The Brendan Voyage

by Tim Severin

  Brendan helped to redress the balance. She demonstrated that the Navigatio is more than a splendid medieval romance. It is really a story hung upon a framework of facts and observation which mingles geography and literature, and the challenge is how to separate one from the other. This mixture is hardly surprising. Scholars of epic literature know from experience that many of the truly durable legends, from the Iliad to the Romance of Alexander, are founded upon real events and real people which the later storytellers have clothed in imaginative detail.

  Where, then, was the Land Promised to the Saints which Saint Brendan is said to have found beyond the swirling fog? There is no reason to suppose that the Promised Land was any more fictional than the Island of Smiths, the Paradise of Birds, the Island of Sheep, the island monastery, or any other locality in the Navigatio. The text gives a few clues to its identity. When Saint Brendan’s boat reached the shore of the Promised Land, it says, “they climbed out of the boat and saw a spacious land full of laden fruit trees as if in autumn. But when they had made a circuit of that land, night had still not come upon them. They took as much fruit as they wanted and drank from the springs, and for forty days explored the whole land without finding an end to it. But one day they came to a great river flowing through the middle of the island. Then Saint Brendan said to his brothers: ‘We cannot cross this river and we do not know how big this land is.’ When they were considering this to themselves, behold a young man arrived, embraced them with great joy, and calling each one by his name, said, ‘Blessed are they who dwell in your house. From generation to generation they will praise you.’

  “When he had said this, he said to Saint Brendan, ‘Behold this land which you sought for so much time. You could not find it immediately, because God wanted to show you his diverse secrets in the great ocean. Return, then, to your native land carrying with you the fruits of this land and as many jewels as your little boat can hold. The final day of your wanderings draws nigh so that you may sleep with your fathers. After many ages have past, this land will be made known to your successors, at a time when Christians are undergoing persecution. This river which you see divides this island. Just as it appears to you laden with fruit, so the land will remain for ever without the shadow of night. For its light is Christ.’ ”

  What facts can be extracted—with caution—from this rapturous medieval description of the Promised Land? There is the great extent of the land; the abundance of the natural fruit; and the great river dividing it. They are all general features which could apply to many places on the North American coast. But what is immediately striking is how these features resemble the descriptions which later visitors first remarked when they reached North America, whether the Norsemen who wrote of its woods and wild grapes, or later settlers who praised the favorable climate for crops. The overlap might well be another simple coincidence, but it could equally well be a hazy description passed down by word of mouth of the great land which lay at the far rim of the great western ocean and at the end of the Stepping Stone Route which the Navigatio so consistently seems to follow and identify. Even the obvious exaggerations, such as the claim that the land provided precious stones, are no hindrance to treating the Navigatio as a possible description of North America. Christopher Columbus was to make very much the same claim for the West Indies when he returned to Spain, and it is hardly surprising that the goal of Saint Brendan’s long search, when he finally reaches it in the pages of the Navigatio, should be credited with fantastic wealth by the storyteller. Our modern error would be to dismiss the statements of the Navigatio themselves as no more than imaginary.

  To bring home the tale of his voyage, Saint Brendan had of course to return to Ireland from the Promised Land and make the journey complete. The Navigatio treats of the return voyage briskly: “Then, when they had taken from the fruits of the land and all kinds of its gems, and dismissed the steward and the young man with a blessing, Saint Brendan and his brothers returned to their curragh and set sail through the middle of the fog. When they had passed through it they came to an island called the Island of Delights. There they received hospitality for three days and then, after being blessed, Saint Brendan returned home by the direct route.” Once more there is a sound and straightforward explanation of this passage. Having sailed out from the fog, the Saint’s curragh picked up the Gulf Stream and the steady winds of the great slant of westerlies and southwesterlies which blow across the Atlantic, and they headed directly back to Ireland. This is the logical eastbound route, the path which is still sailed by small yachts and has been taken by open rowing boats smaller than a leather ocean-going curragh. It is the downwind route, and it is perhaps worth noting that the rowing boats, though they started hundred of miles apart on the North American coast, made their landfall directly on to Ireland’s west coast, precisely where the Navigatio returns Saint Brendan.

  Arriving at his own monastery, concludes the Navigatio, Saint Brendan was greeted joyfully and “he told of everything he remembered happening on the voyage and the great and splendid wonders that God had deigned to show him.” Then he reminded his followers of the prophecy that he would soon die, set his affairs in order, and very shortly afterward, fortified with the Sacraments of the Church, lay back “in the hands of his disciples and gave up his spirit to the Lord.” So died peacefully the most famous sailor-monk of the Celtic Church in Ireland. But did the Irish voyages end with his death? Once more the answer lies in the Navigatio. Nowhere does it claim that Saint Brendan was the first to reach the Promised Land. On the contrary, it states unequivocally that he was told about the Promised Land by another Irish monk, Saint Barrind, who had already visited it in company with an Irish abbot of the west coast by the name of Mernoc, who was a regular visitor there. And when Saint Brendan still had not reached the Promised Land after seven sailing seasons, it is the “Steward” from the Island of Sheep who acts as his pilot, guides him there, and tells him what to expect.

