The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  Arthur and Gannet were both avid bird-watchers, and Brendan gave them ample opportunity to indulge their hobby. The farther north we sailed, the more varied became the bird-life. Scarcely a day passed without sighting some uncommon species, and the reference book of birds was in constant demand. Halfway to Faroes we had recorded fifteen different species and we spent hours watching the behavior of the gulls and terns which constantly tended us, shrieking and twittering, or staring at us as they wafted past Brendan ploughing quietly on her way. Our most elegant companions were the fulmars, the premier aero-bats of these waters, who glided in endless loops and circles around us for hour after hour, riding close to the waves on stiff wings, their fat fluffy bodies like huge moths. For some reason we always seemed to attract a pair of Arctic terns which took up their station over us, fluttering nervously and cheeping anxiously to one another as the other seabirds came near them. Occasionally they would break formation to search for fish in our wake, and once we witnessed a terrific air battle when our two small terns drove away a hulking skua which came marauding in our direction. Gallantly the two smaller birds hurled themselves into the attack and drove off the intruder with much shrieking, before they returned to their mast-top station, and we could distinctly hear their chirrups of pride. But their victory was brief. Scarcely ten minutes later, a pair of skuas arrived and this time there was no contest. The two terns fled for their lives, jinking and turning at wave-crest level as the powerful skuas struck at them.

  For two days Brendan made steady progress northward. The radio continued to give gale warnings, but the wind held fair and my calculations put us halfway to the Faroes. Daily George or I inspected the condition of the leather skin, poking our fingers through the wooden frame to see whether there was any deterioration. By now the leather was completely saturated with sea water, which seeped gently across the membrane and trickled down to join the inch or two of water constantly swirling along the bilge. But the leather itself seemed to be holding up well, except for two patches which worried us near the H-frame. These two patches were in identical places, one each side of the boat, and by sighting along the gunwale I could detect that Brendan’s curved stern had begun to droop, flattening the profile and wrinkling the skin. This was a pity, for it made the vessel less seaworthy in a storm, and the oxhides in this area were no longer stretched tight over the frame but bagged and corrugated like an elephant’s posterior. Prodding a finger against the skin, one could easily pump it in and out like a soft balloon, but this did not seem to affect the material. Our medieval leather was holding up remarkably well, and I suspected that the increasing cold was a help. Brendan was now in chilly waters, and the lower temperature would be slowing down the rate of any decomposition in the leather, stiffening the oxhides, and hardening the layer of wool grease into a protective coat. Here again, I suspected, we were learning another reason why the Irish could have chosen to sail to their Promised Land by a northern route: the sea conditions might have been cold and stormy, but they suited their skin boats and made them last longer on sea-voyages. In the warmer waters of a southern voyage, the protective grease might have washed away, and the leather begun to rot.

  Our daily inspections also revealed that the sea had been taking its toll on the wooden framework. The steering paddle was held in position by a cross rope which fastened to the opposite gunwale. The strain on this rope was so great that the gunwale of seasoned oak, an inch and a half thick, was literally being torn apart. A jagged pattern of splintering cracks had begun to appear. George lost no time in shifting the rope to another strong point, and he doubled the lashings which held the steering frame together. Later, I crawled forward to inspect the mainmast and found that the main thwart had been bent upward in a curve, probably by the same forces which were causing the stern to droop. It was inadvisable to poke and pry too closely with one’s fingers near the mast for the gaps between the thwart and the mast were opening and closing like giant pincers with the motion of the boat, and threatened to crush one’s fingers.

