The Brendan Voyage (10 page)

A bottle of Irish whiskey had seemed more appropriate than French champagne for the first ocean-going leather boat to be launched in Ireland for perhaps forty generations, but there was a last-minute hitch. How did one break a stout glass bottle against a leather hull? The bottle would just bounce off. Crosshaven’s shipwrights came to the rescue. They hung an anchor on the bow and fixed the whiskey bottle into a wooden arm that would swing down on the target. Just to make sure, one of the shipwrights hid inside the bow throughout the service, ready to tug on a cord that made the bottle descend at full speed. A sizeable crowd had gathered to witness the ceremony. Movie cameras were focused; and the inevitable Doubting Thomas bustled among the spectators, offering to take bets. “Five to one she doesn’t float; five to one she sinks within the hour,” he offered. “You’re on for fifty pounds,” called one of my friends, but by the time he got out his money, the little bookmaker had discreetly vanished. Bishop Casey was magnificent. Isolated from the gale inside his purple and lace, he spoke the traditional prayers over the new boat. He blessed her mission, her crew, and the watching audience, and he read a poem in Irish he had specially composed for the occasion:

Then came the moment. My daughter Ida stepped forward with the scissors, and in a small clear voice she announced, “I name this boat
Brendan”
and cut the ribbon. The whiskey bottle, propelled by its hidden shipwright, whipped down with a tremendous crash. Shards of
glass showered everyone within range, and the cloud of atomized Irish whiskey swept over the crowd. “That’s the real stuff!” shouted a hoarse voice, and
Brendan
began to slide down toward the water. With scarcely a ripple, she floated lightly off her cradle; her crew of shipwrights heaved at their oars; and
Brendan
pulled away, floating high with her bunting rippling and the crowd applauding. The boat of leather was afloat.

It was much too stormy and cold to risk
Brendan
at sea, so one of Paddy Glennon’s giant timber lorries trundled her up to the shallow lakes of the River Shannon for trials. We stepped the masts, hung the steering paddle over the starboard quarter, and pushed off to see what happened under sail. It was an idyllic morning. A gentle breeze filled
Brendan
’s two square sails; the hull canted slightly in response, and the long slim boat glided over the peaty brown Shannon water. We were deep in the countryside, with not a house in sight. The broad river curved past deep green meadows. Swans took off before our bows, paddling with their feet and undulating their long necks to gain speed and height as they left behind the powerful rushing sound of their wings. Clouds of ducks rose from the winter-brown reeds on each side of the river, and a cart horse that had been grazing in the water-meadow came galloping down to stop and stare in amazement at the strange, silent gliding craft before it suddenly wheeled and galloped away with soft sucking splashes in the mud, halting again at a safe distance and turning to watch the boat once more. The whole scene—the square white sails moving silently over the brown reeds—had an unreal air.

We glided into Lough Corry, scarcely more than an embayment in the river’s course. A puff of wind struck us, and suddenly everything became alive. The boat heeled more steeply; the water began to surge against the steering oar; a rope jerked adrift from its cleat; suddenly there was chaos. Each sail needed four ropes to control it, and each rope developed a life of its own. When one rope escaped, the others began to wriggle and slat. The heavy crossyard swung over; the sail slapped against the mast; and without warning we found ourselves grabbing at unidentified ropes and hauling in hopefully, trying to discover which rope would quell the riot. But the wind had got stronger, a good solid puff, and
Brendan
shot forward. The crew clung on, ropes burning their hands.
Brendan
whizzed forward and the far bank of the
little lake loomed up. I leaned hard on the steering oar, and
Brendan
began to turn. But it was too late. With a splintering of dry stalks, we went hurtling spectacularly into the reed beds and found ourselves condemned to half an hour of prodding oars into the peat bottom to punt
Brendan
free.

