The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  “One thing is sure,” I replied, “when they hear Faroese coming from Brendan, they’ll know it can only be Trondur Patursson.”

  In fact the Faroese fishing boat knew all about Brendan, not only from our visit the previous year to the Faroes, but also via the mysterious network of sea gossip which links the fishing boats and small freighters plying the far North Atlantic. The voyage of the leather boat was a topic of conversation in the Icelandic and Greenland ports; and Svanur had just come down from Greenland, loaded with a cargo of shrimp to be landed at Gloucester, Massachusetts. All northern ships, her skipper later told Trondur, had been asked to keep a special watch for us, and Greenland radio had been broadcasting our last known position. Nevertheless, had it not been for the bright flash of the signal mirror, Svanur would never have spotted Brendan. Her captain had already changed course away from the ice when the mirror had caught the attention of the watch and Svanur closed to investigate.

  Trondur pumped up the little rubber dinghy and paddled across to Svanur. After ten minutes he came back. “The captain says there is very heavy ice all ahead of Brendan. Svanur has been steaming six hours and could not find a way through the ice. Also he has heard on the radio from another ship which cannot get through. He says the ice is very thick.” I saw that Svanur’s steel bows had ice dents in it. If Svanur, a well-built fishing boat designed for those waters, was backing off the ice, then it was wise for Brendan to do the same. It seemed that the ice had moved since the last reports and was a good deal farther south. Trondur continued: “Svanur’s captain said if you want, he will pull Brendan around the corner of the ice where we can pick up the wind again. Svanur is going this way.”

  “Please tell him that I accept his offer.”

  Trondur paddled back with a tow line and soon Svanur was plucking us out of danger. More Brendan Luck, I reflected, that the first boat in three weeks should show up just when Brendan was blundering into an ice trap. Doubtless we would have been able to work ourselves clear of the ice once the wind had changed, but in future I would be more wary of the ice reports. The pack could move and change its boundaries faster than the Ice Patrol could keep track of it, and next time, I promised myself, I would keep Brendan to seaward of it. I did not know what a broken promise that would soon turn out to be.

  It took only three hours for Svanur to pull Brendan out of her predicament, and then she cast us off. Trondur, who had stayed aboard Svanur for the tow, came back with a bag of frozen bread, a sack of potatoes, the supply of milk which Arthur had wanted, and a great box of frozen shrimp.

  “That’s a splendid haul,” I grunted, taking the box from Trondur’s hands. “Yes,” he replied, “Svanur’s captain lives not so far from us, on the island of Hestor.” Only the wandering Faroese fisherman, I thought, could make so light of a chance meeting off the pack ice.

  We were still busily stowing this welcome supplement to our rations when George exclaimed, “Good Lord—it’s another ship.” Sure enough, rolling down from the north was a grey-painted vessel. She had a strange profile, with a cut-back icebreaker bow and a crow’s nest fixed to her foremast. “This place is like Piccadilly Circus,” I said. “Two ships in a day. Everyone has to come round this corner en route to or from the Arctic.”

  “Let’s hope that ship has seen us,” muttered George. “She’s bearing straight at us.”

  The look-out aboard the newcomer had spotted Brendan. The vessel slowed down and then stopped about two hundred yards from Brendan. She was the U.S. Navy ship Mirfak, and we could see her deck officers leaning over the wingbridge to gaze curiously down at us.

  “What ship are you?” Mirfak asked by radio.

  “Brendan out of Reykjavik and bound for North America,” I replied.

  There was a long pause.

  “Can I have that again?” came a puzzled voice.

  “Brendan, out of Reykjavik and bound for North America. Our boat is an archeological experiment. She’s made of leather and testing whether Irish monks could have reached America before the Vikings.”

  Long pause.

  “Say that again.”

  I repeated the information. Another pause, as the khaki-clad officers peered at us.

  “I had better take this down in writing,” said Mirfak’s radio operator. “Where did you sail from?”

  “Reykjavik, this season.”

  Another incredulous pause. “Where?”

  “Reykjavik in Iceland. We’ve had pretty good weather this side of Greenland, but we took a battering between Iceland and Greenland.”

  “I should say so. Things can be pretty bad in this steel tub. I can’t imagine what it’s like in your little boat.”

