by Tim Severin
“Thank God, you haven’t got your harpoon with you,” said Edan, “or we’d be eating grind from here till Christmas.”
“Or being towed by Moby Dick,” added Arthur.
We calculated that the school contained between a hundred and a hundred and forty whales, and, later in the same day, when another, very large, whale visited us, I watched the huge unidentified creature come up close to Brendan and push a massive bow wave of water in front of it as it swam deliberately toward the boat. It was then that I began to wonder about the story of Saint Brendan and the whale. Superficially, of course, it was a preposterous seafaring yarn to think that someone actually could land on the back of a sleeping whale, mistaking it for an island. According to the Navigatio, the monks had lit a fire and started to cook a meal, but the heat of the fire had woken the whale, which suddenly began to move away. The monks cried aloud in fright, tumbled back into their leather boat, and the whale swam off into the distance with the fire burning on its back like a beacon.
Yet our experience with Brendan and the whales was putting this yarn in rather a different light. There was no doubt now that a leather boat, becalmed on these northern waters, held some sort of attraction for whales. It was not an exaggeration to say that it drew them from the depths. If this was still happening in the twentieth century when the whale population is so sadly depleted, what must it have been like in the sixth or seventh centuries A.D.? In those days it was very likely that there were far more whales off Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland where the animals come to feed off the fishing banks or at the junction of the currents where the masses of shrimps and plankton are found. In the old Viking sailing directions, for example, the sight of whales between Iceland and Faroes was actually used as a position guide, rather like identifying a particular island or headland. How much more impressive it must have been for the Irish monks, drifting quietly across the feeding grounds of these huge animals who, up to that time, would never before have seen a boat or met humans, but remained secure in their own great size and gentle manner. Until then I had been overlooking the fact that the leather boats of the Irish would have been the very first vessels that these whales would ever have seen in these waters. The Irish priests would have been in exactly the same position as explorers who enter virgin jungle for the first time and meet animals totally ignorant of man, animals which are unafraid and curious about the stranger. When one connects this fact with the far greater whale population in earlier centuries, the curiosity of the animals which we in Brendan encountered, and the known habit of fin whales rubbing against boats, it was scarcely surprising that the Irish priests came back amazed by the whale life, bearing stories of monsters, of huge sea creatures, of their boat touching the animals. Seen in this perspective and with Brendan’s paler experience to underline it, the whale stories in the Navigatio increased rather than diminished the realism of the original medieval text.
But not all the sea monsters in the Navigatio had been so friendly. After leaving the Island of Sheep and the Paradise of Birds, Saint Brendan’s boat was chased by a great animal spouting foam from his nostrils and pushing a great wave ahead of him as he ploughed after the curragh. Just as this animal seemed about to devour the boat, another monster had appeared from the opposite direction in the nick of time, and attacked the first creature. A tremendous battle ensued; the newcomer killed the monster, and its body floated off and was later found washed up on a beach by the monks, who cut up and ate some of the flesh.
On July 7 I felt that this episode, too, had found a possible explanation. That day was another typical “whale day,” with Brendan becalmed on a light oily swell and under a grey overcast which seemed to merge with the metal-colored horizon. Trondur, who had an almost uncanny instinct for detecting the presence of whale, was sitting on the aft thwart, quietly sketching on his pad. Suddenly he raised his head, and looked north. He seemed tense, which was unusual for him. The others, lounging quietly round the boat, sensed the feeling and we watched him. Faintly, very faintly, I heard the hiss of a whale emptying its lungs. Trondur was already on his feet shading his eyes against the light.
“Spaekhugger,” he said flatly. We were puzzled. “Spaekhugger,” he repeated. “In Faroes, we not like this whale. It is not so big, but has big—” and here he was at a loss for the right word, and so opened his mouth and pointed at his teeth. To leave no doubt he drew an outline of the whale with charcoal strokes on his sketch book.
