The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  “When he had finished speaking, behold, one of the inhabitants of this island came out of doors as if to do some task. He was very shaggy and full of fire and darkness. When he caught sight of the servants of Christ passing close to the island, he went back into his forge. The man of God blessed himself again and said to his brothers: ‘My sons, haul up the sail even higher, and at the same time row as fast as you can and let us flee this island.’

  “Before he had finished speaking, the same savage came down to the shore near where they were, carrying in his hand a tongs with a burning lump of slag of great size and heat. Immediately he hurled the lump at the servants of Christ, but it did not harm them. It flew more than two hundred yards above them. The sea where it fell began to boil as if a volcano was burning, and smoke rose from the sea as from a fiery furnace.

  “And when the man of God had got about a mile away from the spot where the lump fell, all the people of the island came running down to the beach, carrying lumps of their own. Some began throwing their lumps after the servants of God, one after another throwing his lump, and always going back into their forges to set the lumps on fire. It looked as if the whole island was on fire like a huge furnace, and the sea boiled as a cauldron of meat boils when it is thoroughly heated up. All day long they heard a great clamor from that island. And when they could no longer see it, the howls of the inhabitants still reached their ears, and a stench came to their nostrils. Then the holy father comforted his monks, saying ‘Oh soldiers of Christ, be strong in true faith and in spiritual weapons because we are in the confines of hell. Be vigilant and be brave.’”

  Most scholars agree that the Navigatio was probably describing the eruption of an island volcano, complete with its shattering bombardment of glowing lava, ash bombs hurling from the crater, the sulphurous stench of the eruption spread by the wind, the thud and rumble of subterranean explosions, and the heavy roar of the surface eruption. But the vital question is whether the author of the Navigatio was merely retelling the description of a volcano he had picked up from another source or whether Irish monks had actually witnessed a live volcano in action. On the one hand, the Irish had such an extraordinary breadth of learning that they could have read descriptions of volcanos written by classical authors. On the other, the Irish navigators may have seen the volcanos of Iceland, which lie exactly on the Stepping Stone Route to North America, and could provide exactly the scene found in the Navigatio.

  As Brendan sailed closer to Iceland, I was thinking over the problem from a practical angle. Certainly the geography of Iceland fitted the tale very neatly: The Navigatio states that Saint Brendan approached the fiery Island of Smiths from the south. And there is ample evidence of volcanic activity off Iceland’s south shore. The undersea contours on the navigation chart show the cones of numerous extinct submarine volcanos which pimple the sea floor, and the long Reykanes ridge which projects southwest from Keflavik is largely of volcanic creation. In historic times there have been at least six submarine eruptions along this ridge. In 1783, for example, the people on the nearby mainland looked out and saw a new island rise briefly above the waves. But before the new island could be formally claimed and marked with a stone bearing the royal cipher, it was washed away and lost from view. Farther east, in 1973, a great crack opened on the volcanic offshore island of Vestmanna, out of which oozed a broad stream of lava that nearly engulfed the island’s only town.

  But one island, in particular, held my attention … the small island of Surtsey, three and a half miles west southwest of the Vestmannaeyjar group. Here in November 1963 a new sub-sea volcano had abruptly reared up out of the ocean. Everything I had read about that eruption—its 30,000-foot column of steam, the flying bombs hurtling 8,500 feet up and splashing back into the sea, the muffled explosions as the sea invaded the underwater vents, the emergence of a new-born island—echoed the volcanic description of the Navigatio. The Vestmannaeyjar group had existed in Saint Brendan’s day, and once again there was the oddity of their name: they were the West Men’s or Irishmen’s Islands. The name may have been no more than another coincidence, but in Iceland I wanted to talk to men who had seen the Surtsey eruption, especially to Sigurdur Thorarinsson, one of Iceland’s leading volcanologists who had visited Surtsey soon after the island appeared above the sea.