  Mirfak, as it turned out, was a U.S. Navy supply vessel returning from Sondrestrom Fjord in Greenland and a regular visitor to Arctic waters. Meeting Brendan was a complete surprise.

  “Can we give you any help?”

  “Some fresh vegetables and meat would be very welcome if you can spare any. We ran out of fresh food a little while back.”

  “That’s easy. But how will we transfer the stuff to you?”

  I smiled to myself at the thought of a leather boat advising a navy ship. “That’s easy. We’ll send you a boat.” I turned to George. “Your turn in the dinghy.”

  So Brendan’s little rubber dinghy paddled off again, a tiny dot against Mirfak’s tall flank. We saw crewmen lowering sacks on the end of the line to George, who was heaving up and down on the swell. Then George gesticulated upward.

  Ten minutes later he pulled back to Brendan, the dinghy low in the water. “I had to stop them,” he puffed. “They gave me so much food it would have swamped the dinghy.” Piled around his legs were sacks of oranges, apples, yet more milk, tins of coffee, slabs of meat. It was an incredibly generous haul.

  “Look at that lot,” said Arthur. “Marvelous! We ought to set up a corner shop at the ice here and trade with passing vessels. We’d never starve.”

  “And I left behind three more sacks of food they had ready on deck for us,” George added.

  As Mirfak picked up speed to continue on her way to Bayonne in New Jersey, I made one more request. “Could you give us a position check, please?”

  “Yes,” came the reply. “We’re getting a read-out from the satellite now.”

  That was a nice touch, I thought to myself—a medieval leather boat receiving her position from a twentieth-century navigation satellite. Then Mirfak was gone, and Brendan was left rocking on the swell. The wind had died completely, and the sun went down in a spectacular mauve-and-orange sunset, the sky streaked with radiating patterns of high clouds that complemented the brilliant white of the ice field stretching away on our starboard side. We ate a delicious supper of Greenland shrimp and turned in that night, listening to the ceaseless mutter and grumble of the ice floes rubbing against one another on the Atlantic swell.

  12

  PUNCTURE IN THE ICE

  That evening George finally gave up the unequal contest of trying to compete with Arthur’s flailing knees and elbows inside the confines of the main shelter, and he moved his berth forward to a spot under the bow canvas. We slept with the tent flaps open because the weather was so still, and it was a surprise to find a rind of ice covering Brendan in the morning. We were now some 1,600 miles along our route from Iceland, and across the icefield lay Labrador, only 200 miles away. Moreover our encounter with Mirfak and Svanur had put Brendan back on the map for the outside world. The Canadian Coast Guard radio stations now arranged a special listening watch for us; and on the afternoon of June 15 a small plane flew over the boat for five minutes and took pictures. By radio the plane warned that large areas of pack ice lay to the south and west of Brendan. But there was little to be done. Brendan was still becalmed.

  At quarter past three the next morning, however, I was awakened by the sound of water sliding past the leather hull. That’s odd, I thought to myself, Brendan is not heeling to the wind. Nor can I hear the sound of waves. On my last wa
tch the weather had been very settled, and there had been a flat calm and no sign of wind.

  Then I heard Trondur and George speaking softly, and some sort of commotion, punctuated by light thuds and the flapping of a sail, and several splashes. What on earth were they doing? Was George helping Trondur restow some of the stores? But that was ridiculous; it was dark, and George was off-watch, and should be asleep. Finally, I could contain my curiosity no longer, and called, “What’s going on? Do you need any help?”

  No answer. Then abruptly, the thuds and splashes stopped. I heard the others moving back down the boat.

  “What’s up?” I asked again.

  “Oh, Trondur just lost a pilot whale he had harpooned,” came back George’s casual reply. I pulled on a sweater, and listened to their story.

  Trondur had been on watch by himself when a large school of pilot whales surfaced around Brendan, splashing and puffing. Although it was dark, this was the opportunity Trondur the Hunter had been waiting for. Without bothering to wake up anyone, he clambered forward to his cabin, unshipped his harpoon, and scrambled up onto the very bows of the boat where he could get a clear throw. George was awakened by the sound of Trondur clambering across the thin tarpaulins just over his head. George got up, and emerged just as Trondur saw his chance—a pilot whale of the right size swimming near the boat.

