The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  Nothing seemed to depress our good humor. During the second night of high winds, as I relieved George at the helm, I asked him how his watch had gone.

  “Not bad,” he replied. “A bit wet here and there, but nothing to worry about.”

  “Did you have to pump out the bilges at all?”

  “Yes, quite a bit now and again. We got one good comber straight over the stern.”

  “Was that the one which woke me with a crafty squirt of spray in the face?”

  “Oh no, a much earlier one. There was about a foot of water where you are standing now, and I was wondering if anyone was actually afloat in his sleeping bag. Good night.”

  With that, he calmly disappeared into the shelter, and left me to light the pressure kerosene lamp which gave the helmsman some warmth. I worked up a good sweat pumping the wretched thing, turned on the valve, and was rewarded with a mocking water-logged gurgle. The lamp was completely drowned. From inside the shelter George, who hated that lamp, gave a satisfied chuckle.

  Each of us was reacting to the conditions in his own way. Arthur had decided that the best place to be in foul weather was warmly curled up in his sleeping bag. But if he curled up, George could not lie down properly, so there was much friendly banter between them as George kept count of how many hours each day Arthur could pretend to be asleep, surfacing only for meals and his turn on watch. Neither did the heavy weather take the edge off Edan’s enjoyment of life; though he was complaining that his cigars were getting soggy in the spray. He, alone of us, still liked to take a tot of whiskey in the evening. However much he pressed us to join him, the rest of us had long given up the desire for a drink or even a smoke. Trondur remained absolutely unruffled. He would emerge bearlike from the forward shelter to take his turn at the helm, and on the first wind-swept evening taught us another useful trick. From his pocket he pulled out a pair of shapeless oiled wool mittens. To our astonishment, before he put them on, he leaned over the side and dunked them, warm and dry, into the water, squeezed them out, then put them on half-sodden. “It’s better,” he said. “Not so cold later.” He was quite right; the gloves acted like wet-suit gloves and reduced the wind’s chill.

  Food became the number-one topic. Every morning George dug out the day’s food pack from its place in the stowage area, and each day we watched to see how much of the pack would still be edible after the seas had been washing over it, and our feet had been trampling in the same area. Each bag was sorted through so that the ruined material was thrown overboard and then he brought the salvaged items aft to the cook box. We found that some food was too plentiful. There was packet upon packet of dried soup which we couldn’t face eating, too many packets of biscuits, too much sugar, and sad-looking tea bags with half their flavor already washed out by the sea. To save money when victualing, I had bought a supply of very cheap powdered coffee, and this now proved to be false economy. After twenty or thirty cups of the stuff, not one of us could face the revolting brew any longer, and rediscovered the delights of childhood drinks, hot malted milk, chocolate, or meat extract. The main courses of corned beef or tongue or mince were very popular, and there seldom seemed to be quite enough to satisfy all our appetites, so that Skipper’s Special, the mush of apricots, jam, and crushed biscuits, was a popular event, besides using up our surplus foods.

  By July 11 I was very concerned about Brendan’s rapid advance to the west. The easterly winds had abated from gale strength, but were still pushing the boat westward so effectively that I was worried we would miss Iceland altogether. I looked again at the large-scale chart. If the wind kept up, we might even be able to run direct to Greenland in one long haul. But this would mean that we could not pick up the stores waiting for us in Iceland. I calculated our remaining food and water, and did my sums. There were enough supplies to get us to Greenland if we rationed ourselves strictly. But then I remembered the pack ice. There had been reports that the sea ice off Greenland was unusually prolonged that year, and the east coast might still be closed by a shelf of ice. It was not an attractive prospect, and I made up my mind: Brendan had to get in to Iceland at all costs.

  So we struggled to get north. We set and reset the sails to their best effect. Adjusted and readjusted the leeboards. But still Brendan slipped sideways to the west. We put out the sea anchor again, dropped our square sails, and rigged an oar as a mizzen-mast on which we set a bonnet as a makeshift sail to try to keep Brendan’s nose up against the wind. But still we were pushed westward, past the Westmann Islands, and past the corner of southwest Iceland. Never again, I thought to myself, would I doubt the theory that many sea-borne discoveries have been made by accident, when ships were driven off course by storms and heavy weather. If a vessel was as responsive to the weather as Brendan, then it was very easy to find yourself five or six hundred miles off target after a week of storms.

