by Ice! [V2. 0]
When Caesar entered Gaul with his army to seize the land now known as France and to cross the Channel to tackle the heart-islands of the Celts, the old sea passages were still maintained, for the Mediterranean sailors of Rome were no match for the Atlantic-hardened mariners of the West. Caesar's invasion force sailing for Britain in early 55 B.C., in fact, encountered a British fleet of 220 seagoing vessels in the Channel. A sudden calm in the wind enabled the Roman galleys, commanded by Brutus, with slaves at the oars, to drive alongside the great curraghs and board them with overwhelming hordes of foot soldiers. A far cry from the usual story of the "civilized" Romans landing unchallenged on an island populated by primitive, blue- painted savages! What better camouflage is there for a night attack than blue woad dye?
Rome's power extended as far as the eye could see from the land, and as far as the foothills of the mountains of Wales and Scotland. There, on the high ocean seas and the remote broken rises, the tide of the Roman Empire beat itself for 450 years, but made few inroads. The Celtic sea trade, from Iceland and Germany, though drastically diminished, continued. With Rome astride the ocean road to Cadiz, the American trade died, delaying, for good or ill, the arrival of Christianity on that continent for fifteen hundred years. The far-flung, lonely Celtic outposts of Iarghal were cut off from Europe, their folk to mix with the Amerindian Iarghaltes, and to become part of the Algonquin tribes. From then on, legends record only isolated voyages across the Atlantic, such as the Irish Saint Brendan's in the sixth century and the Welsh Prince Madoc in the twelfth century.
About 290 years after the birth of Christ, the Roman governor of England, Carausius, sent a mighty fleet to sail completely around the British Isles, and then to Iceland, carrying a legion to raid Gaelic settlements in that remote land, as well as the coasts of the wild Picts in Northern Scotland and the Erse of Ireland. The only relics ever found of this expedition, apart from the written accounts, are two Roman coins recovered from the seabed at Bragoarvellir and one at Hvalnes, both sites on the southeast coast of Iceland.
As is well known, when an invading army subdues a country, the effect on the culture and racial composition of the people is mainly felt only among the high and mighty. The common people, the vast majority, are not changed one whit. This is especially so among the seafaring folk of the conquered country. They are brought up on local sea lore and traditions. Once the conqueror is onboard their craft, in their sea, he is present on the sufferance of the native, unless the conqueror is himself a seaman from a hard-weather land. This the Romans were not. The sailors of Carausius's fleet must have been Celts. Their sailing masters knew very well the coasts and the passages as far as the shores of Iceland.
As the military power of Rome waned in Western Europe during the violent incursions of the Goths and the Teutons, so the assault of the Roman Christian church on the militarily unconquered Celtic lands of Wales and Ireland increased. Finally, Saint Patrick, a Welsh Christian, entered Ireland and captured the romantic Irish soul.
With the coming of the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes into England in the fifth century from the fog-bound marshes of North Germany, the Celts were again cut off from land communication with the Mediterranean, the center of world power. But the old sea trade went on and still the curraghs ploughed the deep seas, finding their way by the sun, moon, and stars, while back at home, in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, the Teutons were resisted. But when the Goths reached Cadiz, the sea roads to Rome were cut, and Christian Ireland and Wales were separated from the main body of their new religious and cultural sources in the Mediterranean. But sea travel still continued between Brittany, Ireland, Wales, and Iceland.
In those days, the northern latitudes were a good deal warmer than they are now. It is estimated up to five degrees Fahrenheit on the average. Certainly, from all accounts, the ocean weather was kinder, and no tales of icefloes, or bergs are found in the old Celtic stories and very few in the Norse sagas, even of Greenland and Labrador.
While a wary "detente" had been reached between the Celt and the Saxon during the seventh century, far away across the North Sea, in Norway, the gradual immigration of people across the mountains from Sweden, together with a tremendous increase in the birthrate, had caused the peaceful farmers in the vikke, as the remote, tiny homesteads at the inner ends of the deep fiords were called, to turn to fishing the sea for food, and then to raiding each other's miserable plots. In the course of this warring, a type of craft was developed, the karfi, which made full use of the excellent timber readily available and of the bitter experiences gained over the years from the rough seas of that country. The karfi was a vessel about forty feet long, double-ended, with excellent coastal characteristics. It could deal with the steep heavy seas in rough weather, it could sail fast in the calm waters behind the long coastal island leads, and it could be beached easily for a raid or upon returning home with loot.