One glance was enough. He had drawn the characteristic shape and piebald blotches of the grampus or killer whale. I was not altogether surprised. From the start of the project I had heard more jokes and quips about sharks and killer whales than I cared to remember. The shark fishermen of Courtmacsherry, my own village in County Cork, had jovially pointed out that Brendan’s leather would make a tasty snack for a shark, drawn to the boat by the smell of her—to a shark—succulent wool grease. “Just like laying a rubby dubby trail across the ocean,” they had joked. Personally I discounted the shark danger, particularly so far north, but I was not so confident about killer whales. In the last few years there had been a handful of well-authenticated reports of yachts sunk by killer whales who had battered holes in their hulls. Only the previous summer a big racing yacht off Brazil had been attacked in this way. There was no explanation for these attacks, as the metal or fiberglass hulls certainly were not edible. But it was a different matter with Brendan. The killer whale is carnivorous and, quite simply, there was a risk that Brendan’s leather skin would be mistaken for a potential meal. A killer whale combines a huge appetite with massive teeth, ten to thirteen of them and up to two inches thick on each side of the upper and lower jaws. These teeth are designed to bite and rend, and were more than capable of ripping Brendan to shreds. “As its name implies,” said our little handbook about whales from the Natural History Museum, “[the killer whale] is distinguished by its great ferocity, being the only cetacean which habitually preys on other warm-blooded animals.” The stomach of one killer whale, I had read, yielded up no less than thirteen seals; and it was often recorded that packs of hungry killer whales attacked and demolished larger whales. Would they now mistake Brendan for a dead or wounded whale lying on the surface?
Trondur pointed. There in the distance I could just see the thin line of a black fin lift briefly above the water. A moment later the sound of its hissing breath reached us across the still water. Then another hiss. Trondur’s arm swung. A couple of hundred yards to the right of the first spot, another fin lifted from the sea. Then a double hiss. By now my eyes could pick up a pattern, and I looked farther to the right and saw two more fins. “Four—no, five,” said George, close by my right ear, as he too stood up to watch. “There’s a sixth,” called Arthur.
The pack of killer whales was strung out in the classic hunting pattern, line abreast with perhaps one or two hundred yards between each animal so that they covered a front of about three-quarters of a mile. No wonder, I remembered, the Spanish fishermen called them lobo del mar, the wolf of the sea. They hunted with the same deadly efficient organization.
The pack swept south, sinking down, then reappearing almost in unison with heavy wheezing breaths. The third time they surfaced, they were close enough for us to pick out that there were five smaller animals and a sixth, much bigger one. This was the bull, the leader of the group. He was swimming two places in from the end of the line nearest us. According to sea lore, the bull controls the movements of the hunting group among these remarkably intelligent animals. The rest of the pack takes its direction from the leader, who is more experienced and acts as a director of the hunt. This pack, I saw, were going to pass well astern of Brendan on their present course.
Then the bull sensed us. His fin turned majestically toward us as he left the pack to investigate. We gazed, fascinated by this display of unhurried power. Hiss, ripple, his great bulk surfaced again on a direct course for Brendan, and sank down. Puff, a mist of spray and steam leapt a few feet into the air as he emptied hi
s lungs before the water had cleared from his nostrils on his next surfacing. He came up for breath again, and this time he was no more than fifty yards away, and we could see just how massive he was. He was a fully grown killer whale, as large as he would probably ever be, perhaps five or six feet shorter than Brendan and three or four times the displacement. Alone, of all whales, he looked totally sinister; he was not like the cuddly, performing creature of the dolphinariums but had the brutal black-and-white ferocity reminiscent of the tiger’s stripe. Most sinister of all was the thin, cruel fin which came slicing up every time he surfaced. It looked more like a shark’s fin than a whale’s fin, for it curved back to a point, and it was so big, a good six feet tall, that it could not support its own weight out of the water, but sagged over to one side. It reminded me irresistibly of the razor-sharp wing of an attack aircraft drooping as it squats on the runway.