  Then, quite abruptly, the east wind dropped, and we could catch our breath. We knew we were not very far from land because we saw puffins flying past the boat, and these birds seldom range very far from their nesting grounds. Once more Trondur had a new trick to show us. “Crrk!” he called with a low throaty sound as a puffin went whizzing past, looking curiously at Brendan but keeping a safe distance. Again, “Crrk!” The bird wheeled in a tight arc and came back. “Crrk!” The bird was being drawn by the noise, closer and closer, until Trondur could keep it patrolling back and forth, puzzled by the strange sound. Seeing our interest, Trondur pointed at the usual pair of terns hovering high above Brendan. “Now this bird will come,” he told us, and taking a white rag he tied it to the end of the boat hook and waved it in the air. Sure enough, the terns swooped closer for a look. Trondur waved the lure again. Down farther came the terns, until finally he persuaded one of them to land briefly on the sail.

  “Pity they’re so small,” said Edan. “There’s scarcely a bite of flesh on them.”

  “Not so good,” said Trondur.

  “What sorts of birds do you eat in the Faroes?” I asked him, digging out our bird book and leafing through the illustrations. He pointed out puffins, young gannets, and guillemots. “All good,” he said. “We take them when babies from the cliff by climbing or with nets.”

  “What do they taste like?”

  “Very good. Dry or smoked.”

  “What about these birds—fulmars?” Edan asked carefully, turning to the correct page.

  “White bird is good to eat, but black one not good,” said Trondur.

  “Why not? Do you get sick?”

  “I do not know. Only Faroese fishermen say that black one is not good.”

  Edan looked hungrily back at a noisy flock of fulmars who had settled on the calm waters astern of Brendan and were now cackling away, taking experimental nips at the plastic jug bobbing at the end of the safety line. “Do you think we could get any of those?” he asked wistfully. “Some fresh food would be nice after all that dehydrated muck. I can still taste the sulphur and preservatives for hours after every meal.”

  Trondur reached for a slab of whale blubber, hanging on the steering frame. Edan looked alarmed. “No, no. I’m not that hungry,” he said. Trondur grinned as he cut off a little chunk of blubber, strung it on the hook of his fishing line, and removed the lead weight. “For bird fishing,” he reassured Edan, and gently dropped the line overboard. The blubber floated down toward the fulmars, and sent out a glisteningly tempting ring of oil. Immediately the fulmars left the safety line and paddled over toward it. One bird took an experimental peck, found the blubber good, and began to feed upon it. Immediately the flock began to fight over the morsel, and squawks of rage and disappointment filled the air as they stabbed away with their beaks and tried to rip the tough blubber to shreds before a neighbor could get a bite. But the blubber was stringy enough to stand the onslaught, and a moment later one particularly gluttonous bird tried to steal a march on his fellows. He bent down, took up the whole lump in his beak, and flapped off across the water, trying to make off with the prize. His glutt
ony was his undoing. The fishing line tautened; the weight of the bird’s own rush set the hook firmly into its beak; there was a startled squawk, and Trondur was rapidly reeling in his threshing victim. Five seconds later a fulmar was being skinned, while another lump of blubber drifted innocently back toward the rest of the flock. “Fantastic,” gloated Edan, as two minutes later Trondur caught his second victim.

  But then the fulmars grew cunning. It took five minutes to catch the third bird, and even longer to catch the fourth. Then the birds simply refused to be drawn. They paddled round the tempting oily blob, came within six inches, but refused to take a peck.

  Trondur beckoned to Edan and gestured to him to reel the line in very slowly. The fulmars followed the bait, shearing nervously as they paddled across the swell, trying to keep one eye on the blubber and the other on the strange boat. Thwack! With one clean overhand stroke Trondur brought down the boat hook and hit the nearest fulmar just behind the head, breaking its neck instantly. With a clatter of wings, the flock disappeared leaving five birds, four white and one grey Arctic fulmar on Brendan’s thwart. “Who gets the grey ‘poisonous’ one?” asked Arthur dubiously.

