The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  Scarcely had I spoken than a truly awesome sight loomed up out of the dark just downwind of us—the white and serrated edge of a massive floe, perhaps the dying shard of an iceberg, twice the size of Brendan, and glinting with malice. This apparition was rolling and wallowing like some enormous log. Its powerful, squat shape had one great bluff end which was pointing like a battering ram straight at Brendan, and it was rocking backward and forward with ponderous certainty to deliver a blow of perhaps a hundred tons or so at the fragile leather.

  George took one look at this monster and leapt up the foremast to try to clear the jammed sail and give us steerage way. It was a slim hope. “Hang on tight!” I bellowed at him as the swell gathered up Brendan and pushed her at the great ice lump which heaved up ponderously to greet her. Crack! Thump! The whole boat shook as if she had struck a reef, which indeed she had, but a reef of ice. The impact flung George backward from the mast. “Christ, he’s going to fall between Brendan and the ice floe, he’ll be crushed,” I thought, horrified. But George still had the jammed halliard in his hand, and clutched at it desperately. The rope brought him up short, and for a heart-stopping moment he dangled backward over the gap like a puppet on a string. Now the wind was pinning Brendan against the great block of ice so that she was nuzzling up to it in a deadly embrace. The next impact was different. This time the ice floe rocked away from Brendan as the swell passed beneath us. Brendan swung over a broad spur of a wave-cut ledge projecting from the floe. The spur rose under us, caught Brendan with a grating sound, and began to lift and tip the boat. “We’re going to be flipped over like a fried egg,” I thought, as Brendan heeled and heeled. Then, with another grating sound of leather on ice, Brendan slid sideways off the ice spur and dropped back into the water.

  Crash. The next collision was broadside, halfway down the boat’s length. The leeboard took the impact with the sound of tortured wood.

  This can’t go on much longer, I wondered. Either Brendan will be blown clear of the floe, or she will be smashed to smithereens. As I watched, Brendan jostled forward another six feet on the next wave, and there was a chance to gauge the rhythm of destruction. It was obvious that the next blow would strike the steering paddle and snap its shaft. That would be the final problem: to be adrift in the pack ice with our steering gear smashed. Now the great floe was level with me where I stood at the tiller bar. The face of the floe stood taller than I did and in the light cast by my torch, the ice gleamed and glowed deep within itself with an unearthly mixture of frost white, crystal, and emerald. From the water-line a fierce blue-white reflected up through the sea from the underwater ice ledge. And all the time, like some devouring beast, the floe never ceased its constant roar and grumble as the ocean swell boomed within its submarine hollows and beat against its sides.

  Here comes the last blow, I thought, the final shock in Brendan’s ordeal. I felt a wave lift the leather hull, saw the bleak edge of glistening ice swing heavily toward me and—feeling slightly foolish—could think of nothing else to do but lean out with one arm, brace against the steering frame, and putting my hand on the ice floe I pushed with all my strength. To my astonishment, Brendan responded. The stern wagged away and forward from the ice wall, and instead of a full-blooded sideswipe, we received a glancing ice blow that sent a shiver down the hull, but left the steering paddle intact. One wave later, the great floe was rolling and grumbling in our wake. It had been a very close call.

  Trondur and Arthur were soon up and dressed in sweaters and oilskins ready to help. I should have called them earlier, but their off-watch rest had seemed too precious. Now their assistance was needed, because I planned to try to get Brendan through the ice by increasing speed, which in turn meant that we might be blundering into the main consolidated pack ice and wreck the boat. But it was a risk we had to take. It was better than gyrating into loose floes and being broken up. “Boots! Trondur! Go forward by the foremast and stand by. We’ll raise and lower the foresail as we need it, and trim the sail to port or starboard, depending on the position of the bigger ice floes. We’re going to run through this ice. George, could you act as look-out, and sing out the bearings on the larger floes?”

  George climbed up on to the shelter roof, wrapped an arm round the mainmast for support, and from his vantage point spotted the approaching dangers.

  “Big one dead ahead! Two floes on the port bow, and another on the starboard side! I think there’s a gap between them.”

