The Brendan Voyage (15 page)

“Can you get out the medicine chest?” Peter woke me just after midnight. “My arm is killing me.”

“What’s the matter? Where’s the pain?” I asked, struggling to sit up.

“I don’t know. There’s something wrong with my arm. At times it feels as if it’s on fire, and sometimes it goes completely numb and I can’t feel anything at all.”

“You must have strained it when we were rowing,” I said. “Here, take these two pain killers and try to relax as best you can. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do until we get enough wind to take us into the land. Then we can try and find a doctor for you.”

Peter took the tablets and sat there, slumped miserably against the thwart. His face was ashen, and his eyelids drooped. An hour later he called to me again.

“It’s no good. I’m afraid the pain’s getting worse. It’s spread to the whole side of my chest, and I’m finding it very painful to breathe. Please get on the radio and call for help.”

I looked at the chart.
Brendan
lay becalmed scarcely two miles from the coast of County Donegal, but we might as well have been a hundred miles away for any hope of getting Peter ashore quickly. We couldn’t row
Brendan
against the tide, and Peter obviously needed medical attention. I switched on the radio.

“Malin Head Radio. Malin Head Radio. This is
Curragh Brendan
calling.”

“
Curragh Brendan. Curragh Brendan.
Malin Head Radio here. Come in please.”

“Malin Head. This is
Brendan.
We are off the Limeburner Rock and becalmed. I’ve got an injured crew member on board who needs to see a doctor. Can you arrange any help, please?”

Malin Head told me to stand by, and ten minutes later reported that he was sorry but there were no lifeboats available. “We could alert a ship,” Malin Head offered.

“No, I think it would be more effective if we could get a local fishing boat to take the crew member off,” I suggested.

“Will do,
Curragh Brendan.
Please watch this frequency.”

Malin Head broke contact, and half an hour later called me back. “A local salmon boat is putting out from a village called Ballyhoorisky to pick up your crew member. Please show an identifying light. Good luck,
Curragh Brendan.
Out.”

“Thank you, Malin Head. We’ll let you know how we get on.”

An hour afterward we picked out the lights of a small fishing boat coming toward us, and heard the rhythm of her engine. Then the boat closed on us, the engine cut, and across the calm we could hear the soft mutter of voices talking in Irish. A torch was switched on and I could make out the shapes of two men and a boy on board. “Here, catch this!” and a rope came flopping aboard. “We’ll tow you in.” The fishing boat engine started and we set off toward a seemingly rockbound stretch of coast. At the last moment when I thought we were about to go on the reefs, a spotlight lit up on the boat. Expertly handled, she slid into a tiny cove with
Brendan
behind her. “You’ll be all right here,” called a voice, and unseen hands moored
Brendan
alongside. Soon afterward the blue light of an ambulance came down the lonely road, and Peter was taken away. “Thank you so much,” I said to the muffled figures of our rescuers who had been patiently waiting all this time. “It’s nothing,” said the older man. “Just you get some sleep now. Come up to the house in the morning and my wife will get you some breakfast.” And as if rescuing a medieval skin boat happened every day, the fishermen calmly turned around and went up the track toward their home. So ends the first leg of the Brendan Voyage, I thought to myself. Historians say that medieval life was cramped, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous. They are right.

For two days we sheltered in Ballyhoorisky to make and mend, and catch our breath. Our rescuers, the Freil family, epitomized the old saying that there is a brotherhood between all mariners. They fed us, washed our sea-stained clothing, gave us house room, and took me into the market town to buy provisions. There I met Peter, emerging from the hospital gate, looking downcast.

“What’s the verdict?” I asked him.

“The doctors said I’ve strained the muscles down the left side of my chest, and I’ll have to have two weeks’ rest before I can go back on board.”

“Well, that’s not too bad. The rest of us can take
Brendan
up through the Hebrides by ourselves, and when you are rested, you can rejoin us in Stornoway or some other northern port, ready for the long hop to the Faroes.”