  In the Promised Land too, the newcomers meet a young man who is living there already, knows the Saint’s name, and can speak with him in his own tongue. In short, the picture that the Navigatio provides is the same picture that is found in the writings of Dicuil, in the Norse sagas, and in other contemporary sources: the idea that the Promised Land is the ultimate point in a number of scattered North Atlantic localities which have been settled by tiny groups of Irish monks who passed from place to place in small and seaworthy boats. In this context the voyage of Saint Brendan is less a voyage of primary exploration than a tremendous pastoral tour by a leading churchman who is visiting the farthest outposts of his devout countrymen and, in so doing, ventures to the limits of the ocean and their known world.

  Here, then, lies another crucial fact about the Navigatio. The text stresses that Saint Brendan did not make a single, long, voyage to the Promised Land. Instead he made a whole series of trips, season by season of his seven-year search, before he is guided to his eventual destination in the Promised Land. In the gap between the Saint’s death and the date the Navigatio was composed in the form we now have it, it would have been natural to include into Saint Brendan’s own voyage the experiences and adventures of other Irish monks in their small boats in the North Atlantic and place them as episodes during the seven years of Saint Brendan’s voyage. This is the normal process of building an epic—the central hero is credited with the experiences of lesser figures until his single endeavor embodies the feats of many. Nor does this process detract from Saint Brendan’s own achievement. Rather, it enhances his journey because clearly it was the symbol for the rest, and an example for the monk-navigators who followed him. Also it has stood through the succeeding centuries as a monument to the achievements of the other Christian monks who took to the sea from Ireland. Without the Navigatio the least glimmer of their endeavors would be all that is left to us. The collective experiences within the Navigatio is not likely to be the story of one boat’s crew who set out on a single voyage to search for the Promised Land. It is the main s
urviving record of a Christian seagoing culture which sent boat after boat into the North Atlantic on regular voyages of communication and exploration.

  If so, then the Irish voyages into the Atlantic stand in very special relationship to the entire history of man’s exploration of his world. Usually the first scouts have been forgotten. Their efforts are not recorded or, if they were written down, few people read them. Outside Scandinavia, for example, the Norse visits to Greenland and North America were little heard of. By contrast the Irish voyages, represented in the Navigatio of Saint Brendan, won great attention. The Navigatio’s religious flavor ensured that Saint Brendan’s travels achieved intellectual respectability throughout Europe for five hundred years. Thus strengthened, it helped to demolish the mentality of a closed world, encouraging men of learning to think of a great western land. It prompted map-makers to mark islands in the western sea. And the truly fascinating possibility is that the medieval scholars who read and believed Saint Brendan had reached a western land were right: that the Irish really had sailed their skin boats to Greenland and North America as we now know they could have done. If so, then Europe from the tenth century onward was already perceiving the New World in the manner of the time.

  What sort of men, then, were these monks who deliberately launched out into the Atlantic in small open boats? Many must never have returned, but perished at sea. Aboard Brendan we had the advantages of being in touch with the outside world by radio, and we knew that if they could reach us fast enough, the Coast Guard or the deep-sea fishermen of the North Atlantic would have tried to rescue us in an emergency. But the Irish monks and their curraghs had none of these advantages. A dozen or more men would have been packed into a boat the size of Brendan and would have endured far greater discomfort. They would have been colder, wetter, and—in one sense—more isolated than we were aboard Brendan. Such men must have been special people, even by the exacting standards of their own day. They were directed by a sense of dedication which had to have been the single most important factor in their success. Out of this dedication came much of their suitability as open-boat sailors on long northern voyages. As monks they were inured to hardship. Life in a medieval monastery with its meager food, seasonal shortages, stone cells, abstinence, long hours of tedium, obedience, self-mortification and discipline, was an ideal training for a long journey in an open boat. Equally, their mental preparation must have matched their physical readiness. The outlook of their leaders, if not of the rank and file, was a bold combination of intellectual curiosity and a fearless trust in God. This trust encouraged them to launch their voyages and, once at sea, to sustain their efforts through adversity. The journey itself was regarded as important in its proper execution as reaching a landfall. To venture out in a boat was by its very nature an act of faith in a God whose divine providence would show them wondrous sights and, if He so wished, bring them safely to journey’s end. Should adverse winds or currents beat them back, that too was His will. If their craft foundered underneath them and the crew perished, then they reached their divine reward doubly blessed because they had died in God’s service.

  God’s service on these voyages did not have its modern sense of an overseas mission to go to convert heathen lands. On the contrary, the territories that the Irish monks sought were the unknown and uninhabited lands beyond the horizon, the special places, the wondrous lands to be revealed by God. In the apt phrase of the time, they were the Promised Lands. To reach these farthest territories was a heavenly gift; to be able to live in them, isolated from the evils of the world, was an even greater prize. There can seldom have been a stronger drive to probe the unknown in the entire story of human exploration. It was the quintessential motive for exploration at almost any price, and there is no reason why it should not have brought them across the Atlantic.

