The Brendan Voyage (27 page)

The weather treated us almost too kindly. For the first week we had no more than light airs and calms, and
Brendan
drifted slowly westward away from Iceland. It was a convenient time to settle down and readjust oneself to the medieval way of life, remember the lessons of the year past, and pick up once again the special rhythm of an open boat in northern waters. At Trondur’s suggestion, we adopted the watch-keeping system favored by Faroes fishermen. We divided into two watches—Trondur with Arthur; George and myself—and the two watches worked four hours on and four hours off around the clock. It was a system that allowed each watch to decide its own arrangements. When the weather was fine, one man steered the boat while his partner could rest, or read, or cook a light snack. When the weather grew worse, the two watch-keepers would take the helm turn and turn about, just as they saw fit. When it was very rough, as we were to learn, twenty minutes at the helm was as much as a man could endure before he became completely numb. Only at noon did we break the four-hourly pattern. Then we worked two dog watches of two hours each and prepared the main hot meal of the day, which all four of us would eat together. And this season we shared the chore of cooking, which was a far better arrangement.

In some ways it felt as if we had never interrupted the voyage for the winter. Our old companions the whales promptly paid us a visit.
When we were still well inside the circle of Faxafloi Bay off Reykjavik a school of minke whale surfaced and blew around us, and a young minke about thirty feet long and consumed with curiosity spent fifteen minutes cruising along up and down each side of the boat, some twenty yards away, puffing and snorting, and rolling under us. Two mornings later, again in a flat calm, a large colony of seals popped up to inspect her, their heads bobbing like sleek footballs all around
Brendan
as the seals gazed curiously at the leather boat. Then, all at once, they sank beneath the water and vanished from view.

We had human visitors, too—a passing fisherman who presented us with lumpfish from his catch, which Trondur skinned and cooked up into fish stew; and a party of hunters in a speed boat. They had been shooting guillemot for the pot, and they also gave us part of their catch, much to Trondur’s delight. He plucked, boiled, then fried, and finally sauced the guillemot with sour cream to produce as fine a meal as any French chef. “One guillemot,” he announced judiciously as he ladled out our helpings, “is same as two fulmar, or three puffin, all good food.”

Trondur was obviously back in his element. He fashioned a new fulmar-catching device, a deadly flower of wicked-looking hooks sprouting from a corked float which bobbed along in our gentle wake. Below the surface, at the end of our safety line, he also towed a massive hook-and-feather on a heavy wire trace. It looked big enough to catch a shark. Everywhere one turned, there was evidence of Trondur’s activities: coils of fishing line, lead weights, boxes of fish-hooks, chunks of whale blubber ready for fulmar bait, a stone for sharpening fish-hooks, and the occasional loose feather where he had plucked his latest gull prey. Trondur lavished the most care on his harpoon. During the winter he had made a beautiful new one. Its brass shank fitted into a long wooden shaft, and the attack end carried an exquisitely made spear point of steel, shaped like a leaf. This spear point was also set in brass, with an off-set attachment for the harpoon line so that as soon as the harpoon struck, the head broke free and the pull of the line twisted and buried the head in the flesh. For hour after hour Trondur would sit hunched over the harpoon head, lovingly honing it to a bright, razor edge. On the thwart beside him lay the harpoon shaft, its handle wrapped with leather thong for a grip. With the leaf-shaped point in his hands, identical in size and shape to the Stone Age spear heads of flint recovered from archaeological excavations, it occurred
to me that the whole picture symbolized nothing so much as age-old Man the Hunter.

Seven miles above our heads we could sometimes see the silver dots of airliners flying between Europe and America, drawing their vapor trails across the sky. In just six or seven hours these aircraft were making a journey that it would take
Brendan
many weeks to complete, if we succeeded in our passage at all. How, I wondered, would those airline passengers comfortably seated in their chairs, with their film headsets and plastic meal trays, react if they knew that far below them four men in a leather boat were crawling at less than two miles an hour across that innocent-looking ocean, only a couple of feet above its surface, and dependent largely for their survival upon skills and materials that had not changed in a thousand years?

