The Brendan Voyage (14 page)

With a snap he closed the book and glanced at me mischievously.

“Sounds as if your voyage will be hard work. But if there’s any help on the literary side I can give you, let me know. And incidentally, why don’t you tell Mairin O’Dalaigh about your plans? She may be able to help you on the linguistic side. She’s an expert on the early Irish language.”

“Where can I get in touch with her?”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult. Try Aras an Uachtararn in Phoenix Park, the residence of the President of Ireland. She’s his wife.”

So I went up to the Presidential Lodge, set in the elegance of Phoenix Park, and was met on the steps by a jovial equerry. “Are you the madman who wants to sail round the world in a leather boat?” he hailed me. “Just as far as America will do nicely,” I murmured. “Oh well, step this way. Mrs. O’Dalaigh has asked if you’d like to join her for tea.”

Mairin O’Dalaigh was a most composed and elegant hostess, and we talked about the Brendan project until there was a knock at the door and the President himself came darting in. At once the tranquillity collapsed. President O’Dalaigh was, it turned out, a great supporter of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking area of the west, and most enthusiastic for the Brendan project. He dashed to his bookshelves. “Have you seen this? Or this one?” he asked, pulling down one volume after another in rapid succession. “Ah! And here’s another.” Soon the floor, sofa, and chairs were covered with opened books as he scurried from one to the next. “And wait a minute, there’s something I want to show
you.” He whisked me off to another wing of the building where the walls were hung with his collection of paintings. “Here we are.” We stopped in front of a small painting. It was a picture of a curragh nestling in the cleft of some rocks. “Found that years ago,” said the President. “I’ve always liked it very much indeed. Where do you think it was done—in Donegal, or in the Aran Islands perhaps?”

The memory of President O’Dalaigh’s bubbling enthusiasm came back to me during
Brendan
’s stay in the Aran Islands. Everyone on Inishmore seemed equally determined to help us. It was as if the Brendan Voyage had struck a chord in the imaginations of the Irish-speaking peoples of the Gaeltacht, and they associated themselves with the project.
Brendan
was
their
boat. The curragh men came back twice more to present us with more crabs and lobster. The local wives took it in turns to bake us fresh scones, and when I made a phone call, the postmistress interrupted in order to wish us well in the venture.

A bush telegraph was also signaling
Brendan
’s passage along the Irish-speaking coast. Half an hour after we made landfall in Inishmore, there was scarcely an Aran islander who did not know we were there, and later I discovered that schoolchildren had been stationed on headlands all along the coast to look out for
Brendan
and report her progress. Nor was the help limited to the island. A newspaper paragraph mentioned that our radio was not yet installed, and next day a volunteer flew out to Inishmore and busily soldered connections and tested circuits. When I called up to test the radio, the operator at Valentia coast station spent hours patiently listening in to our signals. “What’s your call sign?” he asked over the air. “We haven’t got one,” I replied. “In fact we never even had time to apply for a license.”

“Never mind then. We’ll call you up as
Yacht Brendan.
That should do.”

“Let’s make it
Curragh Brendan,”
I responded.

He laughed. “Yes, there won’t be any other curraghs with a radio link. Report in daily if you can. Good luck.”

Two days of bad weather held us in the Aran Islands, and then the wind eased enough to let
Brendan
slip out from Inishmore, and we headed across the sound for the mainland coast of County Mayo. I didn’t want to risk the open sea, for the wind was blowing too strongly and we didn’t know how
Brendan
would behave. We hoisted both our flax sails, and soon discovered that it was too much. The mainmast
again bent alarmingly, and
Brendan
leaned over so far that I thought we would scoop water aboard. George called out to Rolf to ease away the mainsail, and he lowered the mainyard about three feet. The effect was immediate.
Brendan
came level; the mast straightened; and we ploughed briskly across the channel toward a line of small islands that extended from the shore. At the right moment the sails came tumbling down;
Brendan
rounded the outer reef, and we rowed our way into shelter and dropped anchor.

