by Tim Severin
The wind dropped, but the weather did not really relent. It produced rain, fog, a brief calm, then more rain, and more fog. For half a day the wind obliged us by going into the northeast, and we bowled along sometimes at six or seven knots, rapidly picking up valuable mileage in the right direction. But then it turned again into the south and we were forced to slant even closer to the ice edge. All this time we kept up our efforts to dry out—mopping up again and again, sponging and bilge pumping, trying to beat back the water.
Whether the medieval Irish seafarers had to endure such bleak conditions is doubtful. Most historians who have studied climate agree that the climate of the North Atlantic between the fifth and eight centuries was often warmer than it is today. But they are cautious about the precise details. Quite simply, too little is known about the reasons for climatic change, and the experts are still gathering evidence of exactly what happened. The leading English historian of climate, Professor H. H. Lamb, had studied the early chronicles for references to floods, harvests, and other records of climatic change. “Briefly, there is good reason to believe,” he had written to me, “that there were periods, particularly between A.D. 300 and 500 or perhaps as late as 550, and again between 900 and 1200, as well as a briefer period coinciding approximately with the eighth century A.D. in which there was an anomalously high frequency of anticyclones about the 50 latitudes and sometimes higher latitudes which must have reduced the frequency of storms and made the possibility of safe voyages to Iceland and Greenland higher in those times than in most others. However, it is quite clear that the variation of climate was not sufficient to rule out the possibility of a disastrous storm at any time.”
Professor Lamb’s conclusions were supported in part, though not in every instance, by the recent analysis of ice-core samples drilled out of the Greenland ice cap by Danish and American scientists. The horizontal layers in these ice cores represent annual snowfalls in Greenland extending back for more than a thousand years. A technique has been devised to calculate the temperatures in those years by measuring the amount of the heavy oxygen isotope trapped in each layer. Again, the evidence shows various warmer periods in Greenland’s history, including one between A.D. 650 and A.D. 850.
Several scholars had already pointed out that the weather was much more suitable for trans-Atlantic voyages when the Norsemen were reaching Iceland and then went on to colonize Greenland. But there were at least two other favorable intervals, sometimes overlooked by the historians: a period in the eighth century just before the time Dicuil had been writing of the Irish voyages to Iceland; and an earlier opportunity in the sixth century closer to the time of Saint Brendan himself. Dicuil’s information also throws a revealing sidelight on the more general climatic picture provided by the scientists. Dicuil declared that in about A.D. 800 the Irish monks had been setting out on regular voyages to Iceland in February, a time of year which modern sailors would certainly not recommend as the best season for the passage. But wind and weather in February, in Dicuil’s day, were suitable for the voyage, more evidence that the early medieval climate was not the same as it is in the mid-twentieth century.
Of course the air temperature over the North Atlantic in early medieval times was only one factor in the problem of climatic history and the Irish voyages. Nothing is known of such vital matters as the prevailing wind direction, or the frequency and seasonal distribution of storms in those earlier centuries. However, it does seem likely that there was less sea ice on the Greenland coast for most of this time. The Norse sailors who voyaged from Iceland to the Greenland settlements in the early years were not unduly hindered by the Greenland ice. And it is reasonable to suppose that with higher temperatures at the time of the Irish Christian voyages, the sea ice would not have presented the problem it does today. Appropriately enough Páll Bergthorsson, a meteorologist at Iceland’s Weather Center, had checked back through the Icelandic records and shown how the variations in winter temperatures could be directly related to the amount of sea ice appearing off Iceland. Now Páll and his colleagues were watching the Greenland weather maps on behalf of Brendan and, whenever possible, sending us weather forecasts by radio.
