The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  Good speed.

  CAPT. GUNNAR H. OLAFSSON.

  As I finished reading the note, Aegir’s boat crew was already scrambling back aboard their vessel. The rubber dinghy was whisked aboard; a burst of smoke from her twin exhausts, and Aegir went throbbing past us at full speed, her crew waving and three long blasts on her siren to wish us farewell.

  The weather continued to be very mild. It was difficult to believe we were in such ill-reputed northern waters. With only a gentle swell on the sea, Trondur could trail astern in the rubber dinghy, sketching Brendan, and George was able to clamber around the gunwale, adjusting ropes and leeboards to his precise satisfaction. The sun shone brilliantly through the clean air, and sank down in magnificent sunsets. Only the cutting edge of the wind reminded us that we were less than one hundred miles from the polar pack ice. When the wind blew from the north, from the ice, it sliced through one’s defenses. Before emerging on watch, it was wise to struggle first into cotton underwear, then a suit of woollen underclothes, then the heavy Faroes underwear, two pairs of socks, trousers and shirt, and two sweaters, before leaving the protection of the living shelter and tugging on oilskins. The technique was to wear as many layers of warm clothing as possible and to dress up before going outside. Otherwise even a gentle breeze stripped away all body heat in a few minutes, and it was difficult to get warm again. As the temperature dropped each of us produced his own choice of clothing. Arthur sported a selection of shapeless woollen hats and a vast pair of padded Navy watchkeeping trousers. George had stocked up with soft Icelandic woollen socks and gloves. I preferred home-knitted mittens reaching halfway up my forearms. But Trondur outshone us all when he appeared in a magnificent furry Chinese beaver hat, its earflaps waving so that it was difficult to tell where the beaver fur left off and Trondur’s luxuriant tangle of hair and beard began.

  We were finding that life aboard Brendan was much more comfortable with four persons instead of five. The extra space was invaluable. We could stow our spare clothes and equipment properly, keeping out only our personal belongings, safely packed in water-tight kit bags. Also our daily rations, originally packed for five men, now gave us ample food. What with the fulmar that Trondur was catching, and our store of smoked and dried meats, we were eating far better than the previous season, and our morale lifted accordingly, even when we had to chip half-frozen honey from the jar. A constant supply of hot drinks—coffee, beef extract, and tea—kept the watch warm; and our fresh supplies survived well. In temperatures that seldom rose above forty degrees Fahrenheit, nature was providing us with a free cold larder, a fact that would have been doubly important to the medieval seamen who sailed that way before us and had to rely on fresh provisions more than we did.

  On May 12, an exhausted bird arrived on board to remind us that migrating birds also took the same route between the continents. Scarcely larger than a sparrow, we identified it as a wagtail when it fluttered down, totally worn out, and landed on the steersman’s head. It refused crumbs and water, but later hopped forward along the gunwale and took up residence in a sheltered hole in the forward bulkhead of Trondur’s berth. By next afternoon it had gone, flown on its way, though we jokingly accused Trondur of having eaten it for a midnight snack. The little wagtail’s journey lay along age-old migration paths that could have been another clue for the medieval sailors that land lay west of Iceland. But such clues would have had to be treated carefully. Flocks of migrating birds moving high overhead in spring and autumn indicated the direction of distant lands to watchers. But it required special knowledge to interpret these signs correctly. The watchers needed to know something of the habits of the particular birds to know just how far or how directly they flew on their migrations. On Brendan we ourselves were witnessing an example of this lore. The previous July whenever we saw puffins flying over the sea, we knew that we were close to land. But now in May we saw flights of puffin one hundred and more miles from the nearest shore. In May the birds were foraging far and wide for food, whereas in June and July, depending on where they laid their eggs, they restricted their hunting to areas close to the nests. On such knowledge could depend the difference between a successful and a futile voyage of exploration.