  Thoughtfully I crawled back and considered our position. Brendan was changing her shape. I did not believe it was yet dangerous, but it was very evident that we were dependent on the quality of our basic materials: the timber had to be strong enough to withstand the constant whiplash effect of the flexing hull, and the leather thongs which tied the framework together had to continue to hold. Above all, the leather skin needed to be tough enough to survive the increased sagging and wrinkles, and the miles of flax thread were now under greater strain than ever before, and must not snap. In a strange way I was reassured. It occurred to me that what a medieval boat-builder might have lacked in his knowledge of naval architecture, he gained in the quality of the materials he used, materials which he had selected critically and then prepared with the utmost care. Aboard Brendan we were learning this lesson for ourselves in a host of small ways. Item by item, our modern equipment was collapsing under the conditions. Our shiny, new, modern metal tools, for example, had virtually rusted away, despite their protecting layer of oil. After a month aboard Brendan, a tempered saw blade simply snapped like a rotten carrot; a miner’s lamp, which I had hoped to use as a night light, was useless. Tough enough for a lifetime’s use in the mines, its metal gauze had corroded into a solid mass, and its iron rivets dropped streaks of rust. Of our modern materials, only the best stainless steel, the solid plastic, and the synthetic ropes were standing up to the conditions. It was instructive that whenever a modern item broke, we tended to replace it with a homemade substitute devised from the ancient materials of wood, leather, and flax. These we could work and fashion, sew and shape to suit the occasion. The product usually looked cumbersome and rough, but it survived and we could repair it ourselves. Whereas when metal snapped, or plastic ripped, the only choice without a workshop on board was to jettison the broken item.

  It all added up to the realization that the sailors of Saint Brendan’s day were in fact better equipped materially—as well as mentally—than is usually acknowledged. The early medieval sailors had access to superb materials which lasted well, and, if they failed, could be repaired with simple tools. Even their clothing was admirably suited to the conditions, as all of us on Brendan were finding. As the weather turned colder, we had replaced our clothes of artificial fiber in favor of old-fashioned woollen clothes, reeking of natural wool oil. We may have looked and smelled unlovely, but our oiled wool sweaters, thigh-length wool sea-boot socks, and cowl-like woollen helmets were not materially different from the garments available in Saint Brendan’s day.

  A calm day, June 19, provided a good demonstration of the shortcomings of some of our modern equipment. After breakfast George went forward to dig out the day’s food pack.

  “Ugh! Look at this!” he called out, holding up the plastic sack with an expression of disgust. It looked like a putrid goldfish bowl, half full of slimy brown water which dripped from one corner. Blobs of food floated by in a soupy mass inside. “How revolting,” muttered Gannet, and then more hopefully, “Let’s open it and see if there’s anything still edible.” George ripped open the bag. Despite its double sealing, a leak had somehow developed in the plastic, and the bag had absorbed a couple of gallons of sea water and rain. Disgustedly, George poured overboard a foul-smelling mess of tea-colored water, which splattered out wet lumps of sugar, sodden tea bags, soggy shortbread biscuits and gluey lumps of porridge, all totally ruined. Gannet hopefully seized on a packet that looked less damaged than most.

  “Oatmeal biscuits,” he exulted. Then he took a bite. “Foch!” He spat out the mouthful. “They’re saturated in salt,” he complained.

  “Well, if you can’t eat them, nobody can,” remarked Arthur.

  “Well, Skip,” said Edan as he suddenly realized what might happen. “We will open another bag, won’t we? I mean there’s nothing at all in that last one.”

  I laughed. “Okay, Gannet. We’re not on short rations yet.”

  It was another lesson learned. If all our supp
lies were similarly damaged, we might later run short of food. Indeed we discovered several other bags had also leaked and most of their contents had disintegrated. By far the worst were the dehydrated items which promptly soaked up water, swelled and burst, leaving a putrid mess. Only the tinned items survived, and because we had not had time to varnish them over, labels had been washed off, so we had a guessing game for a hunter’s casserole.

  “Well, I’m not worried,” George summed up, as he inspected a macedoine of instant vegetables swimming in half a gallon of the Atlantic. “These dehydrated vegetables are all right once or twice a week, but day after day is too much. My whole throat tastes of preservative.”

  The nineteenth and twentieth of June brought us only a moderate advance. The wind headed us for a time, and Brendan actually lost ground, ending up thirty miles farther away from the Faroes. There was nothing to be done, and we accepted the situation with our newly minted medieval philosophy. Eventually the wind died away completely, and we simply waited to see what Providence would bring. George played Edan at backgammon, and was 15p up in the stakes. Arthur had crawled into the shelter and was dozing. I leaned comfortably against the motionless steering oar, and listened contentedly to the sound of the waves rolling under the hull, the occasional creak from the mast against the thwart, or the H-frame shifting in its socket. Every now and then the log line gave a half-hearted twist as we edged forward over the sea.