A dozen times a day we crashed into the reeds, which served as handy buffers, and gradually we got to know the boat.
Brendan,
we discovered, had her limitations. With only four oarsmen on board she was too unwieldly to row against the wind, because her bows were blown downwind and we hadn’t the strength to get her back on course. More ominous was the fact that when left to her own devices,
Brendan
lay broadside to the wind at a dangerously exposed angle. We dropped marker buoys in the lough, and by sailing between them learned that
Brendan
refused to go against the wind like an ordinary yacht. She pointed her bows bravely enough to the wind, but lacking a keel she slid sideways across the water like a tea tray. On the other hand she was far more stable than we had anticipated, and running with the wind astern she went famously. She twisted and turned at a touch of the great steering paddle so that I was reminded of surf boats.

This was how
Brendan
would be at sea, a one-way exhilarating ride with the wind on the stern. A pair of ash shovel handles extended the breadth of our main crossyard so we could carry more sail; and after a day on which it snowed, we rigged the two tent structures that would give us shelter on the voyage. We practiced hauling
Brendan
up onto the bank, and we covered her with a thick layer of wool grease like a long-distance swimmer. And always we watched the leather hull for signs of leaks. We knew that 30,000 stitches pierced the hull, most of them made by amateur leather-workers. Any of them could leak with dire results. At first the water did trickle in, perhaps ten gallons a day, but then the trickles gradually slowed to half the rate and we found it scarcely necessary to bail
Brendan
unless it had rained.

When we were sufficiently confident, we took
Brendan
back down to the coast and tried sailing her in the estuary where I had first tested
Finnbarr.
Sometimes we were dispirited; sometimes we were greatly heartened. Once again we found it was impossible to row against the wind, and spent one dreary and uncomfortable night bottled up in a bay, anchored just out of reach of the surf that creamed and roared past us onto the beach. On another day we tried capsizing the
Brendan,
and found that she floated like an upturned whale, virtually impossible to turn the right way up. So we placed inside her some blocks of buoyancy so that we could spin the boat the right way up. In this state, when totally swamped, we learned that five of us using buckets could bail her dry inside ten minutes.

In Saint Brendan’s
Navigatio
it had been written that the monks “got iron tools and constructed a light boat ribbed with wood and with a wooden frame, as is usual in those parts. They covered it with oxhides tanned with the bark of oak and smeared all the joints of the hides on the outside with fat. Into the boat they carried hides for making two other boats, supplies for forty days, fat for preparing hides to cover the boat, and other things needed for human life. They also placed a mast in the middle of the boat and requirements for steering a boat. Then Saint Brendan ordered his brothers in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to enter the boat.”

In the twentieth century it had taken nearly three years of work and research to reach the same point. Now, like the original monks, it was time to put to sea to look for our way to the Promised Land.

Yellow and brown,
Brendan
lay at the head of Brandon Creek on Saint Brendan’s feast day. Bright yellow tarpaulins had been stretched over bow and stern to make her easier to locate if a search-and-rescue mission had to be mounted to save her, as some Cassandras prophesied. “They’ll need a miracle if they hope to cross the Atlantic in that—more than Saint Brendan ever did!” was how one spectator put it.

But we weren’t going anywhere that particular day. Although it was May 16 and the day I had scheduled for our departure, a full-blown gale was raging. The rain was sheeting down, and the wind buffeted against the damp cliffs of the creek. In the open Atlantic, outside, the surface of the sea was torn to smoke as the squalls rushed across it. The crew and I stood dejected and dripping around
Brendan
where she lay dragged up on the landing slip. The boat was in chaos. It had been a hectic, last-minute flurry to get her into position. In theory, at least, we had a stowage plan for
Brendan
to help us find room for enough stores, water, and equipment for five men. But there had been no time to stow anything properly. Everything lay higgledy-piggledy, tossed in the bottom of the boat—kit bags, torches, food, first-aid kit, the hurricane lamp, even the ship’s bell, which looked like a large Swiss cowbell but was in fact a copy of the chapel bells that in Saint Brendan’s day had hung outside the monks’ oratories and called their congregations to prayer. How much easier it had been, I thought to myself, for Saint
Brendan and his monks all those years ago. They would have simply put to sea with spare leather and currying fat; the woollen clothes they used for everyday wear, especially the hooded gowns of heavy wool; a supply of water in leather flasks; wooden dippers for bailers; dried meat, cereals, and roots for their food; and—most important—a sublime faith that God would take care of them.

