The Brendan Voyage (19 page)

“Well, if you can’t eat them, nobody can,” remarked Arthur.

“Well, Skip,” said Edan as he suddenly realized what might happen. “We will open another bag, won’t we? I mean there’s nothing at all in that last one.”

I laughed. “Okay, Gannet. We’re not on short rations yet.”

It was another lesson learned. If all our supplies were similarly damaged, we might later run short of food. Indeed we discovered several other bags had also leaked and most of their contents had disintegrated. By far the worst were the dehydrated items which promptly soaked up water, swelled and burst, leaving a putrid mess. Only the tinned items survived, and because we had not had time to varnish them over, labels had been washed off, so we had a guessing game for a hunter’s casserole.

“Well, I’m not worried,” George summed up, as he inspected a macedoine of instant vegetables swimming in half a gallon of the Atlantic. “These dehydrated vegetables are all right once or twice a week, but day after day is too much. My whole throat tastes of preservative.”

The nineteenth and twentieth of June brought us only a moderate advance. The wind headed us for a time, and
Brendan
actually lost ground, ending up thirty miles farther away from the Faroes. There was nothing to be done, and we accepted the situation with our newly minted medieval philosophy. Eventually the wind died away completely, and we simply waited to see what Providence would bring. George played Edan at backgammon, and was 15p up in the stakes. Arthur had crawled into the shelter and was dozing. I leaned comfortably against the motionless steering oar, and listened contentedly to the sound of the waves rolling under the hull, the occasional creak
from the mast against the thwart, or the H-frame shifting in its socket. Every now and then the log line gave a half-hearted twist as we edged forward over the sea.

“Trawler in sight! Coming down from the north.” Anything to break the monotony. The others climbed up to have a look.

“I bet they’ll trade for whiskey.” Edan was scheming already.

“I doubt it,” said Arthur. “They’re probably on automatic compass, going home after a fishing trip off Iceland. They won’t even have seen us. After all, they’re not expecting to meet anything out here.”

The trawler kept ploughing steadily toward us. It would pass about half a mile ahead, and there was no sign of life aboard. It was close enough to read the name:
Lord Jellicoe.

“Here, George. You take the helm. I’ll see if I can raise them on the radio.”

I switched on our portable VHF set.

“Lord Jellicoe. Lord Jellicoe. Curragh Brendan
calling. Come in please.”

Silence. Only the hiss of the loudspeaker. I tried repeating the call. Again silence. Then suddenly a startled voice crackled back:

“Lord Jellicoe.
Who’s that?”

“Curragh Brendan.
We’re off your starboard side, about half a mile away. Can you give me a position check, please?”

“Wait a minute.”
Lord Jellicoe
ploughed on, while presumably her navigator was roused to work out the unexpected request. Just as she was disappearing over the horizon, she signaled the information I wanted, and later that same evening as we listened to the BBC news bulletin,
Lord Jellicoe’s
radio broke in. She was calling up a coast station, and we could hear the flat Yorkshire accents of her skipper.

“Humber Radio, maybe you can tell us something. We passed a strange vessel some time back this afternoon, and I’m told that it’s carrying a crew of mad Irish monks, is that right?”

We never heard Humber Radio’s reply, because
Brendan
’s crew were doubled up with laughter.

June 21, the longest day of the year, made us realize that we were now in high latitudes. We were enjoying almost twenty-four hours of daylight, and even at one o’clock in the morning I could still read the log book by reflected light in the sky. From that day on, for the rest of the sailing season, we had no need for navigation lights, which was just
as well, for I was a miser with our precious battery power. That evening we made the final contact with our friendly coast operator at Malin-head radio station who wished us luck for Faroes in his Irish brogue. As if in response, the winds changed to the south, and
Brendan
began to advance again in the right direction.

At six in the morning, a whale-catcher boat, about fifty feet long, came roaring up, its harpoon looming sinister on the forepeak.

“Hope she doesn’t think we’re a leather whale, and take a shot at us,” Arthur muttered as the whale-catcher circled us, its crew waving and cheering, and shouting if they could give us any help. We waved back our thanks, and they went tearing off, quartering the sea in search of their prey. Their lookout would not have welcomed the sea fret which quietly closed around us a couple of hours later, and locked us in a white cloud.
Brendan
ghosted along, the mist clinging in thousands of glistening droplets to the fibers of our woollen hats and to our beards like dew on blades of grass in a dawn meadow.