From the karfi, the next step forward was the hafskip, or, as it was more commonly known, the knarr. This was the much longer, wider, oceangoing "longship." It was, in contrast to the Celtic curragh, like comparing a Maserati to a Model T. It was fast, and it was big enough to carry thirty men with all their battle gear and provisions; it was shallow and could be sailed up rivers deep into enemy territory. The average knaff was eighty feet long, nineteen feet beam (providing excellent stability), and about four-and-a-half feet draft amidships. From the bottom of the keel to the top of the gunwale, the hull was about seven feet high.
Tents were erected when the knarr hove-to at night. The Vikings (as the vikke farmers were known) had no rudders or compass; steering was by a large sweep oar over the starboard (steer-board) quarter, and navigation was by the stars and sun for latitude. The longitude was mainly guessed at. From Norway, it was "sail into the setting sun for five days, then turn left for Britain and Europe, right for Iceland." It was as crude as that. Though we hear of all the successful Viking voyages, we have no idea how many were lost in the ocean. The number must have been great. With the bad weather in their area, I would hazard a guess of probably thirty percent losses.
Once the Norsemen had the knarr, they let loose upon all of northern Europe, and indeed as far round the continent as the shores of Morocco, a sea invasion of burning, looting, murder, and rapine unique in mankind's long history of warfare. In the process, they cut the Celtic sea roads and invaded most of the Gaelic lands. They ravaged England, France, Scotland, and Ireland. Only in three places were they successfully resisted—North Wales, Brittany, and a few of the Irish and Scottish Islands. These became small isolated centers of the old Celtic culture, overlaid with remnants of Greek and Roman civilization and ancient knowledge—a light kept flickering fitfully, but faithfully, by the Christian monks and anchorites hidden away in almost inaccessible fastnesses and islands, from the volcanic desert of the Vatnajokull of Iceland in the north, to the rocky, steep inlets of Brittany, protected by the terrible tides of that shore. For the darkest three hundred years in Western man's history, the tiny lamps flickered; some extinguished only to be lit again on yet another storm-tossed rock, like Tory, Iona, and Barra; some to die forever. During three dark centuries these selfless, faithful Celts held the sum total of Western man's culture in their hands.
As Cresswell heaved and sloughed her way through the kindly night, with St. Finan's Bay and Puffin Island under the lee, I thought of these tales of the sea empire of the Gaels. Here I was passing through one of the crossroads of the ancient world, a world of light and magic and beauty, a world of delightful dreams as well as terrifying nightmares, on the track of a race of people, my people, who worshiped the life force not only in living things such as the oak tree and the elder, the ash and the thorn, but in the rocks of the world and the sigh of the wind and the thunderous crashes of the mighty ocean on the shores of their homes. And I thought of the curtain of lies cast upon the world in the cause of goodness by the Christian missionaries, who drummed into the ears of the magical folk for centuries the incessant untruth that nothi
ng before the Son of God was good. That all before Jesus was sin and ignorance and savagery, that all was evil, that the living spirit of the wind and the oceans, of the waving heather on the soul-hills was evil. How the memory of the Celtic ways, of their stories and art, full of love and terror, was cast into the first doorway of hell so that men's minds could be chained to the cross. And how the resulting cleavage of the Celtic mind is still, to this very day, shown in rivers of terror and violence in the back streets of bloody Belfast.
Ever since the Norman conquest of England, and especially after the loss of the Plantagenet domains in France, the aim of the English Power has been to dominate Europe, and especially Northwest Europe. The method has at all times been to secure a position from which the balance of power could be held, making sure that no one country on the continent became powerful enough, militarily or economically, to dominate any two other European countries.