  “I remember thinking how accurate was the old Saint Brendan text when I first landed on the new island by rubber boat,” said Sigurdur Thorarinsson when I called at his office in Reykjavik’s university. “It was not long after the island appeared above the water, and the vents were still throwing out ash bombs. It was remarkable how conditions on Surtsey resembled the situation described in the old Irish story of the monks. As far as I know, there is no similar description by a classical author of a volcano formed by submarine eruption.” He paused.

  “And there’s another point which is sometimes overlooked: Saint Brendan’s description makes it clear that the monks came up very close to the source of the eruption. This points definitely to a submarine eruption, as it is hardly possible that they could, in their boat, come so close to an eruption on land. To my mind, I am sure that the monk’s description fits only a volcano emerging from the sea floor.”

  Today Surtsey, even when dormant, still gives some idea of what the Navigatio meant by the “Island of Smiths.” Surtsey is low and black, covered with slag and ash, and utterly lacking in any vegetation except for the first few plants now struggling to establish new life. It is precisely like the “Stony island devoid of grass and trees” which Saint Brendan saw; and should a new island appear, it would repeat the pattern of slag bombs, smoke rising from the sea, the fetid smell of sulphur, and the hissing steaming ocean described so vividly by the medieval Irish author.

  The submarine volcano which the Irish could have seen poking its tip out of the ocean most likely disappeared long ago back underwater to become a hummock on the sea floor, or it may have been eroded away by the waves. There is no way of telling. Yet until Surtsey erupted, even the most experienced volcanologists had never been presented with a similar opportunity to study a submarine volcano at close quarters. When they did so, there was even a suggestion that the new island should be named after Saint Brendan. Eventually, however, it was named after a Norse giant, Surtur, in an edda poem.

  Luckily, the Navigatio gives another clue to the location of the volcanic region. On another day, the text states, Brendan and his monks came in sight of “a high mountain in the ocean, not very far to the north, apparently covered in cloud but really in smoke at the summit. Immediately the wind drove them very fast toward the shore of that island until the boat grounded not far from land. There was a cliff so high that they could not see the top, the color of coal, and marvelously sheer like a wall.” Here, says the text, one of the latecoming monks leaped out of the boat and began to wade toward the base of the cliff, crying out that he was powerless to turn back and being pulled forward. Demons seized him and, before his companions’ eyes, he was set on fire. The other monks hastily pushed off the curragh and, as the wind had shifted, managed to sail away to the south. Looking back, they saw the mountain was no longer covered with smoke, but vomiting fire upward to the sky, then sucking the flames back so that the whole mountain glowed like a pyre.

  Again it is obvious that the Irish monks were witnessing a volcano in action, but this time a mountain volcano on land, and apparently a short distance to the north of their Island of Smiths. Once more geography corroborates their tale. North and east from Iceland’s area of submarine volcanic activity rise the volcanos on the main island. The great volcanos of Hekla, Eyjafjallajokul, and Katla, for example, all lienear the south coast. Hekla and Katla are among the most active volcanos in Iceland, and it may be relevant that here the south shore of Iceland is a long, very gently sloping beach without harbors or inlets, where a curragh would run aground in the shallows if driven on land, just as the Navigatio describes. Thus, sailing north from the Island of Smiths, the monks could have seen a di
stant volcano and been driven ashore against their will by a strong south wind. If so, then, their landfall could have been under the vertical black cliffs of the Reykanes Peninsula, which are fissured into coal-like blocks, or under the steep dark cliff of Dyrholaey, 320 feet high and easily the outstanding landmark on this flat and featureless coast. Even today, the Admiralty Pilot echoes the Navigatio when it describes Dyrholaey’s dark hill as a “steep wall-like projection extending 2 cables south of the adjoining coast.” As for the monk seized by “demons” and set alight, perhaps this was the fate of a crew member burned in a lava flow or who rashly trod on the thin crust of surface rock and broke through to the scalding steam underneath.