Peter looked even more despondent. “It’s no good, I’m afraid. The doctors also warned that the same trouble is likely to recur if I put any strain on the muscles, and if it does, it could be more serious. And the next time we may not be able to get me to a hospital.”

This was a blow. In an emergency I needed every member of
Brendan’s
crew to be fit; and Peter was sensitive enough to admit that, once hurt, he would be reluctant to commit himself wholeheartedly for the
rest of the voyage. Clearly it was a risk that neither Peter nor I could accept, and in the end there was really no choice: Peter withdrew from the crew. Sadly he packed his bags and left us.

Luckily I had a temporary replacement for him in Wallace Clark, past Commodore of the Irish Cruising Club. Wallace had volunteered to help take
Brendan
across from Ireland to Scotland, and he lived only a few hours away from Ballyhoorisky. A quick telephone call, and Wallace duly reported for duty, clad in two pairs of vast woolly trousers, several sweaters, a disreputable stocking cap that would have done service as a pillow case, and a tentlike oilskin smock. In that outfit he even made Arthur look petite.

Meanwhile we profited from the lessons of the storm. First priority was to shift
Brendan’s
water ballast farther forward so that her bow dipped down and gripped the water better, and her stern rose more quickly to the following seas. Then Rolf set about making some sense of the hugger-mugger mess of the cooking and eating area, just aft of the main shelter. Until now it had looked like a medieval midden. Every time anyone climbed toward the steering oar, a sea-boot squashed a mug or stepped into the sodden ingredients of the next meal. Now, with odd scraps of wood and string, Rolf ingeniously rigged up a food locker and a couple of shelves to keep our everyday supplies of tea, coffee, and sugar out of harm’s way. He had to use string in place of nails or screws because
Brendan’s
hull flexed so much that any rigid fastening would have snapped immediately.

On the afternoon tide of May 30 Dun Freil’s boat
Realt Fanad,
the Star of Fanad, towed
Brendan
out to the area where they had rescued us, and cast off the line. Once again there was almost a flat calm, and once again
Brendan
hung motionless in the tide, waiting for a wind. But this time there was a completely different feeling on board.
Brendan
’s crew was rested and fit, and we had given careful thought to our experiences in the storm.
Brendan
had survived a gale which would have broken and sunk a weaker boat. She had shown us convincingly that, given half a chance, she would carry us safely through high seas and heavy weather—and the result was a marked upsurge of confidence, both in ourselves and in the boat.
Brendan
was certainly not comfortable, and she was extraordinarily difficult to control. Indeed, with such a small crew it was rather like riding a balloon. Once you cast off in
Brendan,
you had to sail in the direction the wind and weather took you. The margin for correction was small, and if the wind turned foul, there was little one could do but hang on and hope. In short, I suspected, we were beginning to appreciate what it was like to have been a medieval sailor, cast out on the seas at the mercy of wind and weather and armed only with patience and faith.

The new spirit of confidence was infectious, and as soon as the wind picked up next morning to a good stiff breeze, George was all for testing
Brendan’s
new paces, now that we had shifted ballast. Under his expert eye, the slanting sails began to draw
Brendan
briskly across the wind. She was still skidding on the surface of the sea, so we could not claim to be sailing against the wind. But we were certainly making excellent progress, and, instead of running downwind away from the waves, we were sailing parallel to them and riding easily across their crests. All that day we managed to keep this course, ignoring the occasional wave which toppled and broke aboard as
Brendan
hurried northwest toward Scotland. It was a new sensation to be at the steering paddle and watch the water sliding briskly past the massive ash blade, and feel the boat responding to the fine adjustment on the helm. At last, I felt,
Brendan
was
sailing.
She was a little cumbersome, it was true, but she handled like a real boat.

Crash! My thoughts were briskly shattered, as the wooden crossyard carrying the mainsail broke free and came hurtling down with a thud, bringing down the mainsail in a flapping mess. The flax rope holding up the yard had snapped, and the entire contraption had come slicing down with its full weight. Had anyone been underneath, he would have been badly hurt. As it was, George promptly swarmed up the mast like a monkey on a stick, reeved a new rope, and we heaved up the sail again and sped on our way. Wallace, whose family had been in the flax business for generations, inspected the frayed ends of the old halliard, and was very scathing. “This stuff is pretty awful. No wonder it broke. There’s a lot of rubbish in the thread. Where did you get it?”

“It was all I could find,” I replied. “Flax rope is virtually impossible to obtain, and I had to make do with the only sample I could get. It’s been giving us trouble ever since we started, and it was particularly useless during the gale when we had to mend the ropes every few hours.”

“I think we had better get you some better stuff than this,” Wallace replied. “I’ll contact my friends in the flax business, and we’ll see if there isn’t something to be done.
Brendan
deserves better than this muck.”

We made our landfall at the Island of Iona on the second morning, and three hours of steady rowing brought us round to Martyr’s Bay, the beach where a raiding party of Vikings massacred thirty monks of Iona’s Abbey, and left their corpses to rot on the sand. Until then Iona had been the jewel of the Irish overseas mission. Here in A.D. 563 Saint Columba had landed by curragh after sailing across from Ireland. The little bay where he first set foot on the island is still the Port na Curraich, the Port of the Curragh. According to legend, Columba had then ordered his monks to bury the curragh for fear that he be tempted to return to his homeland. Under the Saint’s unswerving leadership, Irish monks proceeded to establish one of the most important Celtic monasteries in the whole of Europe. Iona became the springboard for the Christian conversion of north Britain, sending out missionaries to the west and north of Scotland, and to the people of northern England. On the mainland and throughout the islands, Columba and his successors established daughter houses in the image of the original foundation on Iona. But then came the Vikings. Iona was attacked in 795, again in 802, and again in 806. Under this constant harassment, the monks left the island and moved back to Ireland, where, among other things, they were responsible for the creation of the renowned Book of Kells.

Today, there is once again an abbey upon Iona. It is built upon the ruins of a Benedictine abbey founded there in the twelfth century, and it is the home of the Iona Community, a brotherhood of some 130 members, bound together by a common commitment of Christian prayer and action in the world. This community includes Anglicans, Baptists, and Catholics, and carries its mission overseas and into the industrial towns of Britain. Each year as many of the members as possible return to Iona for a week’s retreat, and repledge their commitment. Very kindly, the Warden of the community invited
Brendan
’s crew to lunch in the abbey’s refectory, and at the end of the meal presented us with a memento of our visit—a small replica of the magnificent fifteenth-century Irish ringed cross, known as the Cross of Saint Martin, which stands outside the abbey door. It was an apt gift, because Saint Martin’s Cross was the cross we had copied onto
Brendan
’s sails.

Iona also gave us a new crew member to replace Wallace Clark, who had to return to his office after the long weekend. Scarcely had Wallace left on the little ferry before a converted, rather battered-looking sailing trawler with a blue hull came into Martyr’s Bay and dropped anchor. About an hour later I was accosted on the beach by a fantastic figure.

“I say,” he began excitedly, “are you the skipper of that strange-looking boat? I must say, it’s fascinating. I’m told you’re looking for a crew member.”

“Yes,” I answered cautiously, looking over the newcomer. He was a big, rather gaunt fellow, with a lock of long hair which kept escaping from under his cap, falling over his eyes, and being brushed back with a nervous gesture. His face was dominated by a great beak of a nose, and he was waving his very long arms so that he looked like some sort of strange, flapping predatory seabird. Even more remarkable were his clothes. On his head was perched an army beret, which I recognized from the Officer Cadet Force. His broad shoulders were encased in a shabby naval sweater far too long for him so that it reached to the knees of his frayed jeans, which were embroidered with homemade figures of boats, flowers, and animals. Last of all, his feet projected without benefit of shoes, socks, or boots, and he was apparently oblivious to the fact that he was standing in icy-cold water. I was impressed.