An improvement in the climate of the North Atlantic in the Middle Ages may explain why the Navigatio had so little to say about bad weather during Saint Brendan’s epic voyage. In general, his curragh seems to have been troubled as much by calms as by gale-force winds. But this was due in part to the Saint’s good sense in restricting the main stages of his voyage to the summer, though there was one occasion when he was taken by surprise by the weather: After their narrow escape from the hostile sea monster who attacked them, only to be defeated and killed by another sea creature, the travelers beached their curragh on an island. Here they found the carcass of the dead monster where it had been washed ashore, and Saint Brendan told his men to cut it up for food. This gave them extra supplies for three months. But the travelers had to spend all three months stranded on the island because foul weather at sea, with heavy rain and hail storms, kept them from putting out in the curragh. Some commentators had suggested that this unseasonal bad weather indicates that the monks had landed in South Greenland, where the weather can be notoriously foul even in summer. A bad Greenland summer, it is claimed, would have caught the Irish monks unawares because they were accustomed to better summer sailing at home.
A more intriguing clue to the possibility that the Irish navigators landed in Greenland is to be found, once more, in the writings of the Norsemen themselves. When the Norse first discovered Greenland they reported coming across “human habitations, both in the eastern and western parts of the country, and fragments of skin boats and stone implements.” The eminent American geographer, Carl Sauer, argued that these skin boats and stone dwellings were much more likely to have been left behind by Irishmen than by the Eskimo, because at that time—as far as all research can show—there were no Eskimos living in South Greenland. The Norse settlers in South Greenland did not encounter any living Eskimo, nor have archaeologists found Eskimo relics of that time in that area. What the archaeologists have found is evidence that the only Eskimos in Greenland when the Norse arrived belonged to the Dorset culture whose early traces are confined to the north of the country. Just as important, the only habitations, other than tents, known to have been used by the Dorset people were very characteristic subterranean burrows, sometimes roofed with skins. These burrows would certainly not be described as “habitations of stone.”
This being so, Carl Sauer asked, then whose skin boats and stone habitations did the Norsemen find in South Greenland? Surely the Irish, because cells are typical structures built by Irish monks all over the west coast of Ireland and in the Hebrides.
Had the Norsemen stumbled across the traces of the Irish monks who fled there as refugees from Iceland when the Norsemen drove them on? Or were these relics left by Irish hermits who had voyaged direct to Greenland from the Faroes or from the Hebrides? The Norse sagas do not give any more information about the size or shape of these “habitations of stone,” but with Brendan’s experience to help, another point now arose: the “skin boats” the Norsemen found were not likely to have been Eskimo kayaks, because the skin cover of a kayak will perish if it is not regreased and looked after very carefully. The skin has not been tanned in the true sense, as Brendan was, and will disintegrate when abandoned any length of time on the shore. By contrast, the oak-bark-tanned leather of the Irish curraghs was extremely stable and durable, and could last for a very long time indeed. Perhaps, then, the skin boats of pre-Norse Greenland were Irish ocean-going curraghs.
As we now struggled toward Greenland’s coast, Brendan’s modern weather-luck was causing me real anxiety. The gales had not only forced her around in a futile circle in the Greenland Sea, but the boat was being pushed much farther north than I had anticipated or wanted. To clear Cape Farewell and its eighty-mile-wide shelf of pack ice striking out from South Greenland, Brendan needed to head southwest. But she was being frustrate
d by the constant foul winds. So I decided to take a gamble: We would steer close to the ice. There the local wind often blows parallel to the ice edge, and Brendan might find the wind she wanted so desperately. But the danger was obvious; if we were caught by an easterly gale, Brendan would be driven headlong into the pack ice with very little chance of anyone reaching us in time if we got into trouble. Petur Sigurdsson of the Coast Guard had told me not to be worried by the ice. “We call it the Friendly Ice,” he had said with a twinkle in his eye. “Coast Guard patrol ships have found shelter many times from the storms by entering the ice. The sea is always calm there.” But he was speaking of steel-built ships, and I was not so sure that Brendan’s leather hull would withstand an ice collision.
I did not have to explain the risk to Brendan’s crew. They watched the pencil line on the chart, which showed our daily progress, inching nearer the Greenland coast. Each man kept his own counsel but it was clear that they appreciated the importance of every slight variation in the wind direction. The foul weather continued to afflict us all the next week, and began to take its toll. There can be few places where the daily fluctuations of weather have a greater and more immediate effect than on the crew of an open boat in such waters. Whenever it rained—which was several times a day—we spent our time off-watch huddled in the shelter or under the tarpaulin, patiently trying to stem the trickles of water. When the air temperature hovered within a few degrees of freezing and the wind got up, the wind chill was harsh enough to restrict us to our damp sleeping bags as much as possible, despite the fact that the sleeping bags were still clammy. The trick, we found, was to keep rotating the bags so that the bottom side of the bag, which oozed a film of water, was periodically turned uppermost and had a chance to dry out. Grudgingly, we hoarded our last remaining dry clothes. The near-swamping had taught us to keep some dry clothes in reserve in case they were needed in a real emergency, and so we continued to wear our damp garments, even though it was a penance to pull on wet socks and trousers, push one’s feet into wet sea-boots, and squelch to the helm on a rainy cold night.
Yet under these conditions, we remained remarkably cheerful, provided only that Brendan was making progress in the right direction. Sails were carefully adjusted; arms plunged into the icy water to haul up the leeboards; the helm painstakingly set to just the right angle. It was when Brendan was stopped or being driven back by headwinds that life became wearisome. All of us knew that the only answer was to be stoically patient, to watch and wait and bide our time until the winds turned in our favor. There was nothing else we could do.
Each man reacted in his own way. As sailing master, George must have felt the most frustration. With the wind against him—or no wind at all—there was little he could do to help us reach North America. Yet he never lost his meticulous sense of care for Brendan. He checked and rechecked ropes for wear, readjusted lashings, stripped down and reassembled the steering frame when it became slack, moved the leather chafing pads to fresh positions. Inside the shelter, he was equally careful about details. With his army training he always left his sleeping bag neatly rolled, his gear carefully wrapped and stacked and out of harm’s way, and one could set a clock by his well-regulated watch-keeping routine.
Arthur was the complete reverse—a rumpled, chaotic, easygoing shambles. Arthur’s sleeping bag, if Arthur was not in it, was usually serving as a squashed-up cushion. His stock of sweaters and scarves ran loose and turned up in strange places, until we finally banished his sodden naval trousers from the cabin, when they threatened to take over the entire living space. It was a standing joke that Arthur never remembered a hat. Invariably he lurched out of the shelter to begin his watch, and a minute later his head would pop back with a plaintive “I say, could you pass my cap, please. I’m not sure where it is, but it should be somewhere.”
Arthur always had the bad luck. If a sneak wave broke unexpectedly over the gunwale at mealtime, it was Arthur who was sitting in the wrong place so that he received the cold sea water down his neck or in his pannikin. When it began to rain heavily, it always seemed to be as Arthur was about to start his watch. “Arthur!” George would sing out cheerfully. “There’s a thunder cloud ahead. It must be time for you to take the helm!” With unwavering good nature, Arthur remained unruffled by his mishaps. Only his suit of green oilskins suffered. They seemed to wilt under Arthur’s tribulations, and adopt their own personality. The rest of our oilskins hung neatly over the steering frame ready for use; but Arthur’s green jacket and trousers were always to be seen, crumpled, battered, and inside out in a corner of the cockpit. “It hardly seems worth putting them on,” Arthur would say as he poured a cupful of sea water from his jacket hood and shrugged his way into the soggy garments. And likely as not, he would discover that the inside of his boots were full of water, too. And there was no mistaking which were Arthur’s sea-boots; his feet were so large that he was obliged to wear agricultural rubber boots, specially ordered from the makers, and their ribbed soles had treads like tractor tyres.