All that day the wind continued light, with just one heavy shower of rain, from which we managed to collect several inches of fresh water as an experiment. Catching the water in a tarpaulin, we drained it into our cooking pots. In an emergency, I calculated, we could just about survive on rainwater in that damp climate.

June 23 answered the question of how the early Irish monks would have located the Faroes in the vastness of the Atlantic. It was an ordinary summer’s day for those regions, occasional sunshine and a great deal of cloud.
Brendan
was still more than fifty miles from the Faroes, yet we picked out the islands with ease from the tall columns of cloud building up over them, thousands of feet into the air. The moist southwest wind sweeping across the ocean was deflected upward by the islands, condensed, and built up cloud banks as distinctive as marker flags on a hidden golf green. Picking up the binoculars, I looked more closely at the clouds and saw something which alerted me: the clouds were rolling and changing shape every few minutes in powerful up-draughts, and some of the clouds seemed to be pouring over the hill crests toward
Brendan.
They were the signs of an abrupt change of the weather, and I didn’t like the look of the turbulence.

That evening my concern deepened. We had a lowering sunset—a red sky with the purple shadows of the islands in the distance, beautiful but ominous. We were now close enough to be able to identify the
individual islands in the group, and I carefully consulted the charts and the pilot book. Our best course was to aim straight for the center of the Faroes, run through one of the narrow channels between them, and then try to duck into shelter on the lee side. But there was one snag—the tidal stream around the Faroes. On every tide the Atlantic sluices through the Faroes in an immense rush of water. The tide gushes through the narrow sounds between the islands with a myriad currents and countercurrents, sometimes so strong that even large ships must take care. The pilot book was a doleful mixture of caution and ignorance. “Little information is available regarding the rate of the tidal streams,” it said; “… in the channels between the islands, the stream may be very rapid and from eight to nine knots is not exceptional.” It also warned the mariner not to sail too close to land for fear of the off-lying rocks called Drangar which lie close off the cliffs on the north and western sides of the group. A medieval sailing boat, I thought to myself, caught in these tide rips would be helpless.

I checked the compass bearings and marked
Brendan
’s position on the chart, just before the storm line hit us. It swept down on
Brendan
from the south, a bank of rain which cut visibility abruptly from twenty miles to three miles in a matter of minutes. The wind force jumped upward. The rain hissed and rattled down, and we pulled on full foul-weather gear.

“Everybody in safety harnesses, please,” I ordered, and we buckled on the belts and clipped lifelines to the boat. “Gannet, you handle the headsail sheets; Boots, take the mainsail, and look after the leeboards. George, you’re the best helmsman on board, you take over the steering. I’ll handle the pilotage. This is likely to be tricky.”

Brendan
groped her way in the general direction of the Faroes, heading on the last compass bearing I had been able to take before the rain blotted out the horizon. After an hour, we had a brief glimpse of the islands as the sea-level cloud lifted. At once I saw that I would have to abandon my original plan. The main tide was running in a circular motion around the islands, and had picked up
Brendan
and was carrying her clockwise around the group. There was no hope of getting to the center of the group. We would be lucky to get into land at all, without being gale-swept past the west of the Faroes. Mykines, the most westerly island and closest to us, was out of the question as a landfall. Its only regular inhabitants were the lighthouse-keepers and a handful
of crofters, and its landing place could only be approached in calm weather. But Vagar Island, just inside Mykines and separated by the narrow channel of Mykines Sound, had a fjord that offered good shelter and it was worth a try.

By now the wind had risen to a half a gale, and
Brendan
was driving blindly through the rain, closing the gap at a terrific pace with the tide under her.

“Keep as close to the wind as you can,” I asked George. All of us were squinting through the downpour for a sight of land. The sea had now turned a nasty grey and was broken into a confusing cross-pattern of pyramids and crenellations. I guessed we must have entered the area of eddies and tidal backcurrents.
Brendan
was going at full stretch. We needed every inch of headway if we were to get up into Vagar, and not be slammed sideways into the sheer cliffs of Mykines. The wind was blowing so hard that although
Brendan
was pointing east she was going almost north, sliding sideways across the top of the water.