  As he called the position of each floe, he aimed the beam of his torch at it to identify the hazard for me at the helm. In turn I called out instructions to Boots and Trondur to raise and trim, or lower, the headsail to catch the wind and pick a route through the ice. “Up foresail …down!” We slipped past a white shape of ice, ghostly in the dark. “Up foresail … sheet to starboard,” and I hauled over the tiller bar so that Brendan slid past the next floe. It was a crazy scene, an icy toboggan run in the dark, with a minimum of control, no way of stopping, no knowing what lay fifty yards ahead. From where I stood, I could see the shape of George’s body clinging to the mast, the gale plastering his oilskin to his back; then the line of the midships tarpaulin running forward to where Arthur and Trondur stood, one by each gunwale. They had opened a gap in the tarpaulin, and the upper halves of their bodies poked out like the crew in an open airplane of First World War vintage. Only the hoods of their oilskin jackets now made them look more like monks in cowls, and the impression was heightened by the red-ringed cross on the foresail, which raised and lowered and bellied out with a thundering clap above their heads. Beyond them, still farther, was the blackness of the night out of which loomed the eerie white shapes of the ice floes, occasionally illuminated by George’s torch beam through which still flicked the streaks of rain and spray.

  After three hours of this surrealist scene, the gloom began to lift. George switched off his torch, and found he could detect the white flashes of the ice floes without help. Dawn lightened the horizon, and we started to identify ice patterns beyond our immediate orbit. We were surrounded by pack ice. Off to one side was floating a huge, picture-postcard iceberg, a sleek monster of ice sloping spectacularly to the ocean with virgin white flanks. But the berg was no danger, for it was at least a mile away. Our real troubles lay ahead and around us in the contorted shapes of the floes which had ambushed us in the night. Now we could identify them by type. There were “bergy bits” broken from the dead icebergs, ice pans of assorted sizes, and “growlers,” the unstable chunks of hard ice which twisted and turned in the water and threatened to do the most damage to Brendan’s quarter-inch-thick leather hull. Now with enough light we could see to avoid these obstacles. Surely the way ahead must be clear, I thought to myself. Brendan had shown her worth yet again. Her leather skin and hand-lashed frame had survived a battering. No more could be expected of her. “Is there any water in her yet?” George asked again.

  “No,” I replied. “She came through like a warrior.”

  But my hopes were soon dashed. Ahead we began to discover mile upon mile of ice, floe after floe, oscillating and edging southward under the combined effects of gale and the current. Brendan could neither hold her position nor retreat. Her only course was forward and sideways, hoping to move faster than the pack ice until we eventually outran it and emerged somewhere from its leading edge.

  All that day we labored on, trying to work our way diagonally across the pack ice and find its limits. It was a nerve-wracking business, trying to pick our way from one gap to the next. Planning ahead was impossible, because the ice floes changed their position, and our horizon was very limited. From time to time fog banks gathered over the ice and visibility was often less than a mile. Our only advantage was that the water was very calm within the pack ice. As we penetrated deeper, the wave action died away even though half a gale was still blowing. The great carpet of ice muffled the waves like an enormous floating breakwater, leaving only a powerful swell which rocked and spun the floes. Sometimes we came across patches
of open water, dotted with only a few lumps of rotting ice. Here we sailed without hindrance for a few minutes. Sometimes ice barriers and ice ridges rose ahead of Brendan where the floes stretched right across her path, forming an impenetrable wall which had to be avoided at all costs. Once or twice there loomed out of the mists the magnificent shape of the great icebergs, one hundred feet high and more; and as we drew closer to them we could discern ominous cracks riven through the ice blocks where the bergs would split and calve. Such bergs had to be avoided because downwind of each one lay its attendant cluster of broken ice. Even more awkward were the patches of consolidated pack ice, the larger relics of the old ice sheet. This consolidated ice floated in broad jumbled rafts, heaped and contorted where one floe had piled upon another, and then frozen into one mass, like a breaker’s yard where every block weighed a score of tons or more.