  Chunk! From a kneeling position on the bow Trondur tossed his harpoon three or four yards to starboard, and made a clean hit. It was a classic shot.

  Immediately the harpooned animal dived. There was a tremendous flurry among its closely packed companion whales. The water churned as the animals thrashed in panic. The shaft of the harpoon snapped under the press of bodies, and then all the whales were gone, leaving the stricken animal to its fate.

  Fascinated, George watched as Trondur began to play the whale like a fisherman with a salmon on the end of a line. At first the thirty-foot harpoon line was pulled out taut to its fullest extent. Trondur had tied the free end of the line to the foremast as a strong point, and the harpooned whale began towing Brendan briskly along. If the whale had been any larger, this could have been dangerous, but Trondur knew what he was doing. He had selected a whale of the right size, about fifteen feet long, small enough to handle from Brendan. As the whale grew tired, Trondur began to haul in on the line. The animal darted back and forth underneath the bows, trying to rid itself of the clinging harpoon. Flashes of foam and phosphorescence rolled up off its body and fins as it fought to escape. Inexorably Trondur continued to haul in. As the line shortened, the pilot whale began to weave up and down; its tail scooped dollops of water aboard Brendan as it fought to resist. Trondur’s strategy was to pull the animal high enough to the surface so that it could get less grip on the water. At the crucial moment, however, when the whale was right alongside the boat, the harpoon head pulled free. A second later, the animal was gone.

  “Harpoon too far back in whale,” said Trondur, sadly shaking his head. “More forward and it would have been good.”

  I wondered to myself what on earth we would have done with a fifteen-foot pilot whale on Brendan. We didn’t have that much extra space. But Trondur the Hunter had done remarkably well to harpoon the animal in the dark. “Never mind,” I said, “you picked a good whale. It was towing us in the right direction at a good two to three knots.”

  Our adventures and misadventures all seemed to be happening in the dark, or at best, in the last hour of daylight. On June 18 the barometer began to fall rapidly. So did the temperature. Then the wind backed into the northwest and blew strongly, bringing driving rain. In short, it was a thoroughly villainous evening, and it was lucky, in view of what was to follow, that Trondur and Arthur unlashed and stowed the bonnet from the mainsail before they ended their watch at dusk. George and I took over on a foul, black night, rigged an awning over the cooker, lit the kerosene lamp, and huddled over it for warmth, taking an hour each at the helm. Our only consolation was that Brendan was thrusting briskly through the murk, sailing at a good pace. At 3:00 A.M. it was my turn to seek the shelter of the cabin, and I crawled in thankfully. I had just pulled off my wet sea-boot socks when suddenly there was a high-pitched crackling sound, rather like stiff calico tearing. “What on earth was that?” I exclaimed, poking my head out of the cabin. George was already standing up, flashing a torch on the sails. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Everything looks okay. The sails seem all right.” “Perhaps a bird was flung into the sail by the high wind, and was thrashing to get out,” I suggested. “No,” said George, “I thought the sound came from the hull—still, there’s nothing we can do about it in the dark,” and he settled back down on the thwart.

  Crack … crack … crack. There it came again, something weird was happening, a strange snapping noise, this time much louder. George was right. The noise was coming from the hull. George was back on his feet, peering into the darkness, trying to see a few yards in the pitch black. Hastily I began to put on my outer clothes again, knowing by instinct that we had a crisis on our hands.

  “It’s ice!” George suddenly shouted. “We’re running into ice! I can see lumps of it all around.” Crack … crack … crack, we heard the sound again and realized without looking what it was. Brendan was hitting lumps of ice at speed, and they were swirling and bumping along her flanks so hard that they rattled and crackled along the oxhide skin.

  “Drop the sails,” I yelled. “If we collide with heavy ice at this speed, we’ll knock her to pieces. Our only chance is to stop and wait for daylight.”