The final time the bull killer whale rose beside Brendan, the fin was just twenty yards away. It stood above the water as tall as any of us. We heard the full hiss of the creature’s nostrils and watched the small cloud of mist which drifted on the boat so we could actually smell the animal’s stale air. Then the great back dipped. There was a flash of the black-and-white flanks where the water sucked back from the massive body pushing through the sea; and the ripples came across and lapped gently against the leather hull. The killer whale had slid right under the boat, all eight or ten tons of him, curious, intelligent, and completely in control. There was nothing we could do. I looked round. We were all absolutely silent. Somehow we had all gathered together near the main shelter. I saw George clip his safety line on the steering frame. If the boat was tipped up, one man at least would stay with her.
We held our breath, absolutely silent, for what seemed like an age.
Whoosh! The great black fin came sliding up out of the water on the opposite side of Brendan, the great lungs emptied, and the killer whale began turning ponderously back toward his pack. We, too, all let out our breaths, and Edan with one heart-felt gasp muttered, “Piss off!” We had been inspected, and found wanting, and we were extremely glad.
Later that afternoon Trondur told us why the Faroese islanders so distrust the killer whales. The trouble usually comes, he said, during the pilot-whale hunts. These hunts take place when a school of pilot whales is seen close off the islands. An armada of small boats rushes to the scene and forms a crescent, gently herding the pilot whales toward the killing beaches where the pilot whales are stranded by the falling tide and provide—at least until recent years—an important supplement to the Faroese diet. Sometimes killer whales are also in the area, or, worse still, mixed in with the school of pilot whales. In these cases the killer whales have been known to come up underneath the small boats of the Faroese, smashing the boats, tipping the crews into the water, and men have been badly hurt. Also the killer whales are intelligent enough to rob the islanders’ fishing nets as an easy source of food. They chew great holes in the nets to get at the catch, and do enormous damage. Some years ago the United States Air Force was called in to try bombing schools of predatory killer whales off Greenland, but the animals were so intelligent that they swiftly learned to dive out of sight when they detected the presence of an aeroplane. But the most astonishing story of the animals’ intelligence came from Trondur. He told us that a Faroese islander had clambered down a cliff to rescue one of his sheep which had fallen onto a rocky sea ledge. As the man was on the ledge, a killer whale burst out of the deep water nearby and reached for him as though he were a basking seal. Again and again the whale tried to snatch the man, keeping him trapped against the cliff wall until the whale finally gave up the attempt and swam away.
We ourselves witnessed some evidence of the killer whale’s ferocity four days later: most unusually, because it was a choppy day, a school of pilot whales suddenly surfaced around us. They were behaving with great agitation. Instead of their usual placid motion, the animals were greatly disturbed. They surfaced and dived in confusion. Some were darting in one direction, others turning back the way they had come, plunging out of sight without taking breath. A few even leapt clear of the water. Instead of their usual herd discipline, the animals were scattering far and wide into small groups as if in panic. “I think spaekhugger are chasing them,” said Trondur, as we watched this display of fear among the whales, and I again thought back to the Navigatio’s description of the battle of the sea monsters. Had the Irish priests been worried by a large whale coming up close to their boat, sending before it the characteristic bow wave? And at the last moment had this whale been the victim of a grampus attack? The details seemed quite reasonable: the bow wave sent forward by a large approaching whale and the mist spouting from the killer whale would agree with the medieval description. And what other “sea monster” was there which, when killed, would float away to a beach and make food for the monks? Surely it had to be a whale. Once again the mundane facts, stripped of their fanciful telling, emerged from the Saint Brendan story and made a sensible interpretation.
