The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  But one thing the Icelanders could not do for us was to improve the weather in our favor. We had Brendan revictualed within a week and we were ready to set out again, heading for Greenland. But the wind had turned against us. Day after day for three weeks we waited in harbor while the wind blew strongly out of the southwest, precisely the direction we wanted to go. Every afternoon I trudged up to the meteorological station and checked the weather maps. Each afternoon’s forecast was the same—westerly and southwesterly winds, usually strong and often gale force. To assuage our impatience, Petur arranged for George and me to go on the ice patrol with the Coast Guard plane that flies off Greenland.

  As the plane droned westward at a few hundred feet, I peered down at the Greenland Sea. It was a discouraging sight. Days of southwesterly winds had whipped up a long, rolling sea which left white foam streaks to the horizon. The color of the water was a bleak dull grey-green, chilly and inhospitable; and the sea itself was absolutely empty for mile after mile. Along the path that Brendan had to sail, there were no ferries, no freighters, not even a fishing boat to be seen. Instead, about a hundred miles off the Greenland coast, we came to the ice, a great ledge of pack ice extending out from the land and continuing north toward the Pole. From the air the ice looked clean and inviting compared to the foul mood of the ocean. But where the two met, I could see how the great floes dipped and swirled, and their shiny white surfaces suddenly changed to a hostile blue-green as the waves washed over them. Most certainly, it was no place for a medieval leather boat to venture.

  When we landed back at Reykjavik, I made up my mind: It would be wiser to winter the boat over in Iceland and return to her the following spring to continue our journey. The season was dangerously late for a westward voyage, and by the time we reached Cape Farewell, the southern tip of Greenland, there was a real risk of autumn gales which could sink Brendan. Also there was far too much pack ice even to think of landing in Greenland. I consoled myself that this was what the Irish monks had done. The Navigatio made it clear that they advanced season by season, moving from one island to the next. Saint Brendan himself, according to the Navigatio, had taken seven seasons to reach the land in the West.

  I knew that to delay the Brendan Voyage into a second season would bring practical difficulties, but I told myself that Brendan was not in a trans-Atlantic race. Above all, we should not take unnecessary risks. I told Petur Sigurdsson of my decision, and he looked relieved. “I’m sure you’re right. Brendan has done well to get here, but now the sailing season is too late. Let the Coast Guard look after the boat for you during the winter. You can come back in the spring when we have easterly winds, and continue your voyage.”

  I assembled the crew aboard Brendan where she lay in Reykjavik harbor and, feeling depressed and worried whether the project would hold together, explained the situation to them. “Of course I would like to invite each of you again to be aboard Brendan next year. It has been an excellent crew; we all know one another; and I think we all agree that Brendan has shown that she can make it to the New World.” George, Arthur, Trondur, Edan did not hesitate. Each said promptly that he would be back next year.

  Winter nearly broke the back of the venture. We all returned to our separate homes—George to an office in Brighton, Arthur to Ireland, Trondur to begin building a house for himself on the farm near Kirkjubo, and Edan to help his brother overhaul their charter boat for a new season. Brendan sat forlornly in the hangar of the Coast Guard airplanes in Reykjavik. But the costs of running into a second season were crippling. The book publishers who had originally advanced the money to help make the project possible agreed to increase their financing. But funds were desperately low. To buy more stores and better equipment, renew insurance premiums, and all the other items of expense, I had to sell my twenty-seven-foot sailing boat Prester John—the car had already gone—and scrape the very bottom of the financial barrel. By the time the 1977 sailing season opened in northern waters, I had scarcely enough money to buy the crew’s return tickets if we ever did manage to reach North America.

  At the beginning of May it was time to muster the crew. I telephoned George and Arthur to tell them a rendezvous date. Edan I reached via the harbor master of a small Scottish port, who had to row out to Edan’s boat to deliver the message. It turned out that Edan’s charter business needed his attention, so while he could come up to Iceland to help us get Brendan ready, he decided he could not sail with us. Trondur’s summons was suitably matter-of-fact. I telephoned the family farmhouse in Faroes, and when Trondur came to the phone, I said simply, “Trondur, this is Tim. Please catch the Tuesday plane to Reykjavik and bring some whale blubber with you.”

