal with the monks, sitting down at the table, each guest next to a monk, eating bread and root vegetables and drinking spring water in time to a bell struck by one of the monks, who was acting as servitor for the day. Later, the abbot showed Brendan around the monastery and took him into the chapel to show him its arrangement of altars, lamps, and a circle of chairs where the monks chanted their litany with the abbot. For more than eighty years, the abbot explained, his monastery had flourished. The only sound of human voices that was heard was the regular psalm-singing, and the monks lived entirely without outside contact.
Stripped of its embellishments, the Navigatio’s description of this island monastery is strikingly matter-of-fact. The only miracles are a flaming arrow which automatically lights the tapers, the unseen replenishment of their food supplies, and the longevity of the monks themselves. But even the latter is explained sensibly: their simple diet and contemplative way of life, the abbot explained to Brendan, had kept the monks in excellent health and prolonged their lives in their settlement.
The Navigatio does not give enough geographical details to pinpoint Saint Ailbe’s Island accurately. It only says that the monastery lay two hundred yards from the only landing place on the island and that there were two water sources nearby, one clear and one muddy. However, traces of stone-built island monasteries can still be seen on several islands off the west coast of Ireland, on Inishmurray, Tory Island, Inishkea, and Inishglora. The last is known to have been founded by Saint Brendan himself. Traces of Irish religious settlements have also been found in the Hebrides and in Orkney and Shetland, and suggested as far afield as Faroes—all on the Stepping Stone Route toward North America. Any one of them could have been the monastery attributed to Saint Ailbe, but most important of all is that Brendan’s Navigatio describes Saint Ailbe’s community as a simple fact. It treats of the place, not as some extravaganza, but as a monastery very like the monasteries an Irish priest of the early Middle Ages would recognize as real.
Saint MacDara’s Island was the last early Christian church that the modern Brendan was to visit in Ireland. Next morning we awoke to a fresh breeze from the south, and despite gale warnings on the radio, we weighed anchor and seized our chance to take the leather boat slanting away on a course which cleared the turning point at Slyne Head. For a few hours we made glorious progress, spinning along at above five knots with the land sliding past. We could not check our speed properly, for the log was malfunctioning. But we did not care. Our fishing lines caught a couple of mackerel which were soon in the frying pan, and also a greedy young seagull which we managed to release unharmed, though Rolf looked longingly at its wing feathers for pipe cleaners. Only Arthur was despondent, for he was still seasick, and the swell around Slyne Head did not help.
But then the weather deteriorated. We lost sight of the lighthouse on Slyne Head in the low clouds. Rain showers began sweeping regularly across us; and it grew colder. By evening we were in the grip of our first gale, and driving faster and faster out to sea. We dragged ropes behind us to slow ourselves down, and took turns to bail the water swirling in the bilges. At the scheduled time I switched on the radio transmitter and tried to get through to Valentia coast station. But I could hear nothing but the crackle of static. Severe electrical storms had broken contact, and on Brendan we could see the lightning flashes in the murk. It was useless to waste our battery power, so I switched off the radio; and to avoid tangling our trailing warps, George hauled in the log. Now Brendan was not only cut off, but we could not guess how far the storm was driving us out into the Atlantic.
For twenty-four hours Brendan ran before the gale. First Arthur and then Peter fell into a semicomatose state and lost all interest in their surroundings. Rolf, George, and I swallowed some hot sweet soup to keep up our strength, and privately I calculated how much drinking water we had on board. Our headlong flight into the open ocean was completely unplanned and we had no reserves of fresh water. If we were becalmed, or if the wind blew us too far from land, we would have to ration our supplies.
Then, after I had calculated that Brendan had been driven about a hundred miles off the coast, the wind eased and swung into the west, blowing Brendan back toward land and safety. On the afternoon of the second day we were able to cook ourselves a hot meal, and tidy up some of the mess in the cabin created by breaking waves and sodden clothing. As my fingers thawed, I made notes in my diary about the lessons we had learned: in future, we should never set out to sea without a full water supply; every man needed extra socks and gloves to keep out the chill; our plastic food packs were unreliable, as far too many of our stores were now a soggy mess in the bottom of each packet. From some packets we poured a nauseating stew of sea water, mashed potato flakes, sauce, biscuit crumbs, and dehydrated vegetables. Equally worrying, every box of matches aboard had been ruined and not one lighter worked any longer. We were so worn out when we finally sighted Tory Island on the northwest corner of Ireland during the third night that we were glad when the wind died away to a calm. After half an hour’s rowing, which seemed to get us nowhere, we curled up and rested our tired bodies, letting Brendan drift slowly down toward land on the tide and swell.
“Can you get out the medicine chest?” Peter woke me just after midnight. “My arm is killing me.”
“What’s the matter? Where’s the pain?” I asked, struggling to sit up.