  Fortunately, the Navigatio is not the only document to state that Irish monks were sailing to Iceland in the great seafaring era of the early Irish church. Dicuil, the learned monk of Charlemagne’s time, records how Irish monks were making regular visits to an island so far north that during the days around the summer solstice “the sun setting in the evening hides itself as though behind a small hill in such a way that there was no darkness in that very small space of time, and a man could do whatever he wished just as though the sun was there, even pick lice from his shirt, and if they had been on a mountain top perhaps the sun would never have been hidden from them.” Dicuil’s description must mean that his northern island was in the same latitude as Iceland, where the midsummer sun only just sinks out of sight and, almost as Dicuil surmised, parties of sightseers enjoy climbing up to the high Icelandic peaks so that they look north and see the midnight sun just on the horizon, and hold midnight picnics by its light.

  Independent evidence for these early Irish visits to Iceland comes from the Norsemen themselves. The Landnamabok, the Book of Settlements, written in Iceland in the twelfth century, describes how the Norsemen first reached Iceland from Scandinavia and found already living there “the men whom the Northmen called Papar; they were Christian men, and it is held that they must have come over the sea from the west, for there were found left by them books, bells and croziers….”

  The word Papar was the Norse word for the Fathers, the Christian priests, and according to the chronicler, Ari the Learned, who wrote the Book of Icelanders shortly before 1133, these Irish anchorites fled from the remote islands when the Northmen sea raiders appeared, because as Christians they did not wish to live near to the heathen. By a happy coincidence the Icelandic scholar who has done the most work on the study of the Papars recently was the President of Iceland himself, Dr. Kristjan Eldjarn. Formerly the Director of the National Museum, Dr. Eldjarn searched for ancient ruins on the island of Papey off the southeast coast of Iceland, and excavated the most promising of them. He was one of the first people to greet us at the quayside in Reykjavik when Brendan docked.

  “We are allowed to believe that the Irish hermits were here,” he told me, “but we still have not found any item definitely associated with them. The Book of Icelanders is still thought to be a very reliable historical source; and the place names tell their own story, like Papos, the island of Papey, and Papafjord, and others whose precise location we do not know. We can still believe that they were named after the Papars, the Irish hermits who lived in these places.”

  I told President Eldjarn a little about our experience in crossing from the Faroes. “Brendan has shown how the priests could have made the voyage in their leather boats,” I said. “And I find it significant that the Papar names you mention all lie in the southeast of Iceland facing across to Faroes. Under normal circumstances that stretch of coast is exactly where I would expect to make landfall in Brendan if I was sailing the shortest route to Iceland. Once again, it seems that geography fits.”

  President Eldjarn looked wistful. “It so happens that I have not had time to carry on the investigations. We have really only just begun to search for Irish remains in Iceland, and there is much ground to cover. One problem should be borne in mind in this connection: In the so-called Viking times there was a lively contact between Iceland and Ireland, and it might be difficult to know whether an Irish artifact, found in Iceland, was brought there by the Norse or by the Papars before them. From the old literature we know that a good many of the Norse settlers came to Iceland via the British Isles, and the study of modern blood groups indicates that a sizeable proportion of Iceland’s original population actually came from Ireland and Scotland, either as wives of the Norse settlers, or as slaves and household servants. Iceland and Ireland were certainly very close throughout the early Middle Ages.”

  Perhaps it was this traditional Irish-Icelandic link that explained the warmth of the welcome which the Icelanders gave Brendan and her crew. During the days we stayed in Reykjavik, the offers of help and hospitality poured in. The small boatyard of Batanaust, situated in the next inlet to Reykjavik’s main harbor, sent a message to say that we could use their slipway free of charge if we wanted to haul Brendan out for inspection. It was an offer I promptly accepted. Brendan had been afloat for eight weeks, far longer than most people had thought a skin boat could survive without at least a new coat of grease on the leather. I wanted to see what her hull looked like now. So we towed Brendan round to Batanaust, and pulled her from the water. She was a reassuring sight. The only damage to her skin were one or two slight gashes near the bow where she had obviously struck sharp edges of flotsam. We examined every inch of the stitching, but not a thread was out of place. The boat was as sound and as tight as the day we had set out from Brandon Creek. Only her shape had changed. On each quarter near the stern two deep wrinkles ran diagonally across the oxhides where the stern had begun to droop, which was allowing the leather skin to slacken and pucker. And on Brendan’s starboard side, where she had lain on the beach at Iona, the soft sand had pressed in the leather between her wooden skeleton ribs so that it looked almost corrugated. But what really encouraged us was the way the wool grease was still sticking to the leather. This meant that our vessel still wore its waterproof coat, and that those critics who said that a leather boat had to be beached and regreased every week were wrong. Apart from one or two patches where the grease had been physically rubbed off by flotsam, Brendan still bore a good protective layer of lanolin which now had a greenish tinge of algae and in some places even gave foothold to a crust of small barnacles. We cleaned it carefully with wooden scrapers, and checked the leather underneath. Its condition was perfect. Our boat was still in excellent shape for another long ocean passage, and the following day a gleeful troupe of small Icelandic boys had the time of their lives painting a fresh layer of hot wool grease over Brendan’s hull, and getting themselves thoroughly sticky in the process.

