by Tim Severin
“The brakes are no good. This car is too old,” said his girlfriend needlessly. Eventually we came to a narrow road which snaked down to sea level. It brought us out into a tiny hamlet on the water’s edge. The place was dominated, of all things, by a Viking house. It sat there massively, an overgrown log cabin built of huge and ancient timbers, stained dark brown. Its windows and wooden doors were picked out in red, and on the roof was a carpet of turf like a slab of mountain pasture. A modern wing had been grafted cleverly to one end, but from where we parked the car, the log house was unquestionably Norse and completely authentic.
“This is Trondur’s family home,” the girl said.
I looked at the house, then past it to a neatly whitewashed church on the edge of the little harbor. In a field to one side, the roofless carcass of an even grander church rose out of the meadow, and its architecture looked late medieval. A strange coincidence occurred to me.
“What is the name of the village?” I asked.
“Kirkjubo,” she replied.
“Does it have any other name?”
“Yes, sometimes this place is called Brandarsvik.”
So there we were—my silent volunteer was from Saint Brendan’s Creek, Faroes.
Bit by bit the details came out, partly obscured by Trondur’s natural shyness, partly because no one thought it strange that he should want to join Brendan’s crew. It turned out that his family, the Paturssons, were among the longest-established families in the Faroes. Their log house was almost a national monument by Faroese standards, as the oldest continually occupied house in the islands. The Paturssons had lived there, father to son, for eighteen generations; before that it had been owned by the bishop of the islands. No less than three churches stood around the holy site of Saint Brendan’s Creek: the roofless cathedral, the white church with its wooden steeple by the harbor, and the stump of an even older church eaten away by landslides into the sea until only its eastern wall remained.
The Paturssons themselves were as traditional and interesting as their own log house. Squads of Patursson children rushed in and out; Grandmother presided as an elegant and stately lady, deferring only to Potl, Trondur’s twin brother, and older by quarter of an hour, who was now the head of the family. It was Potl who greeted us cheerfully, dressed in his farming clothes, and half an hour later reappeared in full, traditional Faroese regalia of silver-buckled black pumps, dark blue knee socks with scarlet tabs, blue broadcloth knee breeches, and an embroidered waistcoat and short jacket embellished with a triple row of silver buttons. Totally unself-conscious in this splendid eighteenth-century attire, he stalked ahead of us to the little church, rang the bell to summon the congregation from the hamlet, and led the prayer responses to the austere, white-ruffed Lutheran pastor, while the ribbed wooden roof of the church creaked above us in the gale, like a ship working in a sea.
Afterward we took tea and coffee and cakes with the pastor in the main house, in a drawing room filled with furniture brought back from exotic lands by generations of seafaring Paturssons, and with some of Trondur’s pictures on the walls. Then, after a decent interval when the pastor had left, Brendan’s crew was entertained to a memorable meal in the old Faroese style. The Paturssons maintained the Faroese traditions, and they kept a table which would have done credit to every generation of Paturssons before them. The food put before us was the product of their own labors, from the milk and cream and the homemade rhubarb jam to the potatoes. But most of all they served us the traditional Faroese dishes. There was leg of mutton, killed and then dried slowly in the wind so that it had the consistency and color of Parma ham and a distinctly rank flavour. There were boiled fulmar’s eggs, which Trondur and Potl collected from the cliff faces in a perilous exercise which involved dangling from a rope’s end over a two-hundred-foot drop. There was even dried whale meat, and a rubbery slab of pure whale blubber with its black rind that reminded one exactly of high-grade tyre rubber. Everything was Patursson-prepared—even the whale, which the Paturssons had helped drive ashore and harpooned to death.
“My word, look at all that,” breathed Edan in awe as he looked at this enormous spread. The table itself was a huge lump of timber which had been washed ashore in Brandarsvik some generations earlier with a half-drowned sailor clinging to it. The Paturssons had rescued and revived the castaway, and kept the timber as their great table.