  Brendan had also shown us that the quality of medieval boat equipment was easily equal to the task of promoting the ocean-going ambitions of the sailor-monks. Indeed, it was an interesting fact that the medieval equipment on Brendan was often a match for its modern equivalent, and occasionally superior to it when used in the grindingly harsh conditions of an open boat in the North Atlantic. Timber, leather, and flax proved to be more durable in many instances than metal, plastic, and nylon; and certainly the former were much easier to work with and could be adapted for day-to-day requirements. This was vitally important when, aboard our small craft, we were only able to carry a few hand tools and a very limited stock of spares. The modern equipment worked better, until it broke, but then the traditional gear, clumsy and inefficient though it was, managed to survive the adverse conditions—and this is what mattered. Perhaps historians do not realize just how well the medieval seafarers were equipped for their endeavors with bronze fittings, handpicked timbers, leather, and flax cordage; and the modern seafarer forgets the tremendous advantages of flexibility and durability in the traditional materials which are all-important when the crises occur, as they always do at sea.

  Similarly, there is little that the medieval sailor would want to borrow from the modern sailor to improve his personal comfort and sustenance. Apart from modern waterproof outer clothing, the medieval sailor was better clad in his woollen trousers, shirt, and cloak than in garments of synthetic fibers. And when he embarked on a cold, wet voyage in an open boat, his diet of dried meats and fish, oats, fruit, and nuts was unsurpassed. It was more nutritious and palatable, and lasted better, than the dehydrated packaged foods of today. His supply of drinking water could be carried in leather flasks, and replenished in emergency by the ample rainfall of northern waters collected in upturned sheets of leather, or topped up by landings on the islands of the Stepping Stone Route. For extra food the medieval sailor could fish or take seabirds from the wealth of the sea around him. Saint Brendan and his monks were lucky to salvage a dead whale, which gave them enough meat for three months, but it is equally clear that they were accustomed to picking up fresh provisions at every inhabited island they visited, and they were using what amounted to a chain of supply places along the Stepping Stone Route to ease their logistical problems.

  Perhaps one reason why the medieval Irish voyages have been so little appreciated for what they were is because they have been described by storytellers whose tales of distant lands and fantastic monsters seem naïve to the modern critic. Such yarns appear overblown, simple-minded, incredible. But the real fault lies not with the medieval author for his writing, but in the modern perception of the older experience. It is easy to dismiss such tales as worthless and childish when they are viewed from the commanding heights of twentieth-century knowledge. But Brendan taught us to look at them otherwise. Brendan helped us to understand them by placing us back in situations similar to the original. Time and again we too found ourselves deeply impressed, and sometimes awed, by what we encountered at sea. Some episodes were unforgettable because their visual splendor was combined with the excitement of physical danger. For example, the breath-taking advance of Brendan toward the stark and looming cliffs of the Faroes in mist and tide race; or the long engagement among the ice floes of Labrador, incredibly beautiful in their shades of color, will stay long in our minds.

  Other memories were more—perhaps the beauty of the slow northern sunsets, or the damp half world of the Greenland fog banks when one’s vision focuses on the tiny, near objects like the glistening droplets forming on a woollen sweater. Or there were the moments of total surprise like the first wondrous rush of a school of pilot whales surfacing around our leather boat in a puffing and wallowing mass, surrounding us with glimpse upon glimpse of our ocean companions. One may have read in advance of such scenes, half imagined them, or even seen excellent photographs of them. But the reality was far greater than the expectation, and stirred us even with our twentieth-century attitudes. How much more impressive these same scenes must have been to medieval sailors who were eager and expectant to see God’s marvels. In a sense even their vivid prose fails to capture the splendor of the occasion, and it
is scarcely surprising that they should have come back and reported so extravagantly and with such wonder.

  This appreciation of their medieval outlook was one of Brendan’s most valid lessons to us, a balance to the more scientific data of laboratory reports on flax and oak-bark leather, the rowing and towing tests to try to fix the boat’s theoretical performance, the daily records of winds and sea states, leeway and miles made good, as we assessed the oceangoing behavior of our leather boat for nautical archaeologists. And running parallel to the medieval aura was a modern lesson: from the moment we first sailed from Brandon Creek to the day when we put ashore in Newfoundland, we had a privileged contact with the seafaring communities around the North Atlantic as they still exist today. When we moved Brendan from her landfall at Peckford Island across to the little fishing port of Musgrave Harbor on the mainland, the local fishing boats returning from their day’s work escorted us home. As we drew near the harbor entrance, we saw the pier was thronged with spectators. They had come down to the harbor from the neighboring fishing hamlets and from the scattered line of wooden frame houses which curved around the bay. Now they stood and waved, and cheered, and greeted Brendan with the same generous enthusiasm which had met us all along the route the leather boat had sailed.