“Cliffs!” bellowed Edan. There, half a mile away, was a leaping band of white water where waves were breaking against a sheer wall of rock. It had to be Mykines.

“My God! Look at that lot,” Arthur breathed. It was indeed a remarkable sight. The cloud was so low that we saw only down a narrow tunnel, about six feet high, between the cloud base and the grey ocean. Thus the height of the cliffs was reduced to a mere looming black shadow inside the cloud, and our view was confined to the tortured line of water bursting into spray against the rock. At that same moment,
Brendan
entered a back eddy, running against her, so that her forward movement suddenly slowed to a crawl. Yet the gale kept her sliding sideways, ever sideways toward the cliffs. It was like slipping down a tunnel in a nightmare. There was no escape. The cloud base pressed down on us, squeezing us as inevitably as the tide. All of us fell silent. We knew it was a race between our snail’space advance and a sideways lurch toward the cliffs. Hardly breathing, we watched the grey cliffs inch past, yet coming closer and closer.

“I think we’ll do it,” I said hopefully to George. “I can see the end of the island. Another quarter of a mile and we’ll be clear, and Vagar is ahead.”

George had climbed up on to the gunwale for a better view and was coaxing
Brendan
forward yard by yard. Edan and Arthur sat calmly in
the waist of the boat, huddled in their oilskins and trying to calculate our progress.

“Christ! I hope the mast doesn’t go,” George muttered. “That really would be curtains.”

I glanced up. The mainmast was curved more than we had ever seen it, drawn down by the intense pressure of the gale on the mainsail, which still carried its bottom bonnet and one side bonnet.

“We’ll have to leave the bonnets up,” George said. “We need all the driving power we can get to pull free of the tide.”

“Keep an eye on the mainmast where it passes the thwart,” I shouted forward to Boots. “If it begins to splinter, cut the bonnets free with your knife.”

A few moments later, it happened: our world suddenly seemed to stand still. The normal motion of the boat and the waves stopped. It was as though we had gone into suspension. Through some quirk of the tide race in the gale the waves, instead of moving horizontally, simply rose up and down as if marking time. One such wave rose up beside
Brendan,
seemed to jump sideways, and dropped apparently vertically into the bilge. The wave was harmlessly small, but
Brendan
appeared to be hanging motionless to receive it. The boat herself no longer pitched nor rolled, in her normal style. At the same moment, the cloud base rose another thirty or forty feet, and we saw them: thousands upon thousands of seabirds, pouring out from the cliffs of Mykines: gulls, guillemots, razorbills, fulmars, gannets, puffins, skuas, and terns. They came in droves, in squadron after squadron, wheeling and turning, and swooping and dipping down toward the queer, lumpy, contorted sea. Driven by primeval experience, they had emerged to fish in the waters at a time when they knew the combination of wind and tide would bring the shoals of fish close to the surface.

I was awed. If there was any place which fitted the idea of a Paradise of Birds, this was it. “It’s fantastic!” I shouted to George above the roar of the wind.

He gave a shout and pointed. “Look! Over there. On the starboard bow. Something big, jumping in the water.” I followed the line of his arm. About a hundred yards ahead was a large swirl of water where something had just disappeared. A vast shape heaved beneath the surface. Then it came up again, and this time it was visible, throwing itself clear of the waves—the lurching massive shape of a whale, hurtling
out of the depths and leaping into the air again and again as if it were a salmon, only its grey body flopped loosely as it fell back with a burst of white water.

Brendan
was at last clawing past the trap where Mykines reached out its heel of cliff toward us. In the space of ten yards we suddenly broke free from the counter eddy, and plunged into the main tidal stream running into Mykines Sound, two miles wide separating Mykines from Vagar Island.
Brendan
shot forward into the gap like a log into the mill race. On each side of us the fjordlike cliffs of the Sound rose up seven or eight hundred feet, funneling the wind into a full gale. Luckily the wind and tide were together, or
Brendan
would have been swamped in the tide rip.