  For our safety, I tried to report Brendan’s daily position to the shore radio stations, who passed the information on to the Coast Guard. So whenever the sky was clear, I took sextant readings and calculated our position. To set our course, there was only one golden rule: keep sailing west, always west. With each wind change, we simply altered course to make whatever westing we could manage. If the wind headed us, then we turned north or south, and moved at our best angle of ninety degrees to the wind, until the wind changed again. Calculations of leeway and the effect of ocean current were hit and miss. We judged Brendan’s leeway simply by looking at the angle of the safety line to the boat, which could be as much as thirty degrees; and our speed and distance was broadly a matter of guesswork. In light air, Brendan, especially when heavily laden, was moving too slowly for the trailing log to be effective, and the log reading was often forty percent wrong. By a simple test we found it equally accurate to throw a chip of wood into the water by the bow, time how long it took to pass the steering paddle, and then calculate our speed.

  Friday the thirteenth proved to be our best day’s progress to date. A breeze of force 3 or 4 pushed Brendan along for sixty miles, and because the wind moved out of the north and into the east, we immediately noticed the rise in temperature. For lunch we ate an enormous cassoulet of beans and smoked sausage, after Boots had scraped the sausages clean of their green fur of mould.

  “Let’s test some of our dye,” I suggested to George as we lounged replete from the meal and wondering what to do to enliven the afternoon. Some bottles of dye powder had been given to us in case of emergency. The theory was to drop the dye into the water where it would be visible to a searching aircraft. “It will color the water an iridescent orange,” George read aloud from the label on the bottle. He unscrewed the cap, and tipped the phial of powder overboard. The powder promptly turned green—not much use in a green ocean. “Perhaps the maker was color blind,” commented Arthur. “Or his stuff doesn’t quite work right in near-freezing water,” I added. Five minutes later, however, George himself turned a spectacular blotchy yellow. Some of the powder had blown back and landed on him, and he spent the rest of the day looking like a strange species of leopard.

  Next morning brought the first real snag of the second stage of the voyage—the kerosene cooker mutinied and refused to work on either burner. This was totally unexpected. All last season the cooker had functioned perfectly. Now I pulled out a box of spare parts and went to work to strip down the cooker, only to find that most of the spares did not fit. Someone at the factory must have made a slip-up when packing the spares. Superficially, this was merely irritating; but in the long run I knew that it could turn into a major setback. The kerosene was our only source of heat. If the stove failed, we would be left without hot food or drink at a time when a hot meal might make the difference between an efficient crew and an exhausted one. Of course we could sail forward, eating only cold provisions, but it was not a cheerful prospect. Even the Eskimos rely on hot food during long journeys; and we still had at least 1,500 miles to go in an open boat. After four hours of work crouching over the cooker, I finally coaxed one burner to work on makeshift replacement parts. But the other burner was never to function again, and for the rest of the voyage I was acutely aware of just how much depended upon that single blue flame.

  Now the weather, after a spectacular display of the northern lights, began to flex its muscles and behave more as if we were in the far North. The wind swung to the southwest and built up ominous black thunder clouds ahead of us. Brendan stopped in her tracks and began to shy sideways, northward, under an overcast sky and steady drizzle. An unfriendly swell heaved up the sea and occasionally splattered aboard as wave crests. Trondur commented on the bilge water which was now surging and lapping under h
is sleeping bag near the bows. “I hear water,” he said, “but it is not wet … yet.” He was amusing himself by fishing for the cloud of Little Gulls which hovered in our wake. They swooped and pecked at his line, even carrying it with them into the air, but their beaks were too small to be easily caught; and only rarely did Trondur reel in a victim which he could add to the larder of seabirds hanging off Brendan’s stern. “Is there any gull you would not eat?” I asked him. He thought for a moment. “The Eskimo, they catch two, three hundred auk. This they put inside dead walrus and bury for many weeks, then they dig up and eat. This I have not tried, but maybe it is not so good.” Even so, Trondur looked mildly hungry at the prospect.

  Saint Brendan’s day, May 16, was the last day of “normal” weather—thick overcast with occasional rain showers that were just short of turning into sleet. It was in stark contrast to our Saint’s day the previous year when, nearly thirty degrees warmer, we had waited in Brandon Creek preceding our departure from Kerry. Now in 1977, in the middle of the Greenland Sea but more relaxed and experienced, we toasted the Saint in Irish whiskey twice—once before lunch, and once in the afternoon when the wind turned, briefly, into the northeast and gave us a short push in the right direction. “Ouch!” grunted Boots when he leaned over the gunwale to dip his pannikin into the water for the washing up. “If that’s any sign, I’d say we’ll see ice at any time.”