  “Trawler in sight! Coming down from the north.” Anything to break the monotony. The others climbed up to have a look.

  “I bet they’ll trade for whiskey.” Edan was scheming already.

  “I doubt it,” said Arthur. “They’re probably on automatic compass, going home after a fishing trip off Iceland. They won’t even have seen us. After all, they’re not expecting to meet anything out here.”

  The trawler kept ploughing steadily toward us. It would pass about half a mile ahead, and there was no sign of life aboard. It was close enough to read the name: Lord Jellicoe.

  “Here, George. You take the helm. I’ll see if I can raise them on the radio.”

  I switched on our portable VHF set.

  “Lord Jellicoe. Lord Jellicoe. Curragh Brendan calling. Come in please.”

  Silence. Only the hiss of the loudspeaker. I tried repeating the call. Again silence. Then suddenly a startled voice crackled back:

  “Lord Jellicoe. Who’s that?”

  “Curragh Brendan. We’re off your starboard side, about half a mile away. Can you give me a position check, please?”

  “Wait a minute.” Lord Jellicoe ploughed on, while presumably her navigator was roused to work out the unexpected request. Just as she was disappearing over the horizon, she signaled the information I wanted, and later that same evening as we listened to the BBC news bulletin, Lord Jellicoe’s radio broke in. She was calling up a coast station, and we could hear the flat Yorkshire accents of her skipper.

  “Humber Radio, maybe you can tell us something. We passed a strange vessel some time back this afternoon, and I’m told that it’s carrying a crew of mad Irish monks, is that right?”

  We never heard Humber Radio’s reply, because Brendan’s crew were doubled up with laughter.

  June 21, the longest day of the year, made us realize that we were now in high latitudes. We were enjoying almost twenty-four hours of daylight, and even at one o’clock in the morning I could still read the log book by reflected light in the sky. From that day on, for the rest of the sailing season, we had no need for navigation lights, which was just as well, for I was a miser with our precious battery power. That evening we made the final contact with our friendly coast operator at Malin-head radio station who wished us luck for Faroes in his Irish brogue. As if in response, the winds changed to the south, and Brendan began to advance again in the right direction.

  At six in the morning, a whale-catcher boat, about fifty feet long, came roaring up, its harpoon looming sinister on the forepeak.

  “Hope she doesn’t think we’re a leather whale, and take a shot at us,” Arthur muttered as the whale-catcher circled us, its crew waving and cheering, and shouting if they could give us any help. We waved back our thanks, and they went tearing off, quartering the sea in search of their prey. Their lookout would not have welcomed the sea fret which quietly closed around us a couple of hours later, and locked us in a white cloud. Brendan ghosted along, the mist clinging in thousands of glistening droplets to the fibers of our woollen hats and to our beards like dew on blades of grass in a dawn meadow.

  All that day the wind continued light, with just one heavy shower of rain, from which we managed to collect several inches of fresh water as an experiment. Catching the water in a tarpaulin, we drained it into our cooking pots. In an emergency, I calculated, we could just about survive on rainwater in that damp climate.

  June 23 answered the question of how the early Irish monks would have located the Faroes in the vastness of the Atlantic. It was an ordinary summer’s day for those regions, occasional sunshine and a great deal of cloud. Brendan was still more than fifty miles from the Faroes, yet we picked out the islands with ease from the tall columns of cloud building up over them, thousands of feet into the air. The moist southwest wind sweeping across the ocean was deflected upward by the islands, condensed, and built up cloud banks as distinctive as marker flags on a hidden golf green. Picking up the binoculars, I looked more closely at the clouds and saw something which alerted me: the clouds were rolling and changing shape every few minutes in powerful up-draughts, and some of the clouds seemed to be pouring over the hill crests toward Brendan. They were the signs of an abrupt change of the weather, and I didn’t like the look of the turbulence.