  “Jaoo,” he replied simply, and hung up. Five days later the crew contingent from the British Isles was filing past the immigration desk at Reykjavik Airport—George as brisk and efficient as ever; Edan in a shaggy tweed jacket, jeans, and homemade shoes, still without socks; Arthur in a disreputable-looking Irish cap. The immigration official peered doubtfully at Arthur.

  “Where is your return ticket from Iceland?” he inquired.

  I intervened: “He is a member of the crew of the skin boat, Brendan.” There was immediate understanding. “Then he won’t need a ticket,” said the official. “Good luck and have a good voyage!” And he handed back Arthur’s passport with a smile. The following day Trondur arrived, as hairy as ever, bearing in one hand a stout brown paper parcel containing about forty pounds of whale blubber and dried lamb, and in the other a harpoon.

  We went immediately to the Coast Guard hangar to inspect Brendan to see how she had fared the winter. My real concern was the danger from rats and mice. I had heard several stories from tanners about the damage done to leather left in store, particularly if the leather was greased. Rats and mice, it seemed, liked to gnaw the fat for food. But Brendan was unharmed. She lay just as we had left her. The Icelandic winter had been exceptionally mild, and the rats and mice had foraged well in the open air. The only evidence of their presence were some mouse droppings and piles of torn-up paper between the double gunwales where several families of mice had built their winter nests.

  Brendan was in such good condition that we did not even need to regrease her hull before we lowered her straight back into the water and began loading. After our previous summer’s experience, there were one or two changes. We loaded 160 gallons of water, nearly twice as much as before, because there was still no chance that the pack ice would permit us to land in East Greenland and I planned to attempt the voyage to North America in a single long run. We also included two small VHF radios to increase our chances of talking directly to the commercial airliners overhead; and we took much greater care in wrapping our daily food packs, heat-sealing them in double sheets of plastic. Our diet, too, had been altered. After the previous season’s trouble with the dehydrated foods ruined by sea-water leakage, I had decided to revert to a more medieval diet. We discarded the bulk of the dehydrated stores, and in its place loaded smoked sausage, smoked beef, and salt pork which a Polish meat curer had prepared specially for me in London over the winter, together with a large supply of hazelnuts, oat cereal, and a splendid truckle of cheddar cheese. These were the foods the Irish monks would have eaten, and I decided to take them too, not for authenticity, but simply because they were the best food for the job. Oat cereal was what Trondur called “good work food,” and the smoked and salt meats were to meet every requirement of the voyage. We found it did not matter if they were swamped by a wave or soaked by rain. They survived without special care and tasted just as good. In fact, the medieval content of our diet was to prove a major success throughout the weeks to come.

  Our clothing too showed the lessons we had learned. The 1976 season had demonstrated so clearly the advantages of woollen clothing in an open boat in high latitudes that we each brought extra wool stockings, wool hats and mitts, woollen trousers and scarves. Our friendly Icelandic boatyard presented each of us with a superb woollen Icelandic sweater, and now Tr
ondur collected a mysterious-looking package from the airport. “Iceland gave Brendan sweaters,” he announced, “so Faroes gives clothes too. They send this from factory. This is what Faroe fishermen wear.” Digging into the box he pulled out five sets of splendid grey woollen underwear, twice as thick and warm as anything I’d ever seen.

  It took only five days to return Brendan from her stripped-down state to full seagoing readiness. It was simplicity itself to re-equip a medieval boat. We merely propped the masts in their steps, lashed down the oars, attached the steering paddle by its leather strap, took on food and water, and by May 7 Brendan was ready to begin the second and major stage of her odyssey. A few minutes past five in the evening, the Reykjavik harbor master’s tug towed us out of port, dropped off the line, waved goodbye, and a light wind wafted us gently to the west. We opened a bottle from our fresh supply of Irish whiskey, charged our mugs, and I proposed a toast: “Fair winds!” “Fair winds,” the others replied. We knew that the most difficult and potentially dangerous stage of the voyage lay ahead of us.

  10

  EMERGENCY

  The weather treated us almost too kindly. For the first week we had no more than light airs and calms, and Brendan drifted slowly westward away from Iceland. It was a convenient time to settle down and readjust oneself to the medieval way of life, remember the lessons of the year past, and pick up once again the special rhythm of an open boat in northern waters. At Trondur’s suggestion, we adopted the watch-keeping system favored by Faroes fishermen. We divided into two watches—Trondur with Arthur; George and myself—and the two watches worked four hours on and four hours off around the clock. It was a system that allowed each watch to decide its own arrangements. When the weather was fine, one man steered the boat while his partner could rest, or read, or cook a light snack. When the weather grew worse, the two watch-keepers would take the helm turn and turn about, just as they saw fit. When it was very rough, as we were to learn, twenty minutes at the helm was as much as a man could endure before he became completely numb. Only at noon did we break the four-hourly pattern. Then we worked two dog watches of two hours each and prepared the main hot meal of the day, which all four of us would eat together. And this season we shared the chore of cooking, which was a far better arrangement.

  In some ways it felt as if we had never interrupted the voyage for the winter. Our old companions the whales promptly paid us a visit. When we were still well inside the circle of Faxafloi Bay off Reykjavik a school of minke whale surfaced and blew around us, and a young minke about thirty feet long and consumed with curiosity spent fifteen minutes cruising along up and down each side of the boat, some twenty yards away, puffing and snorting, and rolling under us. Two mornings later, again in a flat calm, a large colony of seals popped up to inspect her, their heads bobbing like sleek footballs all around Brendan as the seals gazed curiously at the leather boat. Then, all at once, they sank beneath the water and vanished from view.

  We had human visitors, too—a passing fisherman who presented us with lumpfish from his catch, which Trondur skinned and cooked up into fish stew; and a party of hunters in a speed boat. They had been shooting guillemot for the pot, and they also gave us part of their catch, much to Trondur’s delight. He plucked, boiled, then fried, and finally sauced the guillemot with sour cream to produce as fine a meal as any French chef. “One guillemot,” he announced judiciously as he ladled out our helpings, “is same as two fulmar, or three puffin, all good food.”

  Trondur was obviously back in his element. He fashioned a new fulmar-catching device, a deadly flower of wicked-looking hooks sprouting from a corked float which bobbed along in our gentle wake. Below the surface, at the end of our safety line, he also towed a massive hook-and-feather on a heavy wire trace. It looked big enough to catch a shark. Everywhere one turned, there was evidence of Trondur’s activities: coils of fishing line, lead weights, boxes of fish-hooks, chunks of whale blubber ready for fulmar bait, a stone for sharpening fish-hooks, and the occasional loose feather where he had plucked his latest gull prey. Trondur lavished the most care on his harpoon. During the winter he had made a beautiful new one. Its brass shank fitted into a long wooden shaft, and the attack end carried an exquisitely made spear point of steel, shaped like a leaf. This spear point was also set in brass, with an off-set attachment for the harpoon line so that as soon as the harpoon struck, the head broke free and the pull of the line twisted and buried the head in the flesh. For hour after hour Trondur would sit hunched over the harpoon head, lovingly honing it to a bright, razor edge. On the thwart beside him lay the harpoon shaft, its handle wrapped with leather thong for a grip. With the leaf-shaped point in his hands, identical in size and shape to the Stone Age spear heads of flint recovered from archaeological excavations, it occurred to me that the whole picture symbolized nothing so much as age-old Man the Hunter.