With the shift of economic power from the Mediterranean shores to Northwest Europe after the great sea explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the geographical situation of Britain dictated an enormous increase in her political power, for she sits fair and square across the sea routes of the most powerful nations of the continent, and at that time, of the world. From the north of Scotland you can gaze out to sea, north and eastward, and know that you are looking at Iceland and Norway. Move south and in turn you look towards Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, and Spain. Over very short lines of communication, the English could reach out and throttle the ocean throats of all these countries.
There was, however, only one Achilles' heel—Ireland. Whoever controls the west coast of Ireland controls the sea approaches to Northwest Europe. Cromwell knew this full well; he was the originator of modem sea power. The Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the Italians, the Germans also knew it, and for centuries their aim was to foment revolt among the Irish Catholics to keep England looking over her shoulder and thus divert her attention.
Nowadays the world runs on oil. Oil is moved in super-tankers which are deep-draught vessels. The seas around Northwest Europe are shallow. The supertankers cannot enter the narrow seas. Western Ireland has fine, extensive, natural, deep-water ports. In the next decade or two, a great percentage of European industry will be drinking oil coming through the Irish gullet. Whoever controls Ireland will, to a large extent, control North-European industry; thus the shipment of arms to the IRA and the Protestant extremists of Ulster from Libya, of all places!
But to the English, God is an Englishman, and so he revealed to them the extensive off deposits under the North Sea. And once again the Irish threat is neutralized, while Irishmen kill and maim each other for foreign causes of which they know nothing and care less. Pawns in a power game. The Celt can see and touch the stars, but when he looks at his feet he is lost unless he tries to understand himself.
As the light on Bray Head, Valentia Island, dropped down over the horizon over Cresswell's bucking starboard quarter, and as the shimmer of the loom of Great Blasket light shivered under the stars ahead, I recalled the stories of long ago. Now I was sailing one of the oldest trade routes in the world, where every rock, every blade of grass, every tiny islet had its own legend of wonder, delight, bloody death, heroic blunders, and magic. The magic of the youth of the world! The magic of innocence, as it was before the veil was ripped asunder and the blanket of sin was flung over the worship of life!
On the eighteenth day of December, In nineteen -twenty-two, The Tans in their big Crossley tender Outside of the town ofMacroom, But the boys of the village were waiting, With hand grenades primed on the spot, And the Irish Republican Army— Put paid to the whole fuckin' lot!
Irish song (I suspect, because of the last line, it originates in Dublin or Liverpool—I never heard an Irishman, outside Dublin and Belfast, use so-called obscenity in Ireland).
10
The Next Parish to America
The sight around me, as the dawn shone over Dingle Bay, was astonishingly beautiful. Away to the east, across silver-shining water (though fairly rough, for the Irish Atlantic is not Long Island Sound, and every view is well earned the hard way), rose a line of piled mountains, Macgillycuddy's Reeks, lifting black, shattered elbows into the heartbroken sky. The shores were misty with Gaelic modesty and the Reeks seemed to be borne in the air by some mighty unknown force.
To the north lay my destination, the Blasket Islands, sprawling low out into the ocean in gallant defiance of all the laws of gravity. There is an optical illusion here which makes the horizon seem to run downhill to the west. It looked as if the Blaskets were trying to escape from Erin. The island furthest to the west, Inishtooskert, was uninhabited. It lay slinking on the surface of the sea, blue green below its grey, scaly skin, with the sun shining on it betimes as the clouds passed over on their way to take rain to England. On the inshore side of Inishtooskert lay the main island of the Blaskets, Slievedonagh; and behind it, seeming to claw the ocean like the talons of a great eagle, the headland of Sybil Head and the Three Sisters, which are as far as Ireland flings herself after the setting sun.
As I had no detailed chart of the islands, and as navigation among the reefs and rocks is tricky, I clambered forward on the heaving deck and handed the jib and staysail. This was always hazardous in Cresswell, because her bow had a whaleback deck, rounded, to shudder off the heavy seas breaking over her. Consequently, the actual treadway of the foredeck was tiny in area, no more than a triangle of about six square feet. But I had rigged good, hefty guardrails all around the boat, and while on the bow they were only a foot or so above the gunwale to allow the headsails to pass over them when the boat was beating to windward, if I kept low, on my knees, I could manage well enough. Not being able to swim since my spine was damaged in Aden, I had always to be careful on any boat in motion. I could, and still can, float all right, but I cannot manage the kicking motion of swimming; and if I fell over the side, the chances were that the boat would, with her sails balanced to govern her course, carry on away from me.
