The Brendan Voyage (6 page)

I asked John if he would build a curragh for me, and show me how it was done. With him I spent a hot afternoon tarring and stretching the canvas hide into position, and in the end I had a small two-man curragh of my own, built to the traditional pattern right down to the place to step the obsolete mast. When I collected the boat from him, I asked John, “Do you think a big canoe could get all the way to America?” He looked at me with his old man’s grin.

“Well, now. The boat will do, just as long as the crew’s good enough.”

I decided to call my little curragh
Finnbarr,
in honor of Saint Finnbarr, the patron saint of Munster, said to have been the priest who showed Saint Brendan the way to the Promised Land. I hoped the little curragh would do the same for me, and to my wife’s chagrin, I stole the linings from the dining-room curtains to make a sail for
Finnbarr,
and spent all of Christmas Day stitching it by hand. Then I sailed up and down the little estuary outside our house to see how the boat behaved. It was bitterly uncomfortable, but the effort was worth it. By the end of the Christmas holidays I knew that although
Finnbarr
wobbled alarmingly and refused to sail upwind, she and her ancestors had been designed to carry a mast and sails.

It was about this time that I became aware of a curious phenomenon which I could only call Brendan Luck. This was the strange way in which I began to have stroke after stroke of good fortune in my preparations for the voyage. The entire Brendan project seemed lucky. My encounter with John Goodwin was one example of Brendan Luck; the unusual circumstances of the original idea was another; and a third was when I discovered that a definitive study of Irish curraghs had been written by the man who virtually started the study of traditional craft: James Hornell, the naval historian. At one stroke I was presented with a complete record of curragh history, tracing the boats back to Saint Brendan’s day and beyond into the writings of Julius Caesar and other classical authors who had recorded the skin-covered vessels of the natives of Britain. Caesar’s army engineers had even copied the boats, building skin-covered landing craft for amphibious river crossings. But perhaps the most bizarre stroke of good fortune occurred when I was trying to work out how Saint Brendan might have rigged his ocean curragh.

It seemed to me that such a long, slim boat must have carried two masts, but in all my research I had never seen a picture of an early medieval boat equipped with more than one. They all had a single mast, even the Viking ships. Then one day I was in the cellar stacks of the London library. I was not working on the Brendan project at all, but on quite another subject, and by chance I happened to walk through a section of the library that was little used. As I passed the stacks, a book caught my eye. It was misshelved, having been put in back to front. Casually I pulled it out to turn it the right way around, and my eye fell upon the title. It was in German, long and scholarly, and roughly translated as
A Record of Ship Illustrations from the Earliest Times to the Middle Ages.
My curiosity was aroused, and I flipped the book open. From the page where it fell open, one illustration jumped up at me. I caught my breath. It was a drawing of a two-masted ship! And it was undoubtedly medieval. Hastily I turned to the index to see where the original illustration was to be found. To my astonishment I read that the picture was copied from a privately owned medieval bestiary, an illustrated collection of animal descriptions. What was incredible was that the twin-masted boat came from the letter B under the Latin word
Balena
for whale. The picture was of Saint Brendan’s ship stranded on the whale’s back! I had not thought of myself as superstitious, but I took the trouble to count the number of illustrations reproduced in the textbook. There were some 5,000 of them, and only one showed a twin-masted boat. It was on that single page that the book which I found accidentally had fallen open.

An important name kept cropping up in the libraries: John Waterer. He had written the majority of books and articles on the historic uses of leather. It was a subject vital to my project, so I got in touch with him and found myself invited to a most suitable rendezvous in the vaults of Saddlers’ Hall, the headquarters of one of the ancient guilds in the heart of London. John Waterer turned out to be as deep-dyed an enthusiast as John Goodwin. An energetic gnome of a man, his activity belied his eighty-three years. His twinkling eyes and huge ears, as he darted about his vault full of leather saddles and bridles, leather tapestries and book bindings, even leather mugs and jugs, reminded me irresistibly of an industrious dwarf in
Snow White.
John Waterer could not have been more helpful. Patiently he introduced me to the subject of leather science and leather history. He told me about the different
ways of turning animal skin into leather by tanning and by other treatments. He explained how and when the various methods had first been used, why one leather differed from another according to the treatment or whether it came from the skin of ox or calf, goat or sheep, or such exotic animals as moose and buffalo. The depth of his knowledge was profound. He was not a university-trained academic, but had begun work in the leather trade as a luggage-maker. Like John Goodwin the curragh-maker, he too had been gripped by the fascination of his work and had probed deeper and deeper into its history. Now he was the acknowledged authority in the field, consulted for his opinions by archaeologists and museum curators. To me there could not have been a better guide into the esoteric subject of leather.