Trondur had spent so much time at sea in boats that he had developed his own brand of patience. “When do you think the wind will change?” I would ask him. Trondur would look at the sky, at the sea, and pause. “I say nothing,” he would announce calmly, “sometime north wind.” And when the weather was really atrocious, with driving rain, poor visibility, and an unpleasant lumpy sea that had Brendan staggering to the waves, he would say, “Is not so bad. It can be worse than this in winter,” and go about his work with such calm assurance that he raised all our morale. Trondur always found something to keep himself busy. If he was not fishing for fulmar, he was sketching shipboard scenes or working over his drawings, sometimes using the frayed end of a matchstick to spread the ink wash. The inside of his berth under the bow tarpaulin was a vertible artist’s atelier. He had rigged up a hammock of fishnet which contained his paper and pens, his ink bottles and pencils, and the inevitable box of fish-hooks. Drawings and half-finished studies were hung up to dry, and one could sometimes see a needle and thread, scrapings of leather where he had commandeered a spare bit of oxhide and was stitching up some knick-knack, perhaps a little box for his ink bottles, or a leather pendant carved with a Celtic cross.
On the whole, there was little idle conversation among the crew. Like dry clothing, we tended to dole out our thoughts and our comments little by little, knowing that there was much empty time ahead. One side effect, George noticed, was how our conversation actually slowed down. George was using a tape recorder to make a sound track for a film about the voyage, and when he played back the day’s recording he found it was very frustrating. One person would ask a question. There would be a long pause; and then the reply would come back. Nor did George’s tapes reveal much of our thoughts. By and large, each member of Brendan’s crew kept his opinions to himself, and in an old-fashioned way concentrated on running the boat and minding his own affairs. By unspoken agreement it seemed the best way of enduring our ordeal.
Sailing aboard Brendan, we were finding, was becoming a very personal experience despite our shared adventure. Each man reacted in his own way to events, and his experiences did not necessarily mix with the ideas of his companions. Nowhere was this more true than on watch. Then the helmsman was often the only man to see the distant single spout of a whale, the sudden jump of a dolphin, or a changing pattern in the sky. Some incidents passed in a flash before there was time to rouse the other crew members—others happened so slowly and gently that they were only perceptible to a man obliged to wait by the helm for two hours at a stretch.
Watch-keeping in a gale was perhaps the most personal experience of all, because then the helmsman was acutely aware that the lives of the other three depended on his skill. Every big wave during his watch brought a challenge which only the helmsman could judge and meet. Each wave successfully surmounted, and rolling safely past under the hull, was not noticed by the rest of the crew. But to the helmsman it was a minor victory, only to be forgotten in the face
of the next on-rushing wave behind it.
Some moments, by contrast, were seared in the memory of the man concerned. One such incident occurred on May 23, when Brendan was yet again running north. It was the dusk watch, and although the wind was only about twenty-five knots, it was blowing counter to the East Greenland current and kicking up a short, breaking sea, with an occasional rogue wave which raked the boat. We were all very tired. The day-long moan of the wind and the roar of the combers sapped one’s concentration. Watch by watch we had been climbing into our immersion suits, strapping ourselves to the steering frame with our safety lines, and holding onto the tiller. George happened to be forward under the tarpaulin, pumping out the bilge; Arthur and Trondur were in the shelters in their sleeping bags; I was alone at the tiller, steering through yet another maelstrom of sea, cliff after cliff of water rising up behind the boat. Each wave demanded a heave on the tiller bar to bring Brendan to the correct angle to her adversary.
Almost casually I happened to glance over my shoulder, not toward the stern to where the waves were coming from, but to port and away from the wind. There, unannounced by the usual crashing white mane of foam, was a single maverick wave. It was not particularly high, a mere ten feet or so, but it was moving purposefully across the other waves, and now reared nearly vertical along Brendan’s length, while Brendan was already locked solid in the crest of a regular breaker. “Hang on,” I yelled at the top of my voice, and grabbed at the H-frame.