  “We’ll pluck all of them,” I suggested, “drop them all in the pot together, and dish up. And then no one will know who gets which.”

  I boiled the gulls slowly, prodding them with a knife. They looked like skinny, long-legged wood pigeons and were even more tough. “Shouldn’t we hang them for a couple of days to make them more tender?” suggested George. Edan looked agonized at the thought of delay. But after two hours the fulmar seemed to be ready, and I added some dark sauce and a few lumps of dried whale meat to make a gravy. One seagull was dished into each pannikin with some mashed potatoes. There was a moment’s pause, a split second of doubt, before Edan took a bite. “Delicious,” he announced. “Fantastic.” “Still a bit stringy, but jolly good.” “Great!” “I thought it would taste fishy, but it doesn’t. More like pigeon, or perhaps grouse.” Seagull à la Brendan, it seemed, was a three-star success. In the next few minutes there was total silence as we ate ravenously, and when the pannikins were collected up, only the bones were left, picked clean. Nor did anyone feel ill, whoever had eaten the grey bird, and thenceforth we agreed we would supplement our diet with fresh seagulls, one of the best foods available. It was yet another example to show how, a thousand years before, the Irish monks could have survived the long passages without difficulty or loading vast quantities of supplies. With a stock of dried meat, oatmeal, and roots, and blubber if they could get it, they could take fish from the rich northern seas and seabirds from the huge stocks of gulls around them, and thus survive almost indefinitely. Fresh water would have been their only limitation, and in an emergency they could have collected sufficient rainwater in those damp sub-Arctic climates to have survived the accident of being blown off course.

  As for our own feelings about killing and eating the wild life, no one appeared to have any regrets. For my own part, I regarded it as an exercise in the hunter’s skill. We were catching our prey with the most primitive of instruments, and there was no risk that we would deplete the rapidly increasing population of fulmars in those waters. In fact, of all the seabirds, the fulmars attracted the least sympathy. In the Hebrides and Faroes the fulmar population had been expanding rapidly at the expense of the other seabirds. The fulmars were ousting the smaller birds from their nesting ledges. Their unpleasant habit was to spit a green slime at the resident guillemot or puffin, a slime which ruined the waterproofing on the other bird’s feathers so that it drowned the next time it settled on the water. Curiously enough, when we caught them at sea, the fulmars either could not spit slime or had shot it all at the hook when they were being reeled in.

  It took us nearly six days to creep back into the Iceland coast, gently coaxing Brendan through the winds which blew perversely from the north and east. But those days were by no means dull. For one thing we began to see Icelandic fishing boats, a welcome relief from the empty seas between the Faroes and the south coast when we had sighted only two vessels in the entire crossing. The Icelandic fishing skippers would steer close to Brendan to look at the strange visitors, and the fishing crews lined the decks to gaze at us and wave. “Can’t be much fun earning your living that way,” I commented to George, as one Icelandic trawler wallowed past, with the seas breaking clear across her mid-deck as she butted into the rollers. “Just look at that water cascading across her.” Then I remembered, and laughed. “I wonder what they’re saying. Probably much the same thing. Mad to be in an open boat. But just compare the pasting that trawler’s getting to the way Brendan rolls to the waves and rides the sea. We’re scarcely taking a drop of water on board.”

  The following day a spotter plane of the Icelandic Coast Guard Service roared overhead, not fifty feet above our mast, and our radio crackled into life.

  “Hello Brendan. This is Icelandic Coast Guard, Sierra Yankee Romeo. Is all well on board?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. Everything is very relaxed and the crew is in high spirits.”

  “We have a report from the newspapers that Brendan is leaking. Can we give any help?”

  “No thanks,” I replied. “I think the only leak must be among the journalists. If you ever want a leather aeroplane, we’ll build it for you.”