  “Cold, is it?” I asked.

  “Bloody freezing,” he declared. “I wouldn’t fancy my chances of falling into that. It rains just as much here as it does in Ireland, but there’s a difference: if you touch metal in this cold, it hurts.”

  All day long the rain continued to come down, and despite the improvement to the living shelter, the water seeped in. A fine fat puddle formed on the thwart near Boots’s berth; every lurch of the boat sent a trickle down on his head. Just before midnight, out of the darkling mist behind us, loomed the patrol ship Thor. On Petur Sigurdsson’s instructions she had come all the way to check our aircraft VHF radio, which was not giving a proper signal, and how Thor managed to locate us in that gloom and swell we never knew. It was near miraculous. She had to come within six miles of us before her radar could pick up an echo from Brendan. It was like discovering the traditional needle in a haystack. After an hour in which we tested the VHF set between the two vessels, Thor slid away into the darkness. She had come well off her normal patrol route, and I knew that henceforth Brendan had passed out from under the umbrella of the Icelandic Coast Guard unless there was a dire emergency. Ahead of us lay only the bleak coast of Greenland, whose only permanent inhabitants in those latitudes were a tiny band of meteorologists at the small weather station of Tingmiarmuit. During the last few years the sea ice had been growing worse and worse, and even the East Greenland Eskimos who had once hunted along the coast had abandoned that region as too inhospitable.

  As if to underline my sense of foreboding the weather continued to deteriorate. The next day began with fog, mist, and drizzle, and the barometer began to fall rapidly past 980 milibars. A sullen swell from the southeast warned us that heavy weather was on the way. George and I made ready. We dug out a tarpaulin, and stretched it as tightly as possible over the waist of the boat. Two oars acted as a ridge pole, and left a tunnel underneath the tarpaulin just big enough for a man to crawl into if he had to work the bilge pumps. The Irish monks carried leather tents and sheets of spare leather aboard their curraghs and presumably rigged themselves a similar shelter to throw off the breaking seas, otherwise a severe gale would have filled and sunk their boats.

  By noon our lack of freeboard was growing dangerously apparent. Brendan was so heavily laden for the long passage direct to North America that, as the wind and waves increased, she promptly heeled over and began to scoop water aboard. Bilge pumping became a regular chore; and when the watches changed, Arthur and George climbed forward to reduce sail, rolling up the foot of the mainsail and tying in the reefs. Then we ate a hot stew of sausage, and waited for whatever the gale would bring.

  By now I had abandoned any attempt at a westward course. The wind was too strong for Brendan to do anything but run away from it. On the charts I could see we were being driven farther north than I had planned. In a sense we were being embayed, just as we had been embayed on Tiree in the Hebrides. Only now it was on a giant scale. Ninety miles ahead of Brendan lay the pack ice off the east coast of Greenland. From there the ice edge ran north and then curved east, sweeping back toward Iceland, so that we were being pushed into a great embayment of ice. For the moment, we had plenty of sea room, but a day or two of gales would put Brendan into the pack ice. It was not a prospect I relished, but there was nothing we could do about it while the heavy weather lasted.

  We were not the only victim of the strong winds. Another migrating bird landed on Brendan. This time it was a small brown-and-white water pipit traveling its long migration route to a summer home in Greenland. The high winds must have sapped its strength, because the exhausted creature dropped into the sail, slid down, and lay quivering on the cabin top. It was too tired to protest when George picked it up, and put it out of the wind until it regained its strength. When the bird felt active enough, it hopped curiously about the steering area, perched briefly on George’s hat, and then, still wary of humans, decided to spend the night on a coil of rope lying on top of the cabin shelter. There it stayed all night, where the helmsman could see it, balancing and bobbing to the swing of the boat, and unperturbed by the slap and rattle of the mainsail above its head. The little fluffy shape made a companionable fellow creature in the dark loneliness of the night watch; but the bleak conditions were too much for it. By dawn it was stiff and cold, dead of exposure.