  Brendan’s ability to maneuver past these dangers was so limited that virtually every floe had to be skirted on its leeward side. This meant sailing directly at the floe, putting over the helm at the last moment, and skidding around the lee of the ice where the scud and foam sucked and spread as the floe rocked in an endless see-saw motion to the swell. Our advance was a cross between bumper cars at a fairground and a country square dance, except that our dancing partners were leviathans of ice as they dipped, circled, and curtsied. Again and again we slithered past floes, listening to the bump and crunch as ice brushed the leather hull, the sharper tremor and rattle as we ran over scraps of small ice, the shudder as ice fragments the size of table tops and weighing a couple of hundred pounds ricocheted off the blade of the steering paddle.

  “Well, you wanted to see ice on this trip, George,” I said. “You can’t say you’ve been disappointed.”

  “It’s fantastic,” he replied ruefully, “I’m glad I’ve seen it. But I don’t think I ever want it again.”

  The strain on the crew was terrific. When daylight came, we tried to revert to our normal watch-keeping system and get some rest. But it was impossible to relax with the clatter of the ice reverberating through the little thin hull so close to one’s head. And time after time every man had to be called into action—raising and lowering the sail to vary our speed, hauling and readjusting the sheets to alter the slant of our course; and, when the worst befell, leaning out to poke and prod with boat hooks to fend off the boat, or, once or twice, even sitting out on the gunwale, putting feet on the floe, and kicking off with all one’s might. Once again I was reminded of the early voyages—this time of a famous picture of Elizabethan sailors fending off the heavy ice from their ship with just the same simple technique. But I had to confess to myself that I had not expected to find Brendan in quite the same predicament.

  All that day, June 18, we were kept so busy in the pack ice that there was no time for proper meals. At noon Trondur cooked up a hot mush which we spooned down between emergencies, and there was just enough time for two cups of coffee later in the day. But breakfast was a failure—I found my pannikin of cold cereal at tea time. It was still sitting untouched, in a safe place under the thwart.

  It had to be admitted that the ice had a certain lure and majesty. The ice was rotting and disintegrating into thousands upon thousands of weird shapes and sizes, odd corners and pillars, which floated low in the water and speckled the surface as far as the eye could see. The colors were entrancing—opaque whites, deep greens of undersea ledges, transparent flecks the size of cabin trunks, vivid blue glacier ice, dirty ice coated with ancient dust and grime. Once George reached out and broke off a morsel of blue ice from a passing floe, and popped it in his mouth. “Delicious,” he quipped. “Please pass the whiskey.”

  But each color signaled its own danger. The least worrying was the transparent dead ice in the last stage of melting. This ice was riddled with myriads of tiny air pockets so that the outer layer crushed on impact with Brendan’s hull and cushioned the shock. Its only disadvantage was that this type of ice floated so low in the water that it was hard to spot in time to avoid. Most of the big heavy growlers were equally difficult to see because they revealed only a small portion of their bulk above the surface, usually a sleek, round lump of opaque white dipping innocently below the swells. But under the water the growlers could be massive—great blocks of menace that heaved and churned in the current. They could deal a tremendous blow to a small boat. The snow-white surface floes, though thinner and lighter, were awkward because they tended to form up in strips and block our path. Our only chance was to bear down on the line, hoping to pick out a gap at the last second, and slither through. It required judgement, skill, and a lot of pure luck that a gap would open at the right moment. Usually Brendan bumped and weaved her way through safely, but occasionally she would run her bows right onto the floe. Then for a moment or two, we would ride on top of the ice, waiting for the wind to catch Brendan’s stern and lever her back into the water, pirouetting away in her strange ice dance. “It’s easy to follow our path through the ice,” Arthur remarked, “just follow the line of wool grease marks on the edges of the floes in our wake.”

  The two colors we treated most warily were the deep green of the underwater ledges, which threatened to gouge upward into Brendan’s hull as she glided over them, and the stark diamond-white and blue of the floes made of very old ice. The latter had been born many years earlier as snowfalls in interior Greenland and Baffin Land, compacted, and squeezed out as glaciers and finally spawned into the ocean as icebergs. This ice had scarcely begun to melt at all. Its floes were sharp and hard and utterly uncompromising.

