by Tim Severin
Then it was time to pay out the main warps in loops from the stern to slow Brendan down. I was fearful that she would somersault or slew sideways and roll clean over if she went too fast down the face of a wave. Finally we poured whale oil into our oil bag, pricked holes in the canvas, and dangled the bag from a short stern line. The oil bag left a streak of oil in our wake which partly quenched the worst of the wave crests directly behind us, but it was all the helmsman could do to keep Brendan running directly downwind of the slick where it would do any good. Each wave swung the little boat out of control; she threatened to broach and spill, until the trailing rope loops took hold with a thump that shook the steering frame, and literally hauled her straight. Looking back one could see the tremendous strain on the ropes, literally tearing across the surface of the sea under pressure, the spray rising from them like smoke. In this fashion we fought the gale, and in the next five hours of flight we squandered every mile of hard-earned progress from the previous day. And there was no end in sight for the gale.
Arthur was off-watch, asleep in the main shelter, when the first drenching took place. George was at the helm; I was crouched under the forward tarpaulin steadily pumping out the bilge water. As if in slow motion, I felt Brendan begin to tip forward, bows down. The boat seemed to hang there at a weird angle. Curious, I thought to myself, she usually levels off more quickly than this. Then George bellowed, “Pump! Pump as fast as you can!,” and I heard the heavy onrush of water down the length of the boat. Brendan squirmed like a gaffed salmon and began to level off. Water bubbled and gushed out of the floorboards beneath me. Frantically, I redoubled the speed of pumping, and heard the thump, thump, thump of George briskly operating the bilge pump near the helmsman. Trondur emerged from his shelter, crawled to the starboard midship’s pump, and aided in emptying the boat. When the water level was under control I climbed back and peered into the shelter.
There I saw Arthur sitting, disconsolate. On all sides he was surrounded by sodden clothing. His sleeping bag was sopping wet and his hair plastered to his scalp. “I’m afraid half the shelter is soaked, and my cameras have been drenched,” he said.
“A big wave broke over the stern and traveled up the boat. It pushed in the rear flap of the shelter and poured on top of him,” George explained. “Did it drown the radios?” I asked anxiously. “I don’t think so,” Arthur replied, “though there’s spray all over them.” I removed my wet oilskins, crawled into the shelter and dabbed carefully at the sets with a strip of dry cloth. Then I tentatively flicked on the power. To my relief the radios came to life. “Better sponge up the puddles as best you can,” I advised Arthur. “There’s a spare dry sleeping bag which Edan was using. Meanwhile, I think I’d better put extra plastic bags around the radios in case we get pooped by another wave.”
It was lucky I did so. When the watches changed, George and I peeled off our oilskins, crawled inside, and lay down in our sleeping bags. Trondur and Arthur took it in twenty-minute spells to nurse Brendan through the seas.
George and I were half asleep, when out of nowhere there came a thunderous roar, an almighty crash, and a solid sheet of water cascaded into the cabin. It brushed aside the rear flap, slammed over the thwart, and hit with such force that water sprayed onto the shelter roof lining. The water was icy, straight from the East Greenland current. Underneath us in our sleeping bags, the sheepskin mattresses literally floated off the cabin floor. A moment later, there was the frigid shock as the water soaked through the sleeping bags. “Pump her! Quick, pump her! She’s heavy!” somebody shouted. Frantically, George clawed out of his sleeping bag and raced out of the shelter, wearing only his underwear. In the same movement he had scooped up his immersion suit, which was hanging on the steering frame, zipped himself into it, and was swarming forward to get to the bilge pumps. At the helm Arthur was desperately wrestling with the steering paddle, trying to keep Brendan straight to the waves. Trondur, his oilskins glistening, was peeling back the small awning over the cooker and getting ready to bail. For want of a bucket, he had grabbed up the largest saucepan.