  Our next radio contact was encouraging. My radio call to Reykjavik was picked up and answered by the coast station at Prins Christianssund on the southern tip of Greenland. Prins Christianssund is a lonely outpost lying only a few miles from Cape Farewell and it handles the radio traffic for vessels rounding the Cape, so Brendan was now, in radio terms, at the halfway point between Iceland and Greenland. The weather also gave us a brief respite. The wind eased, though it left a heavy swell behind it, and we could prepare another hot meal. As I reached for the pressure cooker, Boots called out from the cabin, “Careful of the camera!” I thought he was talking in his sleep because as usual he was snug in his sleeping bag.

  “Watch out for the camera,” he called again.

  I stopped, puzzled. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s in the pressure cooker.”

  “What!” I couldn’t believe he was properly awake. “What did you say?”

  “In the pressure cooker,” he repeated as if it were the most natural place in the world to keep his camera. And in a sense it was. I removed the lid of the cooker, and there nestling in the vegetable cage was his precious camera, dry and safe, if smelling of onions. Thenceforth no one filled the kettle or put a saucepan on the stove without first checking that it did not contain our photographer’s equipment.

  Soon, for the third time in as many days, the wind turned against us, and picked up strength. Our spirits fell with the barometer. For three days now we’d been struggling in circles, covering the same patch of ocean with no progress. It was very disheartening. Enhanced by the almost constant rain, the sea took on a permanently hostile look. From one point of view the huge swells were impressive. They came as great marching hills of water, heaped up by the wind blowing counter to the main ocean current. They were grand monuments to the power of Nature. But seen from a small open boat, they depressed the spirit. It was difficult to judge their height, but whenever Brendan sank into the troughs, the swells were far higher than her mainmast. The entire mass of the wave loomed over us, and became as much of our surroundings as the sky itself. If I was talking to George at the helm, it was disconcerting to see a great slab of water loom up behind and above his head not more than twenty yards away as if to topple on him. Ripples wriggling down its face, the water wall
rushed toward the boat; then George’s head would suddenly begin to lift against the backdrop as Brendan rose to the swell. Abruptly the skyline would appear, and all at once there was the broad unfriendly vista of Atlantic rollers stretching all the way to Greenland, before Brendan sank once again into the next trough and the grey-blue water closed in about us.

  At 6:20 A.M. on May 20, we picked up a faint signal from Prins Christianssund which gave the weather forecast I had been dreading: we were due for a southwest gale, force 8 rising to force 9 of about forty-five miles an hour, precisely from the direction in which we were headed. We scarcely needed the warning. The ugly look of the cloudy wrack ahead of us was enough to advise us that we were in for heavy weather. Sure enough, within an hour, we were struggling first to reef the mainsail, then to lower it altogether and lash it down. Only the tiny headsail was left up to draw us away downwind and give the helmsman a chance to jockey the boat among the ever-larger seas which now began to tumble and break around us. Even as we worked to belay the mainsail, it was clear that we had left one precaution too late; the heavy leeboard should have been taken in earlier. Now the weight of water had jammed it solidly against the hull. Each time the boat heeled to the pressure of the wind, the leading edge of the leeboard dipped into the sea and, like a ploughshare, carved a great slice of water from the ocean, over the gunwale, to pour solidly into the bilges. In ten minutes the water inside the boat was swirling above the level of the floorboards, and the watch—George and I—could feel Brendan growing more and more sluggish. This was dangerous, because she was no longer rising properly to the seas; and the loose water was heaving back and forth, unbalancing her.

  Clearing the leeboard was typical of the workaday chores aboard. George and I scrambled forward. The holding thongs of the leeboard were taut from the tremendous strain of the water, and the knots defied our efforts to clear them with marlinspikes. Water continued to pour in with every roll of the hull. George pulled out his knife and slashed through the thongs, while I hung onto the leeboard to stop it being swept away. Lurching and clumsy in our heavy clothing, we man-handled the unwieldy leeboard into the boat. The work was slippery and dangerous. We knew a single misstep could send either of us sliding overboard with no chance of survival in those chill waters. Next we tugged the tarpaulin into place to shoot off the breaking seas that leaped the gunwale. Ten minutes pumping and the water level in the bilge was down to a safer margin.