  Bump, slither, swing sideways, charge at the gap, don’t think about the quarter inch of leather between yourself and the icy sea, ignore the rows of stitching offered up to the constant rubbing of ice along Brendan’s flanks; fend off with the boat hook. Helm up, helm down, search for the space between ice floes ahead; calculate, calculate. Wind, leeway, current, ice movement. For hour after the hour the ordeal continued, until by dusk, with the wind still blowing half a gale, the ice seemed to be thinning out. And this time we really did seem to be nearing the edge of the pack.

  Then Brendan Luck finally ran out.

  We were in sight of relatively open water and passing through a necklace of ice floes when two large floes swung together, closing a gap Brendan had already entered. The boat gave a peculiar shudder as the floes pinched her, a vaguely uncomfortable sensation which was soon forgotten in the problem of extricating her from the jaws of the vise. Luckily the two floes eased apart enough for Brendan to over-ride one ice spur, and slip free. Five minutes later, I heard water lapping next to the cooker and glanced down. Sea water was swirling over the floorboards. She was leaking. Brendan had been holed.

  There was no time to attend directly to the leak. The first priority was still to get clear of the pack ice while there was enough daylight to see a path. Otherwise we would find ourselves in the same predicament as the previous evening, blundering into ice floes in the darkness. “One man on the bilge pump, one at the helm; one forward controlling the headsails; and the fourth at rest,” I ordered, and for two more hours we worked Brendan clear of the pack until there was enough open water to run a fairly easy course between the ice floes, and set the mainsail, double reefed. The helmsman still needed to be vigilant, but the man at the headsail could at last be spared; and after twenty-four hours of sustained effort, we could revert to our normal two-man watch-keeping system. The risk, it seemed to me, was as much a question of human exhaustion as of the frailty of our damaged boat.

  “We can’t tackle the leak tonight,” I said. “There’s not enough light to trace it, and then to try to make a repair. Besides, we are all too tired. But it’s vital to learn more about the leak. I want each watch to work the bilge pump at regular intervals and record the number of strokes needed to empty the bilge and the time it takes to do so. Then at least we will know if the leak is getting worse and gaining on us. If we’ve torn the stitching somewhere, then more stitches may open as the thread works itself
loose, and the rate of leakage will go up.”

  Trondur tapped the leather at the gunwale. “I think stitching is broken by ice,” he said calmly.

  “It’s very possible,” I replied, “but we can’t be sure. We’ve simply got to find out all we can.”

  “Ah well,” said Arthur cheerily, “that’s what the right arm is for—pumping. It’s our watch, Trondur, I’d better get to work.” And he crawled forward to get to the bilge pump. It was none too soon. Even as we had been talking, the water level on the floor by the cooker had risen noticeably. The water slopped back and forth around our boots, and would soon be lapping into the lee side of the shelter.

  Pump, pump, pump. It took thirty-five minutes of non-stop pumping to empty the bilge. Brendan’s bilge, though shallow, was broad and relatively flat in profile and so held a great deal of water. Just fifteen minutes after being pumped out, the water level was as bad as ever, and threatening to get worse. Pump, pump, pump. “How many strokes to empty her?” I asked. “Two thousand,” Arthur grunted as he collapsed, exhausted. I did a rapid sum. Two thousand strokes every hour was within our physical limit, but only temporarily. One man could steer, while his partner pumped and kept Brendan afloat. But this system would work only while our strength lasted, or, more likely, we ran into bad weather, and waves began once again to break into the boat. Then we would no longer have the capacity to keep emptying Brendan fast enough. It was a tricky situation: In slanting out of the pack ice and clawing to seaward, I had brought Brendan out a full two hundred miles from land, and even then the nearest land was the thinly inhabited coast of Labrador, from which little help could be expected. We were running before half a gale, and now the damping effect of the pack ice was gone, the waves were beginning once again to break and tumble around us. Nor were we entirely free of ice danger. Here and there we could see in the darkness the occasional white shape of a large growler, stubbornly refusing to melt. “We’ve got six hours before daylight,” I said. “There’s nothing for it but to husband our strength until dawn and then tackle the leak. It’s best if one man in each watch keeps pumping continuously, turn and turn about. If we can keep the bilge empty, Brendan will ride lighter and take fewer waves on board.”