Brendan
had picked our spot for us. Not half a mile away lay a small uninhabited island, which in the sixth century had been the home of Saint MacDara, “son of the fox.” We could not have wished for a more perfect example of the chosen retreat of an early Christian monk. Its feeling of isolation was very strong. There was not a house nor a person in sight, and the sea teamed with wild life. Where we anchored, a flock of terns was busily quarreling and diving for fish around the boat, quite unconcerned by our arrival. A pair of curious seals surfaced ten yards away and watched us calmly for two or three minutes before they too resumed fishing, and a patient row of cormorants sat on a half-submerged rock keeping an eye on the efforts of three Great Northern divers. In the air above Saint MacDara’s Island hovered a mass of gulls, calling and wheeling; and when we landed on the island we found the reason: the place was a thriving gull colony. We picked our way carefully across the boulder-strewn turf to avoid stepping on the gulls’ nests, usually containing three brown and black speckled eggs or an ungainly chick crouching in terror while its parents shrieked and mewed their agitation above us. The island had kept its feeling of lonely serenity. We walked the circuit around the stations of the pilgrimage made by faithful devotees who came out in boats on the Saint’s day to make a circuit of the island and to pray in the simple grey stone chapel, one of the oldest in Ireland, with its curiously steep roof and one narrow window slit looking out toward the mainland. Near the strand, half sunk in the turf, stood a low stone cross, just like the crosses on
Brendan
’s sails, but no more than two feet high, and on the surface of the cross we could trace its pattern of intricate carving, still visible after a thousand years of wind and rain. As the sunlight faded, the crew of
Brendan
gathered on the rocks above our landing place and quietly watched the idyllic scene. The wind had died away completely; the place was calm and still. Even the gulls had ceased
their calling. Silently, George pointed to the rocks beneath our feet. There, undisturbed, was the rarely seen, sleek form of a large otter, quietly fishing along the foreshore.

St. MacDara’s Island made it easier to appreciate another strand that lay behind
Navigatio.
Many of the early Christian monks in Ireland had felt an overwhelming urge to seek solitude on the islands of the west coast, where they could contemplate and pray. They took their inspiration from the Desert Fathers of the Middle East, who had retreated into the deserts to serve God as ascetics. But of course Ireland offered no deserts for retreat, and so these hermits had found their isolated homes deep in the forest or on the islands in the sea. They coined a happy phrase for it: they sought, they said, “a desert in the ocean.” In cases of extreme devotion some of these men pushed themselves out in small boats, deliberately threw away their oars and rudder, and let the wind blow them where God decreed. There, accepting divine intervention, they established themselves and led their lonely lives, relying upon divine providence to supply them with food, perhaps fish from the sea or, as on Saint MacDara’s island, with a supply of gulls’ eggs at hand. According to a nice story in Brendan’s
Navigatio,
one hermit even depended upon fish brought to him daily by a friendly otter.

Full-fledged monasteries grew up on some islands, and Saint Brendan visited one of them during his long quest for the Promised Land. The
Navigatio
called the place Saint Ailbe’s Island, and when the crew landed it said they were met on the beach by a dignified and white-haired old man who bowed to them, embraced each of the visitors, and taking Saint Brendan’s hand led the newcomers to his monastery. At the gates Saint Brendan stopped and tried to find out the name of the abbot and where his monks came from. But the old man refused to answer, gesturing with his hand that he and his fellows observed the rule of silence. In a human touch, Saint Brendan, the
Navigatio
says, told his crew to hold their tongues and respect the rule of silence “or you will destroy the spirit of recollection of the monks here with your chatter.” At that moment a party of monks arrived in procession bearing crosses and reliquaries, and greeted the visitors with psalms. Then the abbot himself, Saint Ailbe, came forward to invite the guests inside. Brendan and his crew shared a simple meal with the monks, sitting down at the table, each guest next to a monk, eating
bread and root vegetables and drinking spring water in time to a bell struck by one of the monks, who was acting as servitor for the day. Later, the abbot showed Brendan around the monastery and took him into the chapel to show him its arrangement of altars, lamps, and a circle of chairs where the monks chanted their litany with the abbot. For more than eighty years, the abbot explained, his monastery had flourished. The only sound of human voices that was heard was the regular psalm-singing, and the monks lived entirely without outside contact.