  We also rummaged Brendan at the boatyard—the old traditional practice of removing every single item from the boat, cleaning her gear and inspecting the hull. Luckily we had kept the ash legs for the steering frame, and so were able to replace the oak which had cracked. Then, piece by piece we carried the rest of our equipment into the boathouse for store, and as we emptied her, Brendan’s leather flanks sucked in a few inches, like a python after digesting its meal. The boatyard cat, however, was dismayed. To the amusement of the shipwrights the cat took one sniff at Trondur’s cache of whale blubber and dried lamb, and promptly evacuated the boatyard, not to be seen again until Brendan was reloaded and safely afloat once more.

  The director of Iceland’s telecommunications center also came down to offer his help.

  “I think we could improve your radio system,” he told me. “I suggest installing crystals for aircraft radio frequencies so that you can try reporting your position to overflying airliners on the aeronautical bands. There are few ships on the way to Greenland, and fewer coastal stations. In fact, once you are out of range of Reykjavik there’s only one station in South Greenland before you get to Canada.”

  “But isn’t it against regulations for a boat to use the aircraft frequencies?” I murmured.

  He grinned. “Perhaps, but most likely you’ll be speaking to Icelandic aircraft, or to our
telecommunications center at Reykjavik, and we certainly won’t raise any objections.”

  The next day a pair of white-coated technicians worked on retuning Brendan’s radio, and the director had another suggestion. “You’ll need a call sign, so what about using ENDA? It sounds as if it’s Irish, the Irish call signs usually begin with an E, and the letters are taken from the middle of Brendan.”

  Icelandic officialdom, it seemed, was delighted to bend the rules to help Brendan. It was a refreshing attitude, and to our great good fortune, the commanding officer of the Icelandic Coast Guard was the courteous and urbane Petur Sigurdsson. He was a man deeply concerned with the sea and its history, and had been interested for many years in the boats used by the Irish monks. Now, under his personal direction, nothing was too much trouble for the Coast Guard to help us. Brendan was given a berth in the Coast Guard base; from Coast Guard stores we were provided with a better anchor, extra warps, a spare car battery for the radio, and an oil bag to spread oil on the water in a storm. “You can never tell; it may come in handy,” said Commander Berend Sveinsson, the Coast Guard officer looking after Brendan’s needs. “Our lifeboats used to carry this type of oil bag, and maybe it will help in a storm.” When I took the oil bag back to Brendan, Trondur nodded approvingly. “This is good,” he announced. “Oil from fish is needed, but best is whale oil.” Twenty-four hours later he turned up with a jerry can of whale oil scrounged from the whale station outside town. It was fortunate he did so. That oil bag was to assist Brendan when she was struggling against the Greenland storms.

  “If there is anything more we can do to help, just let me know,” said Petur Sigurdsson when I visited the Coast Guard headquarters to thank him. In their control room I found myself looking at the big glass operations screen on which they marked the movements of their patrol ships. Still on the screen was the dotted line of Brendan’s approach to Iceland. At each noon position an artistic hand had drawn a tiny sketch of Brendan, and where we met heavy weather, huge waves were looming over the little boat, menacing her. “When you were coming into Iceland we were keeping an eye on you … just in case we were needed,” said Petur quietly. I felt very grateful.