With the headsails dropped down on deck and lashed to the hand rails, Cresswell rode head to wind and sea under her mainsail and mizzen, and even in those lively eight-foot waves off Dingle Bay she was steady enough for me to make a breakfast of fried corned beef and eggs. This is a very simple, easy meal, and Nelson loved it. Some of the pollock from the night before was left, and so as there would not be much time for lunch (there never is when you enter a haven in mid-forenoon), we scoffed that as well, and I washed the lot down with a pint mug of hot tea.
After breakfast I swilled down the decks and squared up all the gear above and below. I am very reluctant to enter any port with an untidy-looking craft. It's impolite to on- lookers, if there are any, and if there are not, it's still unseamanlike. Besides, while carrying out these cleaning chores, there's time to think about the passage in, and whether all the gear is in place.
After I had a good swill and scrub around the decks and a sweep-out below (it's surprising how scruffy a boat becomes, especially if she's coastal-passage-making, with the company landing ashore often), I drank another mug of tea, smoked a cigarette, and thought for half an hour. I could plainly see the roadstead between Slievedonagh and Inishtooskert, where, in 1588, one of the largest ships of the Spanish Armada, Nuestra Senora del Rosario, "Our Lady of the Rosary," a great lumbering galleon of one thousand tons, with the bastard son of King Philip of Spain on board, went to anchor in the calm water of Blasket Sound. During the night a great storm rose out of the southwest, leaving the galleon completely open to the weather. Her anchors dragged in that terrible sea, and she beat herself to death on the fierce fangs of the Three Sisters. King Philip's bastard son is buried in the graveyard at Vicarstown. The intention, when the Armada sailed in pomp and glory from Cadiz, was that he would become the king of Spain's viceroy in Northern England. Instead he got six feet by three of Irish sod in the rocks of Kerry.
A lot of people wonder why it was that so many of the ships
of the Spanish Armada were wrecked on the West Coast of Ireland. If we look at maps of Ireland for the period, the reason is soon obvious.
On all of the maps at the time of the Armada, the West Coast is shown as a straight line running north to south, with just one inlet, the great bay of Galway, whereas in reality it is a very jagged coastline, a continuous series of rocky headlands flung out far to the west of the general trend of the coast. The Spanish fleet sighted Ireland, and from the first northern headland they came to, sailed due south, straight into the rocks. The survivors of the Armada in Ireland were very few indeed. The word was out that they must be slaughtered to a man, and slaughtered they were, not only by the English but by the Irish too. Great was the amount of loot taken from the ships of His Most Catholic Majesty. Eight years before the Armada sailed, two Spanish ships had sailed for Smerwick Harbor in County Kerry, to foster revolt among the Irish. Well informed by the Irish, the English lord deputy for Ireland, Lord Grey, along with his friend and ally, Sir Walter Raleigh, intercepted the ships, took six hundred Spanish and Italian prisoners, and on the heights of Sybil Head, had them all massacred and cast from the dizzy cliffs into the raging seas a thousand feet below. Meanwhile, back in the courts of the Estoril and Hampton Court Palace, the spinets tinkled and bejeweled feet twinkled.
There is the impression that very dark-featured folk from the West of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland are the descendants of survivors of the Armada. I very much doubt it. They are much more likely remnants of the old pre-Celtic folk who inhabited the lands five thousand years ago. Their general characteristics are wiriness, occasional frenetic energy, imagination to the extremes, and they are mostly long-headed with prominent noses. This type is very common in the Irish Islands, Cornwall, Wales, and some of the Hebrides. Others may be descendants of Iberian merchants who established themselves on the coast of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but this would be in the large towns and ports of the mainland, certainly not on the islands or in Wales.