July 8 we finally received our weather luck. The wind picked up from the east, and Brendan began to reel off the sea miles. The wind was exactly what we wanted because it allowed us to steer clear of the long and dangerous coast of Iceland. “The south coast of Iceland is the most dangerous of all its coasts,” stated my old edition of the Admiralty Pilot in a welter of gloom. “Should the winds shift to southwest and blow hard, a vessel would be very badly placed on that coast, where to touch the ground is certain loss…. The advisability in keeping at a distance from the south coast cannot be too strongly enjoined, and the numerous wrecks of French fishing vessels, whose spring fisheries begin here, demonstrate strongly that navigation must here be carried on with great caution…. It is rare that any vessel having incautiously neared the coast in stormy weather can clear it again…. Navigators are apt to be deceived…. The first warning of its vicinity may be the sound of the surf on it.”
The thought of a southwest gale driving Brendan sideways onto that inhospitable shore was enough to make me lay a course that headed almost due west, leaving a safety margin seventy miles wide between Brendan and the coast. But the gale, when it came, was a blessing in disguise, for it swirled Brendan even faster on her way. On the first day we covered seventy miles, and on the second day we went even better. Writing down the log at the end of the day’s run, I noticed that in the space of twenty-four hours Brendan had notched up 116 miles, even when reckoning by our very ineffective log, which, when the conditions became rough, started to flick its rotor out of the water between the larger waves. A hundred sixteen miles was not bad progress, even for a modern cruising yacht, and we were by no means pushing Brendan to her limits. After all, the North Atlantic ocean off Iceland was no place to attempt to break speed records in a leather boat.
Then the wind freshened into half a gale, and the seas began to tumble in cold, grey ranks fifteen feet high. We lowered the mainsail five feet on its mast, reefed up its foot, and took down the headsail altogether. Brendan began to labor. Her frame squeaked and grunted; the massive H-frame of the steering oar swayed back and forth under the changing pressure; and the rope holding the steering oar in place began to emit the most alarming high-pitched creaks as it was stretched under the increasing pressures.
Sooner or later, we knew, gear failures would begin. The first item to break was one of the splendid new oak posts of the H-frame that we had installed in Faroes. With an impressive groan it cracked just where it passed through the thwart. Hastily we trebled the leather thongs holding it in place and carried on, but the lesson had been learned: the oak was too stiff and resisted the motion of the boat instead of flexing with it, and it could not withstand the strain. The next item to give trouble was at the masthead, where a plain leather strap held the crossyard to the mast. The constant see-saw motion of the yard was wearing through the stitching, and the strap gave way. So it was out with needle, leather awl, and flax thread, and make repairs at sea to keep Brendan runni
ng briskly on her course. Inside the main cabin the constant dash of spray over the roof was beginning to tell. An ominous damp stain appeared in each corner where the sea was creeping in, and each day the stain expanded a little farther, inching nearer the vulnerable radio set. The rate of the advance increased dramatically when we were eventually forced to bring Brendan across the wind. The easterly gale was now blowing us so fast that there was a risk that we would be blown clear past Iceland if we did not claw up to the north. But the new course laid the starboard side bare to the rollers, and the spray collected in the cracks and corners, seeking out Brendan’s weaknesses, and steadily trespassing into the living area. A murky tide-line rose steadily along the navigation books stowed on the shelf, and I became accustomed to find my “privileged” skipper’s berth nicely wet at each end.
Fortunately we were now completely accustomed to our medieval surroundings, and it was remarkable how high was our morale. Six weeks earlier it would have been unthinkable to steer Brendan casually across the face of such hostile waves. Yet now we did it without flinching, and scarcely glanced up at the rumbling roar of a large breaker. We had learned that between the roar and any cascade of foam on board, there was a split second to act if we felt the tell-tale thump of the crest butting awkwardly against Brendan’s stern. That was the time to duck, or to hunch one’s shoulders so that the spray didn’t deluge down one’s neck. And I noticed that our priorities had altered too. I was cooking up the favorite pudding of dried apricot and mashed biscuits one afternoon when a large breaker hit. A fair-sized dollop of the Atlantic fell right on top of us. Immediately everyone dived to save the pudding and ignored everything else. When it came time to dish up the pudding, we found that the spatula had been washed clear to the other side of the boat.