“I don’t know. There’s something wrong with my arm. At times it feels as if it’s on fire, and sometimes it goes completely numb and I can’t feel anything at all.”
“You must have strained it when we were rowing,” I said. “Here, take these two pain killers and try to relax as best you can. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do until we get enough wind to take us into the land. Then we can try and find a doctor for you.”
Peter took the tablets and sat there, slumped miserably against the thwart. His face was ashen, and his eyelids drooped. An hour later he called to me a
gain.
“It’s no good. I’m afraid the pain’s getting worse. It’s spread to the whole side of my chest, and I’m finding it very painful to breathe. Please get on the radio and call for help.”
I looked at the chart. Brendan lay becalmed scarcely two miles from the coast of County Donegal, but we might as well have been a hundred miles away for any hope of getting Peter ashore quickly. We couldn’t row Brendan against the tide, and Peter obviously needed medical attention. I switched on the radio.
“Malin Head Radio. Malin Head Radio. This is Curragh Brendan calling.”
“Curragh Brendan. Curragh Brendan. Malin Head Radio here. Come in please.”
“Malin Head. This is Brendan. We are off the Limeburner Rock and becalmed. I’ve got an injured crew member on board who needs to see a doctor. Can you arrange any help, please?”
Malin Head told me to stand by, and ten minutes later reported that he was sorry but there were no lifeboats available. “We could alert a ship,” Malin Head offered.
“No, I think it would be more effective if we could get a local fishing boat to take the crew member off,” I suggested.
“Will do, Curragh Brendan. Please watch this frequency.”
Malin Head broke contact, and half an hour later called me back. “A local salmon boat is putting out from a village called Ballyhoorisky to pick up your crew member. Please show an identifying light. Good luck, Curragh Brendan. Out.”
“Thank you, Malin Head. We’ll let you know how we get on.”
An hour afterward we picked out the lights of a small fishing boat coming toward us, and heard the rhythm of her engine. Then the boat closed on us, the engine cut, and across the calm we could hear the soft mutter of voices talking in Irish. A torch was switched on and I could make out the shapes of two men and a boy on board. “Here, catch this!” and a rope came flopping aboard. “We’ll tow you in.” The fishing boat engine started and we set off toward a seemingly rockbound stretch of coast. At the last moment when I thought we were about to go on the reefs, a spotlight lit up on the boat. Expertly handled, she slid into a tiny cove with Brendan behind her. “You’ll be all right here,” called a voice, and unseen hands moored Brendan alongside. Soon afterward the blue light of an ambulance came down the lonely road, and Peter was taken away. “Thank you so much,” I said to the muffled figures of our rescuers who had been patiently waiting all this time. “It’s nothing,” said the older man. “Just you get some sleep now. Come up to the house in the morning and my wife will get you some breakfast.” And as if rescuing a medieval skin boat happened every day, the fishermen calmly turned around and went up the track toward their home. So ends the first leg of the Brendan Voyage, I thought to myself. Historians say that medieval life was cramped, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous. They are right.
6
HEBRIDES
For two days we sheltered in Ballyhoorisky to make and mend, and catch our breath. Our rescuers, the Freil family, epitomized the old saying that there is a brotherhood between all mariners. They fed us, washed our sea-stained clothing, gave us house room, and took me into the market town to buy provisions. There I met Peter, emerging from the hospital gate, looking downcast.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked him.
“The doctors said I’ve strained the muscles down the left side of my chest, and I’ll have to have two weeks’ rest before I can go back on board.”
“Well, that’s not too bad. The rest of us can take Brendan up through the Hebrides by ourselves, and when you are rested, you can rejoin us in Stornoway or some other northern port, ready for the long hop to the Faroes.”
Peter looked even more despondent. “It’s no good, I’m afraid. The doctors also warned that the same trouble is likely to recur if I put any strain on the muscles, and if it does, it could be more serious. And the next time we may not be able to get me to a hospital.”
This was a blow. In an emergency I needed every member of Brendan’s crew to be fit; and Peter was sensitive enough to admit that, once hurt, he would be reluctant to commit himself wholeheartedly for the rest of the voyage. Clearly it was a risk that neither Peter nor I could accept, and in the end there was really no choice: Peter withdrew from the crew. Sadly he packed his bags and left us.
Luckily I had a temporary replacement for him in Wallace Clark, past Commodore of the Irish Cruising Club. Wallace had volunteered to help take Brendan across from Ireland to Scotland, and he lived only a few hours away from Ballyhoorisky. A quick telephone call, and Wallace duly reported for duty, clad in two pairs of vast woolly trousers, several sweaters, a disreputable stocking cap that would have done service as a pillow case, and a tentlike oilskin smock. In that outfit he even made Arthur look petite.