A fortnight later I attended a meeting at the headquarters of the British Leather Institute. John Waterer had written to John Beeby, who handled public relations for the institute, and explained I needed help.

“I want to build a leather boat to sail across the Atlantic,” I told John Beeby.

“Does John Waterer think it can be done?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I think we’d better help you. I will get in some experts.”

I was elated. Brendan Luck was still with me, and forty-eight hours later I found myself at the Institute explaining my ideas about Saint Brendan to three men whose expertise could help to turn my dream into reality. Dr. Robert Sykes was head of the Research Association of the British Leather Manufacturers and had an international reputation in leather science. He was precise, sensible, and at first a bit skeptical. Next to him sat Carl Postles, tanyard manager from the firm of W. & J. Richardson in Derby, a family business making saddlery and other fine leathers since the seventeenth century. Finally there was the burly figure of Harold Birkin, whom I was to get to know and admire very much over the next few months. Harold was the direct opposite of the scientific Dr. Sykes. Harold lived, talked, and doubtless breathed the business of making leather for special purposes. From a small tannery in the delightful town of Chesterfield, overlooked by the crooked wooden spire of St. Mary’s Church, he sent a variety of exotic leathers to customers all over the world. His leather was used deep in the coal mines for air pumps or out on the snowfields for dog-team harnesses in the Antarctic. Harold was a one-man thesaurus on the best sort of
leather for any job. He could tell you the right leather for a naval fire hose, a sewing-machine drive belt, or an industrial safety glove. One of his prize possessions was a two-inch-thick chunk of walrus hide that sat on his desk like a petrified slab of wasps’ nest. Yet he could also make you leather for a tiny airseal, 0.8 mm thick, on a pocket tyre pressure gauge.

“Saint Brendan is said to have built his boat from leather tanned in oak bark,” I told these experts. “Do you think this was right, and would it have survived an ocean crossing?”

“Oak-bark-tanned leather is certainly authentic,” said Dr. Sykes. “The normal way of tanning leather in western Europe right up to this century was some form of vegetable tannage, usually oak bark if it was available, and taking as long as twelve months to tan fully.”

“At Richardson’s we still do a vegetable tannage,” added Carl Postles, “but not in oak bark any longer. It’s too difficult to get and it takes too long.”

“What about dressing the leather?” asked Harold. “It sounds to me as if the currying or dressing of the leather hull is going to be just as important as the leather itself.”

“The
Navigatio
merely says that the monks rubbed the skins with a grease or fat before they launched their leather boat,” I told him. “The Latin word that’s employed for grease doesn’t define what sort of fat it was. But the text does add that Saint Brendan took along a spare supply of this fat to dress the leather during the voyage.”

“Sounds very sensible,” commented Harold. Turning to Dr. Sykes he asked, “What sort of fats would they have had, Bob?”

“Tallow, or sheep’s fat, beeswax, perhaps cod oil, and for waterproofing …,” and here Dr. Sykes paused, “possibly the grease from sheep’s wool. It’s virtually raw lanolin, and has been known since Pliny’s time; people have used it for waterproofing shoes right up to recent times.”

For about an hour we talked the problem over, and finally agreed that Carl and Harold would send to Dr. Sykes samples of all the suitable sorts of leather they had in their tanneries. Dr. Sykes would then test these samples at his laboratories. There they would be soaked in sea water, rolled and dried, flexed and stretched, measured and weighed, to see what happened.

“What about oak-bark leather?” I demanded. “We must have some of that.”

“Of course,” agreed Dr. Sykes, “but it’s very rare nowadays. In fact, I only know two, perhaps three tanneries who make oak-bark leather. There’s one in particular down in Cornwall in the West Country, a very, very old-fashioned place, almost a farm really. They supplied genuine oak-bark leather to the British Museum when the museum was restoring a leather shield from the Sutton Hoo burial ship. I’ll ask them to send up some of their leather, and we’ll test it in with the other samples.”