They were men accustomed to extraordinary hardship. From the other side of the Dingle Peninsula one could see the twin pinnacles of the Skellig Islands, thrusting out of the Atlantic. Out there it was so exposed that spray from the waves broke the lighthouse windows four hundred feet above the surface of the water. Yet, in Saint Brendan’s day, a community of monks chose to live on those bleak rocks. With devoted labor they had cleared a ledge and built six beehive huts and two oratories of rough stone. Here they had lived huddled together in Christianity’s most lonely outpost. Flailed by the great winds of winter and early spring, they were cut off from contact with the mainland when no skin boat, however skillfully handled, could have reached them. Yet somehow they survived, and clung as stubbornly to their faith as their hemispherical homes clung like housemartins’ nests to the rock. They were so constant and so isolated that long after the Church calendar was amended, the monks of the Skelligs still celebrated Easter on its original date.

To try to emulate such hardy men would prove little. They had shown their fortitude for all history to see; and now for
Brendan’s
crew to set out wearing medieval clothing or eating a medieval diet would teach us nothing new. It would only make our modern task more difficult and uncomfortable. We were embarking on the Brendan Voyage not to prove ourselves, but to prove the boat.
Brendan
was what mattered. No wonder I envied the monks their simplicity. They had not worried where to stow camera equipment so that it kept dry, nor how to find space for the pair of twelve-volt car batteries that powered our small radio telephone. As for the radio itself, it was still in its carton. The radio had arrived so recently that there was no time to unpack it, let alone install or test it properly. Like many other items of our equipment, our radio was an unknown quantity. Radio manufacturer after manufacturer had been approached for help in supplying a suitable set, but most of them were appalled at the thought of exposing their radios to conditions in an open boat. Even the makers of military radio sets
designed to be dropped by parachute had doubted if their equipment would survive aboard
Brendan.
Only at the very last minute was a set offered.

The rest of our equipment was relatively basic. We had a life raft and a box of distress flares, jerry cans of water and paraffin, a small radio direction finder, a sextant and tables, and a bundle of charts. Most of our drinking water was stored in soft rubber tubes—the modern equivalent of the leather flasks of the monks—tucked under the slatted floor of the boat where it would also serve as ballast. Our food was packed in plastic bags, one bag to be opened each day and, if my calculations were correct, containing sufficient food for five men for twenty-four hours. The food itself was a gourmet’s nightmare. There were the usual tins of meat and fish and baked beans; packets of dried soups and vegetables; dried fruit and bars of chocolate; and an apparently endless supply of Scots oatmeal cake, which I hoped would prove a substitute for bread. On our past record, George and I doubted if we would catch many fish to supplement our diet, and looking at all those dehydrated packet foods, I had a premonition that all would not be well. Everything seemed to be plastic. More than half the items were wrapped in plastic or came in plastic tubs, and we had spent a hectic day wrapping every item in a second plastic bag before sealing the full day’s rations in an even larger plastic bag. Our food looked and smelled of plastic and—as it turned out—soon began to taste of plastic, too.

Brendan’s monks had probably cooked on a peat or wood fire kept burning in a fire tray or in a cauldron, which could also be carried ashore. And, of course, they were accustomed to eating cold food. On the other hand, I had placed great value on the morale-boosting effect of regular hot meals, and so had arranged for a traditional paraffin stove to be built into a cook box about the size of a footlocker. Its lid hinged back to serve as a windshield; two side flaps pulled up to give additional protection; and, best of all, the entire stove hung on gimbals. It was an ingenious device because the cook box could be lashed into position wherever we wanted it, and used in almost any weather.