The Brendan Voyage (5 page)

So it was one March day that I found myself walking down a steep track leading to the spot from where Saint Brendan was said to have set out for the Promised Land. I was deeply affected by my surroundings. This was Saint Brendan’s own country, the Dingle Peninsula of County Kerry and the farthest point of Ireland reaching out into the Atlantic, a place where the sweep of green hills and moorlands ends in the blue-grey ocean, and the air is so clear that one almost has a sense of vertigo as the land seems to tilt toward the distant horizon. Here Saint Brendan is still commemorated in almost every natural feature. His name is spelled by the older version of Brandon, and one has Brandon Head, Brandon Bay, Brandon Point, the little village Brandon, and Mount Brandon itself, to whose summit on Saint Brendan’s Day a pilgrimage is made in honor of the Saint, and in past years strong young men carried on their shoulders the altar table to the peak as an act of worship.

Brandon Creek lies on the north side of the Dingle, a cleft in the line of massive cliffs that guards the coast. To reach it one crosses bog country, marked by clumps of brown peat stacked for drying and occasional tiny fields rimmed with walls of loose rock. It is a place of few inhabitants, though where the road finally runs out on the lip of the creek I found two houses, one on each side of the narrow road. The second house could have been cut from a picture postcard. Its rough stone walls were beautifully whitewashed. A water pump stood by the half-open door. There were flowers in tubs, and the neat thatched roof was held down against the ferocious blast of the winter gales by a lacework of cords, their ends weighted with smooth oval rocks gathered from the sea, every rock as neatly whited as a pearl in a necklace.

Just beyond the cottage was Brandon Creek itself, a sheer drop where the Atlantic heaved and swirled in the constriction of the cleft, even on a calm day booming among the sea caves near the mouth of the creek.

It was an unforgettable day, with brilliant sunshine alternating with stinging showers so typical of west Irish weather, and the aquamarine waters of Brandon Creek would not have looked out of place in a tropical island, so clear was the color. As I gazed away from the mouth of the creek to the northwest, my feeling of vertigo was even more pronounced. Out there, I thought, lay North America. Tradition dies hard, and if this is where tradition says Saint Brendan started on his voyage, this is where my boat will start too.

I began walking down the track leading past the thatched cottage, curving down to the base of the creek where a stream emptied out the water it had collected from the slopes of Mount Brandon above us. At that instant, with a thrill of excitement, I saw them. Drawn up on the side of the road were four strange black shapes. They were boats, turned upside down so that their hulls were pointing to the sky. They were the traditional canvas-covered boats of the west of Ireland called curraghs, a type found nowhere else in the world. They are relics of the Stone Age, and believed to be among the last surviving descendants of one of the oldest types of boat in the world—the skin boat. Here, in Brandon Creek, I first laid eyes on the heirs to the craft Saint Brendan was said to have sailed.

Crouching down, I peered underneath a curragh to see how it was made. Inside was an elegantly beautiful cagework of thin laths, frail-looking but in fact capable of withstanding great compression. Stretched over this frame was a tight skin of canvas, tarred on both sides to make it waterproof. Later I learned that this canvas, which has
replaced the original leather skins, is still called the “hide” in some localities. Tucked under the curraghs were sets of oars of a pattern I had never seen before. About nine feet long, they were so slender that they had no blade whatever, and they were fitted with curious triangular blocks of wood, pierced with a hole that matched a pivot pin when rowing. I judged the curraghs too small for anything more than inshore skiffs, yet to my eye they were perfect. They seemed so delicately engineered and so gracefully curved. After I had climbed out of Brandon Creek, I turned back to look down on the four curraghs once again. A rain shower had slicked their hulls so that the four black shapes glistened and glinted in the sun. They looked as sleek as porpoises rolling through the sea.

I yearned to go for a ride in a curragh, not just for my research but because I was captivated by them. A cheerful woman at the thatched cottage directed me on to the village of Dunquin, where, she said, I was likely to find a number of curragh men in the bar, as the weather was too rough to take the curraghs out fishing. I drove there, and asked the barman for advice. He pointed out a group of three elderly men sitting in a corner. “Any of them could take you,” he said, “but the sea’s no good today. Too rough.”

I went over to the men. Not one of them could have been under fifty-five years old. They were uniformly dressed in baggy tweed jackets and battered trousers. They all had gaunt knobby hands, large and reddened raw faces, with strong noses and heavyset bones.

“I am interested in going for a spin in a curragh,” I said. “I wonder if any of you could take me out in one.”

I was met with blank looks.

“In a curragh, your canvas boats,” I repeated.

“Oh, you mean in a canoe,” said one man. He turned to the others and muttered something incomprehensible. He was speaking Irish, which is still the common language in the Dingle. “We have canoes all right. But the weather’s not right for it. And you need to know what you’re doing before you go out in a canoe. It would be dangerous for a stranger.”

“Of course I will pay you for your trouble, and I’m prepared to take the risk,” I coaxed.

“No,” said the spokesman, “it’s too dangerous today. We’d all be killed. Maybe tomorrow.”

“What if I paid you three pounds each just for a quick spin?”

“Ah now! That would be different!”

So off we went to find their “canoes,” a strange little procession that kept stopping and starting and changing its composition. One old man dropped out. Another was hallooed from a field to take his place. And the fourth—a younger man with a bright yellow flower stuck jauntily in his hatband—was recruited at the cliff edge just before we started down a steep path to the landing place where a dozen curraghs lay upside down on their stages or props beside the water’s edge. The crew talked in Irish all the while, so I needed an interpreter. As luck would have it, on the road we passed a young man who was evidently a trainee schoolmaster, one of many sent to spend a few months in the Dingle to improve their knowledge of Irish before taking up their jobs.