  Mile by mile we crept closer to Iceland’s coast. We occupied our time successfully with more fulmar fishing, and using chunks of whale blubber we caught ourselves more seagull stews. And George enlivened one afternoon by boldly plunging overboard into the sea wearing one of our immersion suits. He bobbed gaily round our becalmed boat for half an hour, looking like a bright red tailor’s dummy with his feet sticking up in the air. As we were in latitude 62°N, the water was quite cold, yet when he climbed back on board, George was only just beginning to feel chilled. We did not know it then, but those bright red immersion suits were to play a vital role in our struggle for survival off the Greenland pack ice.

  The submarine shelf off west Iceland is obviously a favorite area for the big fin whale, because their numbers increased as we approached the land, and as usual the animals visited Brendan, sometimes in pods of six or ten animals, including baby ones rolling along in their mother’s wake, and—for once—looking comparatively small alongside Brendan. We saw, too, the whale-catching boats from Iceland’s whaling station which cruise the area on the look-out for their prey, but we never saw them in action, because whenever the whale-catchers appeared, the whales frolicking around us seemed to be warned. They would dive. The catchers steamed past, and half an hour later the whales would reappear, snorting and puffing around Brendan.

  Finally we had a sight of distant land, the magnificent mountain peak of Snaefellsjökull, the great volcanic cone which stands more than 4,700 feet high over the western bay, its peak permanently capped with ice and snow. The white mountain top was the beacon for our arrival, as we began to distinguish the long buttress of mountain ridges running eastward toward the main bulk of land. Snaefellsjökull, too, gave us the wind we wanted. On July 17 Brendan began to slant more purposefully towards Reykjavik, and we made a sweepstake on our time of arrival. Just for a moment, as the harbor of Reykjavik came in sight, I felt a flicker of regret. Was it really necessary to be coming in to land with all its problems, its people, and its responsibilities? Life on Brendan was so relaxed, so peaceful, and so cocooned inside the leather hull that I was almost regretful that this leg of our voyage was coming to a close.

  Yet it was as Brendan passed the outer harbor buoy. Trondur, of course, had guessed the time most accurately and won the sweepstake. The Reykjavik pilot boat came chugging out from between the piers, and I looked back over my shoulder. As if to symbolize the new pressure of the land, a large cruise liner was bearing down on us, 30,000 tons or so of tightly scheduled commerce and investment, hurrying to enter the harbor.

  “I’ll heave to, so that the liner can get past,” I s
houted to the pilot, as he closed us. “I’m afraid we’re not very maneuverable.”

  “Oh no,” he called back. “That ship can wait. We have come out to guide Brendan into harbor. That is why we have come. There is a berth in the harbor waiting specially for you, but there is a strong wind inside and I think we should tow you.”

  “No, thank you,” I called back. “We would like to give it a try ourselves. Perhaps you could stand by with a tow line just in case.”

  I handed the tiller to George, and he excelled himself. Brendan glided delicately in between the pierheads, so close that her crossyard almost brushed the legs of the spectators on the sea wall. She turned through an S-bend, and Edan hauled down our sails. Trondur and Arthur stepped quietly ashore with the mooring lines, as unconcerned as if they were stepping off the pavement, and Brendan was safely moored. A smartly uniformed Icelandic official picked his way over the greasy leather gunwale, white-topped cap tucked under his arm. He thrust a clip-board and pen into my hand. I looked down. It was a health clearance form, and I duly signed a firm No to the question “Are there any rats aboard the ship, or have any rats been seen on board during the voyage?”

  9

  ISLAND OF SMITHS

  One day, said the Navigatio, Saint Brendan and his crew found themselves being blown by a southerly wind toward a stony island “very rough, rocky and full of slag, without trees or grass, full of smiths’ forges. The venerable father [Brendan] said to his brothers: ‘This island worries me. I do not want to go on to it nor even get near it. But the wind is driving us straight toward it.’

  “As they were sailing alongside it, a stone’s throw away, they heard the sound of bellows blowing like thunder, and the thud of hammers on iron and anvil. When he heard this, the venerable father armed himself by making the sign of the Cross in four directions, saying ‘Lord Jesus Christ deliver us from this island.’