I saw Trondur’s eyes twinkle as he pulled out a ferocious knife, and without a word he carved a sliver off the slab of whale blubber. He offered it to Edan, who heedlessly took the blubber in one bite.
“Ugh!” his jaws abruptly froze, and his eyes widened in horror. “Ugh! It’s like rubber soaked in cold oil,” he blurted out, looking distressed.
“Go on, Gannet, it’s rude to spit it out,” said George. Edan screwed up his face, took a mighty swallow, and for the first time on the voyage declined a second helping.
After the meal we went up to the small converted farm building where Trondur lived, and saw some of his sketches. Borgne, his beautiful interpreter, was his fiancée and wholeheartedly in favor of the idea that Trondur should go with us. It would give him new material for his drawing and sculpture, she said. And like a true seaman, all Trondur had to do was pack his kit bag, and he would be ready.
Of course Trondur had to join the crew of Brendan, and it was one of the best decisions of the entire voyage. From the moment he came aboard, his command of English improved daily. He helped us to prepare Brendan for the next challenge—the long crossing to Iceland in the face of the westerly winds. There were several minor adjustments to be made: we smothered the flax ropes in whale fat to make them more supple and waterproof; Trondur and Edan improved the forward tent to make it more watertight; and, farther aft, George and Arthur replaced the ash legs of the steering frame. These had been bending and swaying so alarmingly on the run from Stornoway that I thought they might snap. So we replaced them with heavy baulks of oak, three inches thick, and lashed these new legs into position with leather thongs. Then Potl Patursson towed us round to Brandarsvik where, despite Edan’s protests, we loaded Trondur’s favorite sailing diet of dried fish, dried whale meat, and yet more chunks of whale blubber. Most of it hung from the rigging, and it gave off a truly medieval smell, strong enough to be noticed above all Brendan’s other odors. And so, draped with our new larder, we were ready for the next phase in our adventure.
8
FAROES TO ICELAND
The Patursson family made a brave little group as they stood on the quayside at Brandarsvik, with their Norse home and the white church behind them as they waved and waved goodbye to Brendan. Their figures grew smaller and smaller, as the magnificent vista of the Faroese coastline opened up on each side, sheer cliffs falling direct into the sea. The sun was setting, and its rays slid from under the Atlantic cloud cover to backlight the silhouettes of the western islands, and here and there strike a patch of color from the rocky hill flanks. Potl was towing Brendan with the Patursson family fishing boat, and we were traveling across a calm, bronze, evening sea toward the harbor of Westmanna. The Westmanna or West Men were, in Viking parlance, the men who came from Ireland, the farthest-western land in Europe; and perhaps in Westmanna, too, the Irish or the Norse-Irish had settled. But for Brendan it was just a brief anchorage and then away again next day, July 3, to clear the Faroes and set course for Iceland.
Once again we found ourselves afloat off Mykines, our first bird island. Only instead of a raging gale, we now had a slack calm and lay rocking gently on the quiet swell. Trondur at once proved his worth: he taught us how to fish properly. As a five-year-old boy he had learned in the fjords the same skills that generations of Faroese fishermen have practiced off Greenland and on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Certainly there was a trick to successful fishing in these depths of water. First Trondur produced a massive lump of lead, perhaps four or five pounds in weight, from his kit bag. This weight he tied to a very long line looped around a curious flat wooden frame which ac
ted as his spool. His lures were three simple hooks with brightly colored rags on them. Splash! The massive weight plunged overboard followed by yards and yards of line whipping over the gunnel. We were in three hundred feet of water. As soon as the weight touched the bottom, Trondur began to pull in the line quite slowly and smoothly, then flick! After about ten feet he gave the line a swift tug, grunted with satisfaction, and began to haul aboard the entire line hand over hand.
“Have you got one?” Gannet asked eagerly.
“Two,” said Trondur laconically, as the wet line fell in coils around his sea-boots. Sure enough, up from the sea glinted the shapes of two splendid cod. Splash! Back went the fishing weight. Gather, jerk, and once again Trondur began to haul in.
“How many this time?” asked Edan.
“Three,” said Trondur. Again and again he succeeded, and we all wondered how he did it. When I handled the line, even after Trondur told me a fish was hooked, I couldn’t feel a tremor. When Edan tried, he raised a fine, fat blister on his hands just by the action of hauling in a single cast of the line. Soon Brendan was wearing yet another decoration—a dripping row of fresh-caught fish, hanging like washing on the line, and we were trying out every variation of cod—boiled cod, fried cod, cod in batter, cod stew, cod with rice or potato, or parsley sauce, even a tasty cod spaghetti.
On the second day a fine southeast wind sprang up, and we made excellent progress, fifty miles, in a gentle sea so that we had time to doze and chat and relax. A fog came down at eight in the evening, though of course it was full daylight and we could enjoy the spectacle of the millions of pearly droplets which formed on every surface, from the sails to the fibers of our woollen clothes and, most of all, on Trondur’s magnificent head of hair. He was sitting on the stern, sketching in his note pad, and with the wind layering him with fog, he was coated down one side in the most spectacular manner.
Edan, of course, had come up with yet another scheme. This time, it was to launch messages in bottles. For one thing, it gave him an excuse to empty the last few inches of our current bottle of whiskey, and for another it gave him a chance to try out his prose.
“You never know who might pick up one of our messages,” he said, looking hopeful. “I’m sure they’ll write back.”
George reached over the side and quietly retrieved one of Edan’s bottles which was lazily bobbing past in the gentle flow of water along Brendan’s leather side.
“Aboard leather boat Brendan, west of Faroes,” he read aloud from Edan’s note. “Dear Reader, I am so glad you have picked up this message, which was thrown into the sea from the leather boat Brendan between Faroes and Iceland. Please let me know where and when you found the bottle.” Then followed Edan’s signature and address.
“I think it’s worth a try, don’t you?” continued Edan, perking up. “Just think of it. Some delightful girl, strolling along the beach in her bikini, sees this bottle resting on the sand and picks it up, reads my message. I’m sure she will write. That’ll show you.”
“I have my doubts about the bikini,” I said. “You’re dropping your bottles into the tail end of the Gulf Stream, and with the prevailing southwesterlies it’s much more likely that they’ll finish up near North Cape on the Arctic Circle.”
“Ten to one the only blond who’ll write back to you will be a lonely Norwegian fisherman,” said Arthur, “six foot tall, fifteen stone, and smelling like a sardine factory.”
Whoosh! Just at that moment there was a massive sigh, like a huge gas bag emptying, followed by a gentle rippling sound. “Hval!” cried Trondur with delight, as we all leapt to our feet and gazed aft to where the sound had come from. Whoosh! There it was again, and this time we saw the cause of it, a great, sleek, black island of wet skin which came to the surface not twenty yards from Brendan, and wallowed there gently for a moment with the water running off it, and eddying away. “Good, big hval,” said Trondur admiringly, as the rest of us gaped at the monster. The whale was certainly big, something like sixty feet long, and perhaps eight or ten times Brendan’s weight. It completely dwarfed Brendan, and suddenly one had the realization how puny our little, low-slung boat must seem to this huge animal. Apart from that immediate reaction, however, there was no feeling of danger, only a fascination for this huge creature which had deliberately emerged from the depths right beside us.
“He’s come to take a close look at us,” said George, in a hushed voice.
“Hope he doesn’t come too close,” muttered Edan. “One nudge from that fellow, and we’ll all be swimming.”
“No,” I said, “he’s probably interested in Brendan sitting motionless on top of the water. We probably look enough like a whale to make him curious—we’re about the right size; curved to something like a whale shape; and, like him, Brendan is skin stretched over a skeleton. I wonder what he makes of us.”
The whale heaved and sighed beside us, gently and deliberately. Then it sank down, and the next time it surfaced, it was a quarter of a mile away, swimming quietly and without hurry to the north.