In the first four days
Brendan
had progressed so sluggishly that we could still see the snow-capped peak of Snaefellsjokull on the horizon behind us. In the clear northern air it was difficult to gauge just how far from land we had come. This clarity of the air was another factor, along with twenty-four hours of useable daylight in high summer, which must have helped the early voyagers in these northern waters. The Norsemen had used the peak of Snaefellsjokull as their departure point for Greenland. Norse shipmasters would sail west from Snaefellsjokull until the mountain sank below the horizon, and soon afterward, by looking ahead in clear weather, they would have been able to distinguish the first peaks of Greenland. From land to land along this track the distance between Iceland and Greenland is about 250 miles, and the mountains at each end make perfect landmarks, thus reducing a major gap in the Stepping Stone Route westward. On a fast passage the navigator might not be out of sight of land for more than one or two days. Also the phenomenon known as the Arctic Mirage may have helped them still further.

The Arctic Mirage, known in Iceland as the Hillingar effect, is a northern equivalent of the well-known desert mirage. The Arctic Mirage occurs when a stable mass of clear air rests on a much colder surface. The result is to change the optical properties of the air so that it bends the light like a giant lens. Objects far beyond the normal horizon now appear within view, floating above the horizon, and sometimes turned upside down and stacked, one image above the other. Sextant
readings become unreliable, and the theoretical horizon may extend for a distance limited only by the resolution of the human eye. Highly favorable conditions for the Arctic Mirage occur over Greenland, where a mass of high-pressure heavy air rests on the great ice cap, while the high-altitude Greenland glaciers supply a bright source of reflected light for the mirage. So it is possible that Irish and Norse mariners, venturing out from Iceland’s coastal waters or gale-driven westward, saw this distant light of Greenland well beyond the normal limits of the visual horizon and suspected that land lay in that direction.

Brendan’s
slow advance made her an easy mark for the patrols of the Icelandic Coast Guard service, whom Petur Sigurdsson had instructed to keep an eye on us for as long as possible. First the Coast Guard spotter plane circled us, then the guard ship
Tyr
came to investigate. As usual Trondur had a fishing line into the water. “We’re only fishing for fulmars, not cod,” I radioed to
Tyr
as she steamed inquisitively around us. “Jolly good, and good luck,
Brendan,”
came back
Tyr’s
reply as she churned off on her duty to protect Iceland’s two-hundred-mile fishing limit from poachers. I turned to Trondur. “By the way, did you tell your fishermen friends in Faroes that last year we ate grey fulmars which they say are poisonous?”

“Ya,” he replied.

“What did they say?”

He grinned. “They say we are crazy.”

Coming from Faroes fishermen, I thought to myself, that was the best compliment we had received so far.

Our next visitor was the patrol boat
Aegir,
which sent across a rubber dinghy. Standing bolt upright in the dinghy was a junior Coast Guard officer, clutching a brown box as if it would explode at the slightest tremor. “The Captain sends this with his compliments. I hope it’s all right,” he said, gingerly handing over the box. I opened it. Inside was an enormous cream cake, on the cream sailed an outline of
Brendan
piped in red icing. Beside it was an envelope addressed:

The letter inside read:

As I finished reading the note,
Aegir
’s boat crew was already scrambling back aboard their vessel. The rubber dinghy was whisked aboard; a burst of smoke from her twin exhausts, and
Aegir
went throbbing past us at full speed, her crew waving and three long blasts on her siren to wish us farewell.

The weather continued to be very mild. It was difficult to believe we were in such ill-reputed northern waters. With only a gentle swell on the sea, Trondur could trail astern in the rubber dinghy, sketching
Brendan,
and George was able to clamber around the gunwale, adjusting ropes and leeboards to his precise satisfaction. The sun shone brilliantly through the clean air, and sank down in magnificent sunsets. Only the cutting edge of the wind reminded us that we were less than one hundred miles from the polar pack ice. When the wind blew from the north, from the ice, it sliced through one’s defenses. Before emerging on watch, it was wise to struggle first into cotton underwear, then a suit of woollen underclothes, then the heavy Faroes underwear, two pairs of socks, trousers and shirt, and two sweaters, before leaving the protection of the living shelter and tugging on oilskins. The technique was to wear as many layers of warm clothing as possible and to dress up before going outside. Otherwise even a gentle breeze stripped away all body heat in a few minutes, and it was difficult to get warm again. As the temperature dropped each of us produced his own choice of clothing. Arthur sported a selection of shapeless woollen hats and a vast pair of padded Navy watchkeeping trousers. George had stocked up with soft Icelandic woollen socks and gloves. I preferred home-knitted mittens reaching halfway up my forearms. But Trondur outshone
us all when he appeared in a magnificent furry Chinese beaver hat, its earflaps waving so that it was difficult to tell where the beaver fur left off and Trondur’s luxuriant tangle of hair and beard began.

We were finding that life aboard
Brendan
was much more comfortable with four persons instead of five. The extra space was invaluable. We could stow our spare clothes and equipment properly, keeping out only our personal belongings, safely packed in water-tight kit bags. Also our daily rations, originally packed for five men, now gave us ample food. What with the fulmar that Trondur was catching, and our store of smoked and dried meats, we were eating far better than the previous season, and our morale lifted accordingly, even when we had to chip half-frozen honey from the jar. A constant supply of hot drinks—coffee, beef extract, and tea—kept the watch warm; and our fresh supplies survived well. In temperatures that seldom rose above forty degrees Fahrenheit, nature was providing us with a free cold larder, a fact that would have been doubly important to the medieval seamen who sailed that way before us and had to rely on fresh provisions more than we did.

On May 12, an exhausted bird arrived on board to remind us that migrating birds also took the same route between the continents. Scarcely larger than a sparrow, we identified it as a wagtail when it fluttered down, totally worn out, and landed on the steersman’s head. It refused crumbs and water, but later hopped forward along the gunwale and took up residence in a sheltered hole in the forward bulkhead of Trondur’s berth. By next afternoon it had gone, flown on its way, though we jokingly accused Trondur of having eaten it for a midnight snack. The little wagtail’s journey lay along age-old migration paths that could have been another clue for the medieval sailors that land lay west of Iceland. But such clues would have had to be treated carefully. Flocks of migrating birds moving high overhead in spring and autumn indicated the direction of distant lands to watchers. But it required special knowledge to interpret these signs correctly. The watchers needed to know something of the habits of the particular birds to know just how far or how directly they flew on their migrations. On
Brendan
we ourselves were witnessing an example of this lore. The previous July whenever we saw puffins flying over the sea, we knew that we were close to land. But now in May we saw flights of puffin one hundred and more miles from the nearest shore. In May the birds were
foraging far and wide for food, whereas in June and July, depending on where they laid their eggs, they restricted their hunting to areas close to the nests. On such knowledge could depend the difference between a successful and a futile voyage of exploration.

For our safety, I tried to report
Brendan
’s daily position to the shore radio stations, who passed the information on to the Coast Guard. So whenever the sky was clear, I took sextant readings and calculated our position. To set our course, there was only one golden rule: keep sailing west, always west. With each wind change, we simply altered course to make whatever westing we could manage. If the wind headed us, then we turned north or south, and moved at our best angle of ninety degrees to the wind, until the wind changed again. Calculations of leeway and the effect of ocean current were hit and miss. We judged
Brendan
’s leeway simply by looking at the angle of the safety line to the boat, which could be as much as thirty degrees; and our speed and distance was broadly a matter of guesswork. In light air,
Brendan,
especially when heavily laden, was moving too slowly for the trailing log to be effective, and the log reading was often forty percent wrong. By a simple test we found it equally accurate to throw a chip of wood into the water by the bow, time how long it took to pass the steering paddle, and then calculate our speed.