Meanwhile we profited from the lessons of the storm. First priority was to shift Brendan’s water ballast farther forward so that her bow dipped down and gripped the water better, and her stern rose more quickly to the following seas. Then Rolf set about making some sense of the hugger-mugger mess of the cooking and eating area, just aft of the main shelter. Until now it had looked like a medieval midden. Every time anyone climbed toward the steering oar, a sea-boot squashed a mug or stepped into the sodden ingredients of the next meal. Now, with odd scraps of wood and string, Rolf ingeniously rigged up a food locker and a couple of shelves to keep our everyday supplies of tea, coffee, and sugar out of harm’s way. He had to use string in place of nails or screws because Brendan’s hull flexed so much that any rigid fastening would have snapped immediately.
On the afternoon tide of May 30 Dun Freil’s boat Realt Fanad, the Star of Fanad, towed Brendan out to the area where they had rescued us, and cast off the line. Once again there was almost a flat calm, and once again Brendan hung motionless in the tide, waiting for a wind. But this time there was a completely different feeling on board. Brendan’s crew was rested and fit, and we had given careful thought to our experiences in the storm. Brendan had survived a gale which would have broken and sunk a weaker boat. She had shown us convincingly that, given half a chance, she would carry us safely through high seas and heavy weather—and the result was a marked upsurge of confidence, both in ourselves and in the boat. Brendan was certainly not comfortable, and she was extraordinarily difficult to control. Indeed, with such a small crew it was rather like riding a balloon. Once you cast off in Brendan, you had to sail in the direction the wind and weather took you. The margin for correction was small, and if the wind turned foul, there was little one could do but hang on and hope. In short, I suspected, we were beginning to appreciate what it was like to have been a medieval sailor, cast out on the seas at the mercy of wind and weather and armed only with patience and faith.
The new spirit of confidence was infectious, and as soon as the wind picked up next morning to a good stiff breeze, George was all for testing Brendan’s new paces, now that we had shifted ballast. Under his expert eye, the slanting sails began to draw Brendan briskly across the wind. She was still skidding on the surface of the sea, so we could not claim to be sailing against the wind. But we were certainly making excellent progress, and, instead of running downwind away from the waves, we were sailing parallel to them and riding easily across their crests. All that day we managed to keep this course, ignoring the occasional wave which toppled and broke aboard as Brendan hurried northwest toward Scotland. It was a new sensation to be at the steering paddle and watch the water sliding briskly past the massive ash blade, and feel the boat responding to the fine adjustment on the helm. At last, I felt, Brendan was sailing. She was a little cumbersome, it was true, but she handled like a real boat.
Crash! My thoughts were briskly shattered, as the wooden crossyard carrying the mainsail broke free and came hurtling down with a thud, bringing down the mainsail in a flapping mess. The flax rope holding up the yard had snapped, and the entire contraption had come slicing down with its full weight. Had anyone been underneath, he would have been badly hurt. As it was, George promptly swarmed up the mast like
a monkey on a stick, reeved a new rope, and we heaved up the sail again and sped on our way. Wallace, whose family had been in the flax business for generations, inspected the frayed ends of the old halliard, and was very scathing. “This stuff is pretty awful. No wonder it broke. There’s a lot of rubbish in the thread. Where did you get it?”
“It was all I could find,” I replied. “Flax rope is virtually impossible to obtain, and I had to make do with the only sample I could get. It’s been giving us trouble ever since we started, and it was particularly useless during the gale when we had to mend the ropes every few hours.”
“I think we had better get you some better stuff than this,” Wallace replied. “I’ll contact my friends in the flax business, and we’ll see if there isn’t something to be done. Brendan deserves better than this muck.”
We made our landfall at the Island of Iona on the second morning, and three hours of steady rowing brought us round to Martyr’s Bay, the beach where a raiding party of Vikings massacred thirty monks of Iona’s Abbey, and left their corpses to rot on the sand. Until then Iona had been the jewel of the Irish overseas mission. Here in A.D. 563 Saint Columba had landed by curragh after sailing across from Ireland. The little bay where he first set foot on the island is still the Port na Curraich, the Port of the Curragh. According to legend, Columba had then ordered his monks to bury the curragh for fear that he be tempted to return to his homeland. Under the Saint’s unswerving leadership, Irish monks proceeded to establish one of the most important Celtic monasteries in the whole of Europe. Iona became the springboard for the Christian conversion of north Britain, sending out missionaries to the west and north of Scotland, and to the people of northern England. On the mainland and throughout the islands, Columba and his successors established daughter houses in the image of the original foundation on Iona. But then came the Vikings. Iona was attacked in 795, again in 802, and again in 806. Under this constant harassment, the monks left the island and moved back to Ireland, where, among other things, they were responsible for the creation of the renowned Book of Kells.