So began a delightful period of work. The British leather industry took the Brendan project to heart, and what splendid people the leathermakers turned out to be. It was a close-knit industry in which everyone seemed to know everyone else in friendly rivalry, but with a shared appreciation of leather. While Dr. Sykes and his technicians exposed various leather samples to every test they could devise, I visited tanneries, saddlemakers, and luggagemakers who still worked with leather. At the Richardsons’ tannery in Derby I found that they even made drinking tankards out of leather, and I noticed small scraps of leather floating in jam jars and saucers of water on several windowsills. “What on earth are those?” I asked Carl.

“Oh, the tannery workmen have heard about your crazy Saint Brendan idea, and everyone has been testing pieces of leather to see whether they float.”

“And do they?” I asked.

“Not for longer than four days,” he grinned. “You are going to need a life raft.”

Then one afternoon, after ten weeks of tests at the laboratories, I had a momentous telephone call from Dr. Sykes.

“I think we’ve identified your hull leather,” he said. “You were right. Oak-bark leather is the best.”

“How do you know?”

“We’ve done every test we can manage in the time available, including putting the samples on a machine designed to test leather-shoe soles. This machine rolls the sample back and forth on a mesh kept flooded with water, like a foot walking on a wet road, and we can test how much water penetrates the leather.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“As supplied, the oak-bark leather wasn’t as good as the others. In fact several of the other leathers were much better. But after dressing with grease and extensive testing, all the other leathers began to fail; many became waterlogged, rather like wet dishcloths. But the oak-bark samples scarcely changed at all. In the end the oak-bark leather was actually two to three times more resistant to water than any other sample. If you still want to make that leather boat, then you should use oak-bark leather.”

With a glow of triumph I put down the telephone. Once again the simple factual accuracy of the
Navigatio
had been demonstrated, this time in the opinion of a skilled scientist.

There remained the problem of where to get the oak-bark leather, and here I had another stroke of luck. John Beeby arranged for me to meet Bill Croggon of Josiah Croggon and Son Ltd., the oak-bark tanners from Cornwall, at a leather fair in London. I was warned that the Croggons were a very conservative firm. “They’ve been making oak-bark leather in the same manner and in the same place for nearly three centuries,” John said. “People have been advising them to change to some more modern methods. But they won’t. I don’t know what they’ll say to your idea of a leather boat, and it’s up to you to persuade them to let you have the leather.”

When I explained to Bill Croggon that I wanted enough oxhides tanned in oak bark to cover a medieval boat, he looked thoughtful. “I’ll have to talk it over with my brother,” he said. “And you must realize that it takes a very long time to make oak-bark leather. Every single piece is nearly a year in preparation and we might not have it ready in time. When would you want your leather?”

“Well, I’d planned to set sail on Saint Brendan’s Day,” I said.

“When’s that?”

“May sixteenth.”

“What a coincidence! That’s my wife’s birthday!” he replied, and somehow I knew then that the Croggons would be helping the Brendan project.

So it turned out. I went down to the Croggons’ tannery in the little Cornish town of Grampound and met the Croggon family themselves, grandmother, sons and grandsons, a whole clutch of Croggons, helpful,
hospitable, and soon as excited about the Brendan Voyage as I was. They took me around the tannery, starting with the lime-soaking pits where the animal hides were stripped of their hair. There I was astonished to see one workman actually scraping the surface hair from an oxhide by hand. He was using a double-handed scraper, and as he leaned over the “beam” or block he looked exactly like a woodcut illustration of a leather-worker printed four hundred years ago. We walked across a field, past a string of ducks, and went up to the tanning pits, row upon row of tanks dug into the ground and filled with a rich liquid made of ground-up oak bark and water, which looked like thick beer with a creamy froth and smelled sickly sweet. In this “oak-bark liquor” lay the oxhides, slowly absorbing the tannin in the mixture, which entered the skins and formed a tight bond with the skin fibers, turning a perishable oxhide into some of the finest leather known. “It’s a technique that can’t have changed much since Saint Brendan’s day,” commented John Croggon. “It takes good oxhides, the right oak-bark mixture, and lots and lots of time. Of course, many people say that today it’s very old-fashioned. But some of the very best handmade shoes are soled with our leather, and orthopedic hospitals specify oak-bark leather for certain uses because it is so pure that it is less likely to cause skin irritations.”