  George moved into action. By the time I had struggled into my oilskins, he had lowered the mainsail and scampered forward over the icy tarpaulins, and already had the headsail halfway down. I went forward to help him secure the sodden canvas. It was perishingly cold. In an instant our bare fingers were numb as we secured the lashings on the sails. Neither George nor I said a word as we worked frantically. We could glimpse indistinct shapes in the water, and felt under our feet that Brendan’s hull juddered softly against unseen obstacles. We hurried back to the helm and took out the two most powerful hand torches. They were the only spotlights we had. We switched them on, one each side of Brendan, and shone them over the water. Their beams penetrated only fifty yards through the spray and sleet which hissed down in white streaks through the shafts of light. But fifty yards was far enough to reveal a sight which brought the adrenalin racing. All around us floated chunks and lumps and jagged monsters of ice. This was not the same ice we had seen a few days ago. In place of the well-defined ice edge, there was now a nightmare jumble of ice floes of every size and description, with channels of clear water opening and closing between them as the floes moved with the wind. But this ice should not be here, I told myself. I knew the ice chart by heart. That same day I had painstakingly marked in the ice boundaries according to the latest information radioed by the ice information service. Brendan should be at least sixty miles clear of the nearest ice. Yet here it was; and with a morbid feeling of satisfaction I knew exactly what had happened. The same northwest gale which had been spinning Brendan so happily on her way had swept over the main ice sheet and burst it open. The compact ice raft we had seen two days ago was now sprayed like shrapnel right into Brendan’s path. Later I learned that the entire pack-ice front had advanced across a broad front so that the Straits of Belle Isle, well to the south of Brendan, were nearly closed to merchant shipping.

  Our torch beams showed us that Brendan had blundered into a type of sea ice known as Very Open Pack, and that most of the ice was rotten. Very Open Pack would have presented no problems to a large ship, which would have been able to shoulder forward, driven by powerful engines. But it was a totally different matter for Brendan. How much of a battering would her leather hull withstand, I wondered, and what would happen if a couple of ice floes bumped together, and Brendan was caught in the middle? Would she burst open like an overripe banana? And just how much sailing water was there among the ice floes which lay ahead? The devil of our situatio
n was that there was no way to plan a strategy. We might only be in a small zone of ice, a temporary obstacle which we would soon clear. Common sense said that it was far more likely that we were in a major area of ice and that sooner or later we would find massive rafts of consolidated ice still frozen together. We had already seen the grinding action of the giant ice floes on a relatively calm day. I shuddered to think of what would happen to Brendan if she was blown into that sort of obstacle in the dark. She would be fed in like mincemeat. For about an hour George and I tried to keep the boat out of trouble. Without her sails, Brendan was still moving through the pack ice at one or two knots, driven by the pressure of the wind on the masts and hull. But sail-less, Brendan was at her worst—slow to maneuver and only able to turn through a very small arc. If too much helm was applied, she merely drifted sideways, out of control.

  Everywhere the torch beams probed, white lumps of ice winked back out of the dark. Painfully, we wallowed past them, heaving on the tiller, and silently hoping that Brendan would respond in time. Smaller floes bumped and muttered on her leather skin; and out of the darkness we heard the continuous swishing sound of the waves breaking on ice beyond our vision.

  George hoisted himself on the steering frame to get a clearer view. “There’s a big floe dead ahead,” he warned. “Try to get round to port.” I pulled over the tiller as far as it would go. But it was not enough. I could see that we were not going to make it. “Get the foresail up,” I shouted. “We’ve got to have more steerage way.” George clipped on his lifeline and crawled forward along the gunwale. Reaching the foremast, he heaved on the halliard to raise the sail. It jammed. A loose thong had caught in the collar that slid up and down the mast. “Trondur!” shouted George. “Quick, pass me up a knife.” Trondur’s berth was right beside the foremast, and he began to emerge like a bear from hibernation. But it was too late. With a shudder from the top of her mast to the skid under her, Brendan ran her bow into the great lump of sea ice. It was like hitting a lump of concrete. The shock of the impact made me stagger. “That will test medieval leather—and our stitching,” I thought. Thump! We struck again. Thump! Once more the swell casually tossed Brendan onto the ice. Then ungracefully and slowly, Brendan began to pivot on her bow, wheeling away from the ice floe like a car crash filmed in slow motion. Thump! The boat shivered again. We had a feeling of total helplessness. There was nothing we could do to assist Brendan. Only the wind would blow her clear. Thump! This time the shock was not so fierce. Brendan was shifting. Scrape. She was clear. “Is she taking water?” George called back anxiously. I glanced down at the floorboards. “No, not as far as I can see back here,” I replied. “Try to clear the jammed headsail. I’ll get Boots up as well. This is getting dodgy.”