  Seven miles above our heads we could sometimes see the silver dots of airliners flying between Europe and America, drawing their vapor trails across the sky. In just six or seven hours these aircraft were making a journey that it would take Brendan many weeks to complete, if we succeeded in our passage at all. How, I wondered, would those airline passengers comfortably seated in their chairs, with their film headsets and plastic meal trays, react if they knew that far below them four men in a leather boat were crawling at less than two miles an hour across that innocent-looking ocean, only a couple of feet above its surface, and dependent largely for their survival upon skills and materials that had not changed in a thousand years?

  In the first four days Brendan had progressed so sluggishly that we could still see the snow-capped peak of Snaefellsjokull on the horizon behind us. In the clear northern air it was difficult to gauge just how far from land we had come. This clarity of the air was another factor, along with twenty-four hours of useable daylight in high summer, which must have helped the early voyagers in these northern waters. The Norsemen had used the peak of Snaefellsjokull as their departure point for Greenland. Norse shipmasters would sail west from Snaefellsjokull until the mountain sank below the horizon, and soon afterward, by looking ahead in clear weather, they would have been able to distinguish the first peaks of Greenland. From land to land along this track the distance between Iceland and Greenland is about 250 miles, and the mountains at each end make perfect landmarks, thus reducing a major gap in the Stepping Stone Route westward. On a fast passage the navigator might not be out of sight of land for more than one or two days. Also the phenomenon known as the Arctic Mirage may have helped them still further.

  The Arctic Mirage, known in Iceland as the Hillingar effect, is a northern equivalent of the well-known desert mirage. The Arctic Mirage occurs when a stable mass of clear air rests on a much colder surface. The result is to change the optical properties of the air so that it bends the light like a giant lens. Objects far beyond the normal horizon now appear within view, floating above the horizon, and sometimes turned upside down and stacked, one image above the other. Sextant readings become unreliable, and the theoretical horizon may extend for a distance limited only by the resolution of the human eye. Highly favorable conditions for the Arctic Mirage occur over Greenland, where a mass of high-pressure heavy air rests on the great ice cap, while the high-altitude Greenland glaciers supply a bright source of reflected light for the mirage. So it is possible that Irish and Norse mariners, venturing out from Iceland’s coastal waters or gale-driven westward, saw this distant light of Greenland well beyond the normal limits of the visual horizon and suspected that land lay in that direction.

  Brendan’s slow advance made her an easy mark for the patrols of the Icelandic Coast Guard service, whom Petur Sigurdsson had instructed to keep an eye on us for as long as possible. First the Coast Guard spotter plane circled us, then the guard ship Tyr came to investigate. As usual Trondur had a fishing line into the water. “We’re only fishing for fulmars, not cod,” I radioed to Tyr as she steamed inquisitively around us. “Jolly good, and good luck, Brendan,” c
ame back Tyr’s reply as she churned off on her duty to protect Iceland’s two-hundred-mile fishing limit from poachers. I turned to Trondur. “By the way, did you tell your fishermen friends in Faroes that last year we ate grey fulmars which they say are poisonous?”

  “Ya,” he replied.

  “What did they say?”

  He grinned. “They say we are crazy.”

  Coming from Faroes fishermen, I thought to myself, that was the best compliment we had received so far.

  Our next visitor was the patrol boat Aegir, which sent across a rubber dinghy. Standing bolt upright in the dinghy was a junior Coast Guard officer, clutching a brown box as if it would explode at the slightest tremor. “The Captain sends this with his compliments. I hope it’s all right,” he said, gingerly handing over the box. I opened it. Inside was an enormous cream cake, on the cream sailed an outline of Brendan piped in red icing. Beside it was an envelope addressed:

  HIGH COMMAND OF THE GREENLAND SEA

  CAPT. TIM SEVERIN

  BRENDAN

  ADDRESS POSITION 63° 56’N; 23° 17’E

  The letter inside read:

  HELLO TIM, OLD BOY.

  You better start whistling for a wind. For added assurance we will make a powerful woodo [sic] dance in your behalf, at the Dance halls in Reykjavik tonight.

  Seriously we all here wish you all smooth crossing and may God be with you all on your remarkable journey. The steward sends you a small token of his admiration and wishes you all the best.