Ankle-deep in water in the cabin, I took a quick look around to see if anything could be saved from the water. Virtually all our gear was saturated. A book floated forlornly across the floor; the sleeping bags lay like half-submerged corpses. Water was sloshing everywhere. Quickly I jotted our last estimated position, tore the leaf from the message pad, and stuffed it in my pocket. If Brendan filled and sank, our only chance was to broadcast a MAYDAY with an accurate position advice. I thrust the small VHF transmitter, spare batteries, and a microphone into a satchel which I placed, ready to be grabbed, on top of the radio board. Then I, too, clambered into my immersion suit and went forward to help George, who was ratcheting away, flat out, at the port midship’s pump. As I passed Trondur, I could see what a shambles the steering area had become. He was standing up to his knees in water, steadily scooping away, while around his legs bobbed pots and pans, jars of food, empty sea-boots, and wet rags. This was a full emergency.
Pump, pump, pump. The two of us heaved back and forth at the pump handles, sending two feeble little squirts of water back into the ocean. Curled up in the wet darkness beneath the tarpaulin, one had a heightened sense of the crippled motion of the boat. Brendan lay almost stopped in the water, dead and sluggish, while the water inside her swirled ominously back and forth. She was so low in the sea that even the smaller waves lapped over the gunwale and added more water to the bilges. It was a race against the distinctive rhythm of the sea. As I heaved frantically at the pump handle, I wondered if there was another wave waiting to break and fill her. Would she stay afloat? And what a Godforsaken place for this emergency to happen—halfway between Iceland and Greenland. What had the experts said? Survival time in this near-freezing water was five minutes or less.
Pump, pump, pump. A glance through a chink of the tarpaulin revealed the cause of our distress. The full strength of the Atlantic was showing itself. Whipped up by the gale racing clear from Greenland, the waters were thrashing in wild frenzy. The main motion was the steady pounding of huge waves from the southwest, overtoppling their crests in a welter of foam. Flickering across the surface as far as the eye could see were spume streaks drawn out by the gale across the skin of the water. Here and there cross waves slid athwart the main wave direction, and collided. When they met, they burst upward as though cannon shells were landing. It was an awesome sight.
Pump, pump, pump. It took forty-five minutes of non-stop work with pumps and Trondur’s saucepan to reduce the water in the boat to a safer level, and lighten Brendan. Then we could assess the damage. Structurally Brendan seemed as tight as ever. The steering frame was still in place, and the seams of stitching had held. It was easy to see where the wave had struck. It had come aboard at the unprotected flank of the boat, through the open gap beside the steering paddle. Right in the wave’s path stood the metal cooker box. It had taken the full brunt of the wave. One side of the box was stove in and completely twisted. The retaining clip had been smashed open, and its rivets sheared off cleanly by the force of the blow.
The scene inside the cabin was heartbreaking. Everything on floor level, which was most of our equipment, was awash in water trapped on top of the plastic sheet we used as a base for our living quarters. We opened the flap that led forward beneath the central tarpaulin, and one by one I handed through to George the dripping floor mats, sodden sleeping bags, sheepskins oozing water, soaked clothing. Everything was saturated in icy, salt water. Only the radios and equipment perched above floor level had been saved, together with the contents of our personal kit bags, which, thank heavens, had remained waterproof. Our spare clothes, at least, were dry.
George was shivering with cold and pulled on proper clothing at last. “Christ,” he muttered as he struggled into a sweater, “I hope your theory is right that body heat will dry out our sleeping bags. I don’t fancy being this wet for the rest of the voyage.” As soon as the shelter was clear of gear, I concentrat
ed on trying to get rid of the water on the floor, mopping up puddles and stabbing drain holes in the plastic floor with a knife. After half an hour’s work it was obvious we would have to be content with the glistening wet interior. The shelter would never become any drier. Back from the tarpaulin tunnel, George passed everything we had evacuated, except the three sheepskins and one sleeping bag. These were so saturated that even after we had tried to squeeze them dry, the water poured out in rivulets.
Exhausted, George and I crawled back into the remaining two sleeping bags, trying to ignore the fact that we were drenched to the skin and the sleeping bags lay clammy upon us. For nearly thirty-six hours we’d been working with scarcely any sleep.