I thought back to the visit I had paid in the previous autumn to the Whale Research Unit of the Natural History Museum in London. I was not sure of the reception I would receive, because the meeting was the result of a letter I had sent to a scientist on the Natural Environmental Research Council. Was there any useful work in environmental research Brendan could do on her voyage? I had asked. Yes, you might try counting whales, came the unexpected reply. He’s pulling my leg, I thought as I read this. He knows the legend of Saint Brendan landing on the whale’s back, and this is a practical joke. But I went down to the Whale Research Unit, and to my surprise found that the idea was completely serious. “We’ve been asking selected yachtsmen and the crews of ships to keep a log of all the whales they see on their travels,” said the scientist in charge. “The thing is that we really know surprisingly little about the habits of whales on a world-wide basis, where they migrate, what species are to be found in different places at different times, and so forth.”
“But how can Brendan help?” I asked.
“Well, your boat is going to waters where we receive very few reports, and where one would expect to find a number of whales.”
“What sort of whales are we likely to encounter?”
“Oh, almost all types. That’s it, you see, we don’t really know. But I would expect you to see fin whale, perhaps an isolated blue whale—those are the two largest whales in size—pilot whales, and off Greenland you may even see some of the true Arctic whales. We’re interested also in the smaller species such as the dolphins.”
“Do you think we’re likely to get close enough to identify the particular species?”
“Again, I don’t really know. But …,” and here he paused, “the minke whale is commonly described as ‘curious’ and he may come up to take a really close look at you, while the fin whale sometimes rubs himself up against small boats.”
Just what Brendan needs, I thought, some itchy whale having a good scratch on the leather hull, to say nothing of tipping her over.
But on the voyage itself none of Brendan’s crew guessed what was about to happen, not even Trondur, who had a great deal of experience of whales and whale-catching. Day after day Brendan was visited by whales, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups. It was uncanny. The conditions were always the same: if the weather was gentle and the sea calm, we could virtually guarantee the appearance of whales close by, emerging from the depths with a great sigh of air, and a spray of water from their blowholes. Then they would stay in our vicinity for half an hour or more. For some reason the whales were drawn to Brendan. In all his experience Trondur had seen nothing like it. The great animals seemed to be almost as fascinated by Brendan as we were by them. Even when the whales came very close, there was more a feeling of companionship than of risk, and it was noticeable when we finally entered an area of shipping how the whales would dive when the ships were in the area, perhaps frightened by the sound of their engines. But when
the ships had gone, the whales reappeared around us, rolling and wallowing in sight of Brendan, who was also slopping around on the cold water.
That first day of whale visits was all the more exciting because of its novelty. Scarcely two hours after seeing the first whale, which was probably a large fin whale, Edan was helping Trondur to fix a waterproof collar around the foremast to stop water dripping into the shelter. He was standing precariously on the gunwale, when he glanced down and suddenly let out a cry. “Hey, look at that! There are dolphins under the boat! No, they’re not, they’re whales and there’s a solid mass of them right under us!” Even as he called out and we all rushed to the side of Brendan, the distinctive black fin and the boot-shiny back of a small whale broke out of the water just beneath Edan’s foot, scarcely three or four feet away, with the characteristic hiss of air from the whale’s lungs, and a lazy swirl of water as the animal curved into view. Looking down into the water, we could see the extraordinary pattern of large, moving shadows, as whale after whale moved gently underneath our leather hull, a vast congregation of animals changing places as they rose and fell, a living escort of sea creatures not more than six feet beneath the hull. There were literally scores of them, and we could even pick out the white flash of the bellies of two dolphin who seemed to be traveling in company with the whale school, almost as scouts. Then the whales began to surface around Brendan. The air was filled with a constant hissing and sighing of their breath as they came to the surface, some ten or fifteen animals at a time, then sank down and others took their place in a strange marine ballet. “Grind! Grind!” cried Trondur, usually so phlegmatic, but now almost capering with delight. They were pilot whales, one of the smaller species, though the larger members of the school were half as long as Brendan and probably weighed as much as our vessel. They were unafraid, and moving very slowly. Trondur seized one of his slabs of whale blubber. “This is grind,” he said. “Very good to eat.”
