The Brendan Voyage (13 page)

We were making satisfactory progress. During the first full day’s sailing,
Brendan
moved stolidly northward. Astern of us, between the rain showers, we could glimpse the peak of Mount Brandon steadily sinking lower and lower on the horizon. To starboard we passed the mouth of the Shannon, whose estuary was the last safe haven for about forty miles. Navigating
Brendan
along this lee shore was really only a matter of identifying each port of refuge in case a gale blew us down on the coast. In the mouth of the Shannon I had marked down Scattery Island as a possibility. In the days of the monks Scattery had been a landmark for the curraghs, a very holy place, for it was here, according to repute, that Saint Senan, the contemporary of Saint Brendan, had defeated the monster Cata and founded his monastery on the island in the first half of the sixth century. Today its most evocative relic is the stump of a round tower, perhaps erected by the monks as a place of refuge when the Vikings came raiding the coast. And until recently the local fishermen, when they launched a new boat, sailed her “sunwise” around the island to bring the new vessel good luck and carried to sea a pebble from Scattery Island as a talisman.

I had hoped that
Brendan
on her first run could sail clear of the great finger of Slyne Head which points out into the Atlantic from the west coast and formed the first turning point of our coastal passage. But it was not to be. The wind gradually moved into the west, and blew us down on the coast. For every ten miles
Brendan
sailed forward, she lost
a mile slipping sideways across the surface of the water. The darkness of our second night at sea closed in on us as
Brendan
plodded forward with so little fuss that she actually ran down a gannet sleeping on the water. The bird was not awakened until the bow actually touched, and the poor creature was tipped upside down in the water. There was a startled squawk, followed by much thrashing and flapping and an irate-looking gannet eventually surfaced in our wake, grumbling with vexation before it flew off to less disturbed waters. Dawn was slow in breaking, its light shrouded by mist that reduced visibility to less than a mile. Then rocks loomed up ahead, a group of isolated reefs with the swell breaking in a wide ring around them. A glance at the chart confirmed that they were the Skird Rocks, well inside Slyne Head, and that
Brendan
could not possibly get around the headland until we had a fair wind. So I changed course, and
Brendan
bore away to find shelter in the Aran Islands. I was not downcast. In thirty-six hours we had come over a hundred miles, and what better landfall than the Aran Islands—which, according to the
Navigatio,
had been the place where Saint Brendan came to discuss his idea for a voyage to the Promised Land with his mentor Saint Enda the great teacher-saint.

As the mist broke up before the morning sun, the Aran Islands themselves appeared.
Brendan
came sailing in past their northwest tip, and we saw first the lighthouse, then the high line of the land itself with its green patchwork of fields sloping down to limestone screes that dipped into the sea. George was steering to take best advantage of the wind, and we hugged the coast as closely as we dared. We could see only one or two farmhouses, standing by themselves, and could just distinguish the figure of a man going to work in a field. What would he think, I wondered, if he looked out to sea and saw a sight which harked back a thousand years—an ocean-going curragh coming in from the Atlantic, a small black curve against the glittering surface of the ocean, and the distinctive black squares of medieval sails? As we drew in behind the island, we glimpsed a small black speck bobbing about in the waves. At first sight it looked like a channel marker buoy. “I think that’s a curragh,” I called to George, and he altered course to investigate. A few minutes later we could pick out the outlines of two men in the boat. They were hauling lobster pots, but the moment they noticed us, they left their work. They bent to their sculls, and sent their curragh racing toward us. Their teamwork was superb.
The two oarsmen rowed in perfect unison. If one man took a half stroke, so did the other without even watching his companion’s sculls. Their curragh was not like the Dingle boats, but of the typical Aran type with the stern cut off square. Yet the difference did not seem to affect the sea handling. The two fishermen brought their curragh to within five yards, neatly spun her, and kept pace with
Brendan,
gazing at us. One of them had a fiery red bush of curly hair and a splendid beard to match. “Are you the crowd for America?” he called out. He had a strong accent, for Irish is the language of the Aran Islands. “Welcome to the islands.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Would you like some crab?”