Stripped of its embellishments, the
Navigatio’s
description of this island monastery is strikingly matter-of-fact. The only miracles are a flaming arrow which automatically lights the tapers, the unseen replenishment of their food supplies, and the longevity of the monks themselves. But even the latter is explained sensibly: their simple diet and contemplative way of life, the abbot explained to Brendan, had kept the monks in excellent health and prolonged their lives in their settlement.

The
Navigatio
does not give enough geographical details to pinpoint Saint Ailbe’s Island accurately. It only says that the monastery lay two hundred yards from the only landing place on the island and that there were two water sources nearby, one clear and one muddy. However, traces of stone-built island monasteries can still be seen on several islands off the west coast of Ireland, on Inishmurray, Tory Island, Inishkea, and Inishglora. The last is known to have been founded by Saint Brendan himself. Traces of Irish religious settlements have also been found in the Hebrides and in Orkney and Shetland, and suggested as far afield as Faroes—all on the Stepping Stone Route toward North America. Any one of them could have been the monastery attributed to Saint Ailbe, but most important of all is that Brendan’s
Navigatio
describes Saint Ailbe’s community as a simple fact. It treats of the place, not as some extravaganza, but as a monastery very like the monasteries an Irish priest of the early Middle Ages would recognize as real.

Saint MacDara’s Island was the last early Christian church that the modern
Brendan
was to visit in Ireland. Next morning we awoke to a fresh breeze from the south, and despite gale warnings on the radio, we weighed anchor and seized our chance to take the leather boat slanting away on a course which cleared the turning point at Slyne Head. For a few hours we made glorious progress, spinning along at above five
knots with the land sliding past. We could not check our speed properly, for the log was malfunctioning. But we did not care. Our fishing lines caught a couple of mackerel which were soon in the frying pan, and also a greedy young seagull which we managed to release unharmed, though Rolf looked longingly at its wing feathers for pipe cleaners. Only Arthur was despondent, for he was still seasick, and the swell around Slyne Head did not help.

But then the weather deteriorated. We lost sight of the lighthouse on Slyne Head in the low clouds. Rain showers began sweeping regularly across us; and it grew colder. By evening we were in the grip of our first gale, and driving faster and faster out to sea. We dragged ropes behind us to slow ourselves down, and took turns to bail the water swirling in the bilges. At the scheduled time I switched on the radio transmitter and tried to get through to Valentia coast station. But I could hear nothing but the crackle of static. Severe electrical storms had broken contact, and on
Brendan
we could see the lightning flashes in the murk. It was useless to waste our battery power, so I switched off the radio; and to avoid tangling our trailing warps, George hauled in the log. Now
Brendan
was not only cut off, but we could not guess how far the storm was driving us out into the Atlantic.

For twenty-four hours
Brendan
ran before the gale. First Arthur and then Peter fell into a semicomatose state and lost all interest in their surroundings. Rolf, George, and I swallowed some hot sweet soup to keep up our strength, and privately I calculated how much drinking water we had on board. Our headlong flight into the open ocean was completely unplanned and we had no reserves of fresh water. If we were becalmed, or if the wind blew us too far from land, we would have to ration our supplies.

Then, after I had calculated that
Brendan
had been driven about a hundred miles off the coast, the wind eased and swung into the west, blowing
Brendan
back toward land and safety. On the afternoon of the second day we were able to cook ourselves a hot meal, and tidy up some of the mess in the cabin created by breaking waves and sodden clothing. As my fingers thawed, I made notes in my diary about the lessons we had learned: in future, we should never set out to sea without a full water supply; every man needed extra socks and gloves to keep out the chill; our plastic food packs were unreliable, as far too many of our stores were now a soggy mess in the bottom of each
packet. From some packets we poured a nauseating stew of sea water, mashed potato flakes, sauce, biscuit crumbs, and dehydrated vegetables. Equally worrying, every box of matches aboard had been ruined and not one lighter worked any longer. We were so worn out when we finally sighted Tory Island on the northwest corner of Ireland during the third night that we were glad when the wind died away to a calm. After half an hour’s rowing, which seemed to get us nowhere, we curled up and rested our tired bodies, letting
Brendan
drift slowly down toward land on the tide and swell.