“Would you care to come for a boat ride?” I called out to him. “You could help me with some translation as well.”

“Why of course,” came the cheerful reply, and ten minutes later the poor fellow was sitting nervously beside me on the rear thwart of a curragh as it bounced up and down in the spray.

“Have you ever been in a small boat before?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied, looking startled and clutching the gunwale. “Will we be away long?”

The trip was fascinating. To carry the boat to the water’s edge, the crew crawled beneath one of the upturned curraghs, crouched so their shoulders pressed up on the thwarts, and then straightened their backs so that the curragh shot smartly into the air like a strange black beetle heaving itself up onto four pairs of legs which then marched off to the edge of the slipway. With a swift movement the boat was lowered to the ground, tipped right side up, and when the next wave washed up, she was swirled afloat as casually as a toy. One by one we jumped in, taking care not to put a foot through the thin canvas. The oarsmen settled in their places; one good strong heave, and the curragh shot forward into the waves faster than any oared sea boat I have ever ridden in. In a moment we were out in the sound and curvetting like a horse over the waves. Balance was critical. If the boat stayed level, she flew over the waves and scarcely a drop of water came aboard. Through my interpreter I bombarded the crew with questions. How many curraghs were still used in the Dingle? About a hundred. What were they used for? Lobster pots and setting salmon nets.
Would they stand a really rough sea? If they were handled right, came the response. What happens in a capsize? The boat stays wrong side up, and you drown.

“Can you carry heavy loads all right?” I asked.

“Why, yes. In spring we take cattle out in the canoes to leave them to graze on the islands,” came one answer, and someone else added a comment which made the other laugh.

“What did he say?” I asked my schoolteacher-interpreter.

“He said the cows are less trouble. They don’t ask so many questions.”

When we were ready to return to the slipway, I asked the curragh crew to perform a small but important experiment. I asked them to row the boat on a figure-eight course, because I wanted to learn how the curragh rode the seas at different angles. Up to that moment, I had noticed, the oarsmen had been keeping the boat heading directly into the waves or directly away from them. My request caused some anxiety. The crew muttered and shook their heads. But I insisted. Eventually they agreed, and off we went rather gingerly. Everything turned out splendidly. The curragh skimmed away through the troughs and crests, then turned handsomely as the waves curled under her. My crew beamed with pleasure, and so did I. Now I knew for certain that the curraghs of Brendan’s homeland were not just inshore skiffs. They handled like true sea boats. The voyage was one step closer.

Back ashore I paid off my curragh men, who were evidently delighted with such apparently easy money, and asked them who could tell me more about their “canoes.” They were unanimous in telling me that John Goodwin of Maharees was my man. No one else, they said, knew as much about canoes or built them so well. Yes, I had to see John Goodwin.

So it was that I met the curragh-builder of Maharees, whose advice was to underpin a major part of my boat-building. Seventy-eight-year-old John Goodwin was the last man in the Dingle Peninsula who made curraghs for his living. He was the only survivor of an industry that had once seen a curragh-builder in every coastal village. A number of the Dingle farmers still knew how to build themselves a curragh in a back shed during the winter months, but John Goodwin was a professional. More than that, he had spent his lifetime accumulating information about curraghs because he loved them. As a young man he had emigrated
briefly to America, only to return to the Dingle to take up his father’s trade and his grandfather’s trade before him. He even used the tools he had inherited, a few hand drills and wood chisels, a knife and a hammer, and a small selection of wooden battens marked like yardsticks that were all John needed to measure out his work and produce the sophisticated and elegant curraghs for which he was famous.

Just as important for me, John loved talking about curraghs. For hour after hour he plied me with stories about curraghs and their crews, about building curraghs, about the days when every creek and cleft in the coast had its population of these small boats, hundreds upon hundreds of them, when the mackerel fishing was so rich that Dingle men living in America would come home just for a few weeks in the summer to reap the sea’s harvest. Proudly John showed me a photograph of himself and his three brothers sitting bolt upright in a racing curragh in which they had been champions of Kerry. Walking past a row of upturned curraghs, he would stop and point out minute differences between each boat; indeed, he had built most of them with his own hands. Once I showed him a faded photograph taken in the 1930s of a curragh frame, and without a second’s hesitation he identified the man who had made it. Another time I asked him about the days when curraghs were sailed as well as rowed. After a moment’s thought he began rummaging around in the rafters of the tarred shack where he built his boats and pulled down an old sail. It was a museum piece, and he let me measure and copy it, while he spent another half hour telling me how to rig and sail a curragh to best advantage. It was advice that was to prove vital.

One story in particular stayed in my mind. On a wintry day earlier this century, John said, a steamer had been driven into a local bay by a terrible storm. The vessel was in real danger, but she managed to get down an anchor to hold her temporarily. Her master sent up distress rockets to call out the lifeboat from Fenit before the anchor broke. But the storm was so fierce that the Fenit lifeboat was unable to get out of the harbor, and had to turn back after suffering damage. Then two local curragh men decided to help. They carried their frail craft to the rocks, launched her into the raging sea, and with great daring rowed out to the steamer. One man leapt aboard and persuaded the steamer’s master to hoist anchor. Then he piloted the vessel through the shoals and reefs to safety. “A canoe will go through any weather,” John
summed up. “Just so long as her crew know how to handle her, and there’s a man aboard who still has the strength to keep on rowing.”