“Yes, please!”

A hail of crabs flew in an arc from the curragh to
Brendan,
and Rolf scrambled about the boat trying to seize them before they scuttled into the bilges.

“Thank you. Thank you very much,” I called. “Where’s the best place to land?”

“Go into the bay. You’ll be safe enough there. Just follow the line of our lobster pots, and turn in when you no longer see the lighthouse behind you. But don’t turn before then, or you’ll be on the bank.” He meant the Brocklinbeg Bank, a hump of sand and rock lurking just below the surface. “Sea breaks heavily,” said my navigation notes, and as we cautiously dropped sail and rowed into the bay we saw why: for five minutes the sea was calm, and then—by some combination of wind and swell—the water gathered in a heap over the bank and burst upward in a leaping spout. It was no place for
Brendan.

Brendan
dropped anchor in a wide bay where there was a short pier for the curraghs to bring their lobster catch. We had landed on the largest of the three main Aran Islands, Inishmore. From the anchorage the ground sloped up, past a small sandy beach at the head of the bay, across a flat shelf of land, and then more steeply it rose to the crest of the hill. There the island ended abruptly, with steep cliffs falling sheer into deep water. It was as if the island had been titled on one edge for our inspection, and from sea level we could admire the pattern of hundreds upon hundreds of tiny fields whose loose stone walls divided up the land like a honeycomb. There are said to be more than 1,850 miles of wall on the islands, and the honeycomb effect is all the more striking
because the grey walls are not broken by gates. Instead the farmers pull down a section of the wall when they want to drive in cattle, and then build up the stones behind the animals.

That afternoon, after an enormous lunch of crab boiled in a bucket of sea water, we all went ashore and walked up toward the far crest. The sky had cleared, and in the tiny corrals of the fields the turf was sprinkled with thousands upon thousands of spring flowers—buttercups, violets, gentians, and others. We found a narrow track, a “boreen” between the walls, followed it past a cattle pond where a stream trickled into a collecting trough, and finally came out onto open land where the ground sloped steeply up toward the far ridge. Across the hillside the bones of the island lay exposed, enormous slabs of limestone that rain and wind had pockmarked and slashed with scars along the fault lines. These too were filled with wildflowers or little pools of rainwater. Here the stone walls of the small fields were more tumbled down, until suddenly the eye picked out a pattern, and we saw that we were walking through the concentric rings of stone ramparts that encircled the hilltop.

The boreen had turned into an ancient roadway which led straight to the last and most important rampart sitting upon the hill crest like a drum. In its side blazed the bright eye of a single entrance, the light pouring through it. This was the gateway to the fort of Dun Aengus, one of the most spectacular sites of prehistoric Europe. Climbing through the eye of the gate, we came out onto the cleared space inside the rampart, and where the back wall should have been was only empty sky, for we had come to the very lip of the cliff at the far edge of the island. Edging cautiously forward, we poked out our heads over the abyss and looked straight down the cliffs, past the backs of the seabirds wheeling far below us; and to the surface of the ocean two hundred feet below, broken by huge chunks of rocks that had toppled from the cliff edge.

The great fort of Dun Aengus is one of several massive stone fortresses on the Aran Islands, built in the first centuries A.D. by Irish clans. They were constructed before Saint Enda settled his community of monks in modest stone cells down by the seashore, and began the monastic school that was to become one of the most famous and important in all Ireland. In a sense, the massive forts looming over the Christian cells represented another strand to Saint Brendan’s quest for
the western land, for they reached far back into a Celtic past. Among the old Celtic beliefs had been the ancient idea of a land that lay toward the sunset peopled by departed souls and strange creatures. This theme of the Other World occurred in the early poetry of the pagan Irish, whose bards described the journeys of famous heroes to this destination and their experiences there. Sometimes the hero traveled over the water in a magic chariot; or he dived beneath the waves and found a submarine world of beautiful maidens who wooed him; or occasionally he rode up into the sky to find this strange realm. Usually the Other World was described as a place that was mystical yet attainable. It lay within the grasp of specially fortunate mortals, and this theme passed easily enough to the Christians when Christianity was introduced to Ireland, because many of the Christian priests lived and worked alongside the older order of seers and sages, sometimes in conflict with them but also sharing knowledge with them. As a result the old idea of the Other World became entwined with the new religion, only given Christian garb. The Christians thought of the Other World as peopled with saints and holy men. It became a land promised by God to men of great virtue. Still attainable, it was a reward on earth, a target for men to explore. Even more important, the journey itself became an act of faith, so that the dangers of the venture only enhanced its appeal. In short, Christian voyages to seek a far-off land gained their vital motive.