  That evening my concern deepened. We had a lowering sunset—a red sky with the purple shadows of the islands in the distance, beautiful but ominous. We were now close enough to be able to identify the individual islands in the group, and I carefully consulted the charts and the pilot book. Our best course was to aim straight for the center of the Faroes, run through one of the narrow channels between them, and then try to duck into shelter on the lee side. But there was one snag—the tidal stream around the Faroes. On every tide the Atlantic sluices through the Faroes in an immense rush of water. The tide gushes through the narrow sounds between the islands with a myriad currents and countercurrents, sometimes so strong that even large ships must take care. The pilot book was a doleful mixture of caution and ignorance. “Little information is available regarding the rate of the tidal streams,” it said; “… in the channels between the islands, the stream may be very rapid and from eight to nine knots is not exceptional.” It also warned the mariner not to sail too close to land for fear of the off-lying rocks called Drangar which lie close off the cliffs on the north and western sides of the group. A medieval sailing boat, I thought to myself, caught in these tide rips would be helpless.

  I checked the compass bearings and marked Brendan’s position on the chart, just before the storm line hit us. It swept down on Brendan from the south, a bank of rain which cut visibility abruptly from twenty miles to three miles in a matter of minutes. The wind force jumped upward. The rain hissed and rattled down, and we pulled on full foul-weather gear.

  “Everybody in safety harnesses, please,” I ordered, and we buckled on the belts and clipped lifelines to the boat. “Gannet, you handle the headsail sheets; Boots, take the mainsail, and look after the leeboards. George, you’re the best helmsman on board, you take over the steering. I’ll handle the pilotage. This is likely to be tricky.”

  Brendan groped her way in the general direction of the Faroes, heading on the last compass bearing I had been able to take before the rain blotted out the horizon. After an hour, we had a brief glimpse of the islands as the sea-level cloud lifted. At once I saw that I would have to abandon my original plan. The main tide was running in a circular motion around the islands, and had picked up Brendan and was carrying her clockwise around the group. There was no hope of getting to the cent
er of the group. We would be lucky to get into land at all, without being gale-swept past the west of the Faroes. Mykines, the most westerly island and closest to us, was out of the question as a landfall. Its only regular inhabitants were the lighthouse-keepers and a handful of crofters, and its landing place could only be approached in calm weather. But Vagar Island, just inside Mykines and separated by the narrow channel of Mykines Sound, had a fjord that offered good shelter and it was worth a try.

  By now the wind had risen to a half a gale, and Brendan was driving blindly through the rain, closing the gap at a terrific pace with the tide under her.

  “Keep as close to the wind as you can,” I asked George. All of us were squinting through the downpour for a sight of land. The sea had now turned a nasty grey and was broken into a confusing cross-pattern of pyramids and crenellations. I guessed we must have entered the area of eddies and tidal backcurrents. Brendan was going at full stretch. We needed every inch of headway if we were to get up into Vagar, and not be slammed sideways into the sheer cliffs of Mykines. The wind was blowing so hard that although Brendan was pointing east she was going almost north, sliding sideways across the top of the water.

  “Cliffs!” bellowed Edan. There, half a mile away, was a leaping band of white water where waves were breaking against a sheer wall of rock. It had to be Mykines.

  “My God! Look at that lot,” Arthur breathed. It was indeed a remarkable sight. The cloud was so low that we saw only down a narrow tunnel, about six feet high, between the cloud base and the grey ocean. Thus the height of the cliffs was reduced to a mere looming black shadow inside the cloud, and our view was confined to the tortured line of water bursting into spray against the rock. At that same moment, Brendan entered a back eddy, running against her, so that her forward movement suddenly slowed to a crawl. Yet the gale kept her sliding sideways, ever sideways toward the cliffs. It was like slipping down a tunnel in a nightmare. There was no escape. The cloud base pressed down on us, squeezing us as inevitably as the tide. All of us fell silent. We knew it was a race between our snail’space advance and a sideways lurch toward the cliffs. Hardly breathing, we watched the grey cliffs inch past, yet coming closer and closer.