Boom! Again a heavy wave came toppling over the stern, smashed aside the shelter door and poured in, slopping over my face as I lay head-to-stern. We sprang up and tried to save the sleeping bags from the flood. But it was too late. In a split second the situation had returned to exactly where it had been before. Water was everywhere. The bilges were full, and the cabin was awash. Brendan was near-stationary before the breaking seas, and George and I were wading around the cabin floor with icy water soaking through our stockinged feet.
Once again it was back to the pumps for an hour, rocking back and forth at the pump handles, hoping silently that another wave would not add to the damage while Brendan was handicapped. Then back to the same chore of stripping out the cabin contents, squeezing out the sodden items, mopping up and returning everything to its place. I flicked on the radio. There was a heart-stopping moment of silence before I realized that the radio had been knocked off-tune in the hectic scramble. As soon as I had corrected the fault, I put out a call to try to report our position in case of disaster. But no one was listening. We were many miles off any shipping lanes, and with the radio’s tuning unit drenched with water and the waves over-topping the aerial more than half the time, I thought it was very doubtful that we were putting out a readable signal. The little VHF set had fared even worse. Water had got into it, and it would only squeak and click in frustration. I switched the set off before it did itself an electrical injury.
“We’ve got to do something about those big waves,” I said. “We’re exhausting ourselves pumping and working the boat. This can’t go on. The cabin will soon be unlivable.”
The crew looked at me with eyes raw-rimmed from exhaustion and the constant salt spray. The wind buffeted the mast and plucked at the tarpaulin; the waves kept up their ceaseless rumble and roar; and for a moment I seriously wondered what on earth the four of us were doing here in this lonely, half-frozen part of the Atlantic; cold, drenched, and very tired, and out of touch with the outside world.
“I propose we put up an oar as a mizzen-mast,” I went on. “Rig a mizzen staysail and put out the sea anchor so that she rides nose up to the waves. It means taking a risk when we peel back the tarpaulin to dig out the oar—a wave might catch and fill her—and it will be a dangerous maneuver trying to turn the boat around. She could be caught broadside. But the curragh men of Aran ride out heavy weather, head to wind, hanging onto their salmon nets as sea anchors.”
I saw Trondur was looking very doubtful. “What do you think, Trondur?” Of all of us, Trondur had by far the most experience in these heavy northern seas.
“What we are doing now is right,” he said. “It is better that Brendan is this way to the waves. Now she can move with them.” He twisted his hands to imitate Brendan zig-zagging down the combers. “If we have sea anchor,” Trondur continued, “Brendan cannot move. When big wave hits the bow, I think tarpaulin will break and we have very much water in the boat. Water in stern of Brendan is not so much problem. Water in bow, I think, is big problem. Now we must stop water in stern and in cabin.”
But how? What we needed was some way of closing the large gap between the cabin and the helmsman’s position. But even if we cut up a sail as an awning, or used some of the forward tarpaulin, which we could ill afford to do, I doubted if they would withstand the pressure if we rigged them over the gap. We needed something extremely strong, yet something which we could erect at once in the teeth of the gale.
Then I had it. Leather! Under the cabin floor lay a spare oxhide and several slightly smaller sheets of spare leather. They were intended as patches if Brendan sprang a leak or was gashed. Now they could be used to plug a far more dangerous hole in our defenses. At the same moment I remembered, absolutely vividly, an encyclopedia illustration of the Roman army Testudo, the “tortoise” under which the Roman legionnaires advanced against a town rampart, holding leather shields overlapping above their heads to ward off missiles thrown by the defenders. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
For the third time, I began emptying out the contents of the cabin, peeled back the floor sheet with a sticky ripping sound, and prized up the leather sheets where they had lain on the deck boards. “Get a fistful of thongs,” I told George. “I want to lace the hides together.” He crawled forward.
I shoved the leather sheets out of the cabin door. They were stiff and unwieldy in the cold. So much the better, I thought, they will be like armor plate.
Quickly I pointed out to Trondur what needed to be done. Immediately he grasped the principle, nodded his understanding, and gave a quick grin of approval.
Then he was off, knife in hand, scrambling up onto Brendan’s unprotected stern where the waves washed over the camber of the stern deck. It was a very treacherous spot, but it was the only place where the job could be done properly. With one hand Trondur held onto his perch, and with the other he worked on the leather sheets we passed up to him. Every now and then, the roar of an oncoming breaker warned him to drop his work, and hold on with both hands while Brendan bucked and shuddered and the wave crest swirled over the stern. Meanwhile, Arthur at the helm kept Brendan as steady as he could, and George, balancing on the port gunwale, pinned down each sheet of leather to prevent it being swept away by the gale. Trondur’s job was to cut a line of holes along the edge of the oxhide in the right place for the leather thongs to lash down and join together the tortoise. With the full power of his trained sculptor’s hand, Trondur drove his knife point again and again through the quarter-inch-thick leather, twisted and sawed, and carved out neat hole after neat hole like a machine. It was an impressive display of strength. Then George fed the leather thongs through the holes, tied down the corner of the main hide, and laced on the overlapping plates.
In less than fifteen minutes the job was done. A leather apron covered the larger part of Brendan’s open stern, leaving just enough room for the helmsman to stand upright, his torso projecting up through the tortoise. Leather cheek plates guarded the flanks.
Boom! Another breaker crashed over the stern, but this time caromed safely off the tortoise and poured harmlessly back into the Atlantic; only in one spot did it penetrate in quantity, where I had plugged a gap beneath the leather apron with my spare oilskin trousers. So great was the force of the water that the trousers shot out from the gap, flying across the cockpit on the head of a spout of water.
The tortoise won the battle for us that night. Several more potentially destructive waves curled over Brendan, broke, and shattered themselves harmlessly against our leather defenses. Only a fraction of that water entered the bilges, and was easily pumped back into the sea. Poking up through his hole in the leather plating, the helmsman had a hard and bitter time of it. Facing aft and steering to ride the waves, he was battered achingly in the ribs by the sharp edge of the tortoise while the wind scoured his face. From time to time a breaker would flail his chest, and it was so uncomfortable that each man stayed only fifteen minutes at the helm before he had to be replaced, his hands and face numb in the biting cold.
But it was worth it. Even if we were losing the distance we had made and were being blown back in our tracks, we had survived the encounter with our first major Greenland gale. We had made Brendan seaworthy to face the unusual conditions of those hostile seas, and we had done so with our own ingenui
ty and skills. Above all, we had succeeded by using the same basic materials which had been available to Saint Brendan and the Irish seagoing monks. It was cause for genuine satisfaction.
11
GREENLAND SEA
By eight o’clock next morning the gale had eased enough for us to begin sorting out the jumbled mess in the cockpit created by the waves that had washed aboard. Shelves were knocked askew; canisters of food had leaked. The lids had sprung off plastic boxes, and their contents now swam in murky puddles. When the salt container was tipped, its contents ran out as a liquid. All the matches we had been using, and the lighters, were ruined; to light the stove we had to resort again to special lifeboat matches which ignited even when damp. Sea water had burst into the kerosene lamps so that even the mantle had been broken behind the glass of the pressure lamp. Gloves, socks, scarves, hats, all were soaked, and there was no way to dry them except by body heat. The pages of my daily journal, which were written on waterproof paper, had been so badly soaked that most of the allegedly indelible ink had run. Each page had to be mopped off with a rag. Nor could I raise contact on the main radio with any shore station until that evening our signal was picked up by one of the Icelandic Airlines regular flights between Reykjavik and Chicago, and the pilot promptly relayed our position report to his air traffic control center, who in turn passed on the message to the Coast Guard that we were safe. That at least was one worry out of the way: the last thing I wanted was for our friends in the Icelandic Coast Guard to start searching for us on a false alarm. They had been magnificently generous in offering to keep track of Brendan, and I had the reciprocal responsibility not to put them to unnecessary trouble.