The Christian monks were well equipped to fit this notion of the distant land into a more accurate frame of geography. Irish monks gathered an incredible store of scholarship from all over western Europe. During the troubled fifth and sixth centuries many scholars came to Ireland from the upheavals of the Continent, bringing with them manuscripts and knowledge of the classical authors. Ireland became the grand repository for this intellectual treasure, and the Irish monks copied and codified this information. They wrote commentaries on it, and handed the knowledge on from one generation to the next. They read Virgil and Solinus and, in translation or original, had access to Greek authors. In their geographical concepts the monks understood that the world was round—“like a well-formed apple” was how it was sometimes put. They understood Ptolemy’s concept of geography, and could read how the Romans had sent a fleet around Scotland and found islands lying to the north. The flowering of early
Christian culture in Ireland, about which so much has been written, was a process that lasted almost five hundred years. Irish monks were acknowledged to be the best-educated and best-informed men in all of western Europe; and in due course they set out to carry their knowledge back into the mainland. They founded schools, advised kings and even emperors (Charlemagne was a great admirer of Irish learning) and established monasteries from Lombardy to Austria. They and their pupils were regarded as Europe’s wandering intelligentsia. As a Frankish observer put it, “Almost all Ireland, despising the sea, is migrating to our shores with a flock of philosophers.”

This vitality also produced Saint Brendan’s
Navigatio.
Here was a story from the very core of Irish tradition, Christian in inspiration and composition, but drawing also upon the old Celtic heritage. Like the heroes of old, Saint Brendan was the hero who set out to find the Promised Land, and experienced many adventures on the way. Only now the saint traveled by a different route, not in a wave-riding chariot but in a prosaic vessel of skins stretched on wood. And now, instead of the imaginary islands of the Celtic heroes, the saint’s itinerary could be based on the real geographical knowledge of the monks. Until recently the earliest surviving version of the story was thought to have been written down no earlier than the tenth century, four hundred years after Saint Brendan’s death. But new investigations have suggested a date closer to the year 800, and naturally the date of the story’s composition could go back even earlier.

I had met the scholar who, as much as anyone, had traced Brendan’s
Navigatio
back deep into the golden age of Irish monastic achievement. Professor Jim Carney of the School of Celtic Studies was a brilliant light in the field of early Irish literature. He made sensitive translations of Irish and Latin poems, and his knowledge of the Irish literary background was outstanding. “Of course we don’t yet know exactly when Brendan’s
Navigatio
was first composed,” he told me when we had met in the library of the Royal Irish Academy. “But I’ve actually come across a reference in a seventh-century Irish poem to the fact that Saint Brendan was known as a composer of poems. So maybe the
Navigatio
is very old.”

“What do you think about the theory that the
Navigatio
isn’t a Christian work at all, but merely a Christian gloss on an old and imaginary Celtic tale?”

“You mean that it’s one of the Celtic voyage-tales, an
imram.
Well, I think it’s been shown that most of the surviving
imrama
are either contemporary with Brendan’s
Navigatio
or even later. In fact, instead of the
Navigatio
being a copy of them, I think in one case at least the
imram
has borrowed from the
Navigatio.
By the way, there’s something about a Christian boat voyage in my book of early Irish poems I’ve translated. It’s a poem dedicated to Saint Columbanus.” He riffled through the pages until he found what he wanted, and began reading: