The Brendan Voyage (22 page)

The whale heaved and sighed beside us, gently and deliberately. Then it sank down, and the next time it surfaced, it was a quarter of a mile away, swimming quietly and without hurry to the north.

I thought back to the visit I had paid in the previous autumn to the Whale Research Unit of the Natural History Museum in London. I was not sure of the reception I would receive, because the meeting was the result of a letter I had sent to a scientist on the Natural Environmental Research Council. Was there any useful work in environmental research
Brendan
could do on her voyage? I had asked. Yes, you might try counting whales, came the unexpected reply. He’s pulling my leg, I thought as I read this. He knows the legend of Saint Brendan landing on the whale’s back, and this is a practical joke. But I went down to the Whale Research Unit, and to my surprise found that the idea was completely serious. “We’ve been asking selected yachtsmen and the crews of ships to keep a log of all the whales they see on their travels,” said the scientist in charge. “The thing is that we really know surprisingly little about the habits of whales on a world-wide basis, where they migrate, what species are to be found in different places at different times, and so forth.”

“But how can
Brendan
help?” I asked.

“Well, your boat is going to waters where we receive very few reports, and where one would expect to find a number of whales.”

“What sort of whales are we likely to encounter?”

“Oh, almost all types. That’s it, you see, we don’t really know. But I would expect you to see fin whale, perhaps an isolated blue whale—those are the two largest whales in size—pilot whales, and off Greenland you may even see some of the true Arctic whales. We’re interested also in the smaller species such as the dolphins.”

“Do you think we’re likely to get close enough to identify the particular species?”

“Again, I don’t really know. But …,” and here he paused, “the minke whale is commonly described as ‘curious’ and he may come up to take
a really close look at you, while the fin whale sometimes rubs himself up against small boats.”

Just what
Brendan
needs, I thought, some itchy whale having a good scratch on the leather hull, to say nothing of tipping her over.

But on the voyage itself none of
Brendan
’s crew guessed what was about to happen, not even Trondur, who had a great deal of experience of whales and whale-catching. Day after day
Brendan
was visited by whales, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups. It was uncanny. The conditions were always the same: if the weather was gentle and the sea calm, we could virtually guarantee the appearance of whales close by, emerging from the depths with a great sigh of air, and a spray of water from their blowholes. Then they would stay in our vicinity for half an hour or more. For some reason the whales were drawn to
Brendan.
In all his experience Trondur had seen nothing like it. The great animals seemed to be almost as fascinated by
Brendan
as we were by them. Even when the whales came very close, there was more a feeling of companionship than of risk, and it was noticeable when we finally entered an area of shipping how the whales would dive when the ships were in the area, perhaps frightened by the sound of their engines. But when the ships had gone, the whales reappeared around us, rolling and wallowing in sight of
Brendan,
who was also slopping around on the cold water.

That first day of whale visits was all the more exciting because of its novelty. Scarcely two hours after seeing the first whale, which was probably a large fin whale, Edan was helping Trondur to fix a waterproof collar around the foremast to stop water dripping into the shelter. He was standing precariously on the gunwale, when he glanced down and suddenly let out a cry. “Hey, look at that! There are dolphins under the boat! No, they’re not, they’re whales and there’s a solid mass of them right under us!” Even as he called out and we all rushed to the side of
Brendan,
the distinctive black fin and the boot-shiny back of a small whale broke out of the water just beneath Edan’s foot, scarcely three or four feet away, with the characteristic hiss of air from the whale’s lungs, and a lazy swirl of water as the animal curved into view. Looking down into the water, we could see the extraordinary pattern of large, moving shadows, as whale after whale moved gently underneath our leather hull, a vast congregation of animals changing places as they rose and fell, a living escort of sea creatures not more than six feet beneath
the hull. There were literally scores of them, and we could even pick out the white flash of the bellies of two dolphin who seemed to be traveling in company with the whale school, almost as scouts. Then the whales began to surface around
Brendan.
The air was filled with a constant hissing and sighing of their breath as they came to the surface, some ten or fifteen animals at a time, then sank down and others took their place in a strange marine ballet. “Grind! Grind!” cried Trondur, usually so phlegmatic, but now almost capering with delight. They were pilot whales, one of the smaller species, though the larger members of the school were half as long as
Brendan
and probably weighed as much as our vessel. They were unafraid, and moving very slowly. Trondur seized one of his slabs of whale blubber. “This is grind,” he said. “Very good to eat.”

“Thank God, you haven’t got your harpoon with you,” said Edan, “or we’d be eating grind from here till Christmas.”

“Or being towed by Moby Dick,” added Arthur.

We calculated that the school contained between a hundred and a hundred and forty whales, and, later in the same day, when another, very large, whale visited us, I watched the huge unidentified creature come up close to
Brendan
and push a massive bow wave of water in front of it as it swam deliberately toward the boat. It was then that I began to wonder about the story of Saint Brendan and the whale. Superficially, of course, it was a preposterous seafaring yarn to think that someone actually could land on the back of a sleeping whale, mistaking it for an island. According to the
Navigatio,
the monks had lit a fire and started to cook a meal, but the heat of the fire had woken the whale, which suddenly began to move away. The monks cried aloud in fright, tumbled back into their leather boat, and the whale swam off into the distance with the fire burning on its back like a beacon.

Yet our experience with
Brendan
and the whales was putting this yarn in rather a different light. There was no doubt now that a leather boat, becalmed on these northern waters, held some sort of attraction for whales. It was not an exaggeration to say that it drew them from the depths. If this was still happening in the twentieth century when the whale population is so sadly depleted, what must it have been like in the sixth or seventh centuries A.D.? In those days it was very likely that there were far more whales off Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland where the animals come to feed off the fishing banks or at the junction of the
currents where the masses of shrimps and plankton are found. In the old Viking sailing directions, for example, the sight of whales between Iceland and Faroes was actually used as a position guide, rather like identifying a particular island or headland. How much more impressive it must have been for the Irish monks, drifting quietly across the feeding grounds of these huge animals who, up to that time, would never before have seen a boat or met humans, but remained secure in their own great size and gentle manner. Until then I had been overlooking the fact that the leather boats of the Irish would have been the very first vessels that these whales would ever have seen in these waters. The Irish priests would have been in exactly the same position as explorers who enter virgin jungle for the first time and meet animals totally ignorant of man, animals which are unafraid and curious about the stranger. When one connects this fact with the far greater whale population in earlier centuries, the curiosity of the animals which we in
Brendan
encountered, and the known habit of fin whales rubbing against boats, it was scarcely surprising that the Irish priests came back amazed by the whale life, bearing stories of monsters, of huge sea creatures, of their boat touching the animals. Seen in this perspective and with
Brendan
’s paler experience to underline it, the whale stories in the
Navigatio
increased rather than diminished the realism of the original medieval text.

But not all the sea monsters in the
Navigatio
had been so friendly. After leaving the Island of Sheep and the Paradise of Birds, Saint Brendan’s boat was chased by a great animal spouting foam from his nostrils and pushing a great wave ahead of him as he ploughed after the curragh. Just as this animal seemed about to devour the boat, another monster had appeared from the opposite direction in the nick of time, and attacked the first creature. A tremendous battle ensued; the newcomer killed the monster, and its body floated off and was later found washed up on a beach by the monks, who cut up and ate some of the flesh.

On July 7 I felt that this episode, too, had found a possible explanation. That day was another typical “whale day,” with
Brendan
becalmed on a light oily swell and under a grey overcast which seemed to merge with the metal-colored horizon. Trondur, who had an almost uncanny instinct for detecting the presence of whale, was sitting on the aft thwart, quietly sketching on his pad. Suddenly he raised his head, and looked north. He seemed tense, which was unusual for him. The others,
lounging quietly round the boat, sensed the feeling and we watched him. Faintly, very faintly, I heard the hiss of a whale emptying its lungs. Trondur was already on his feet shading his eyes against the light.

“Spaekhugger,” he said flatly. We were puzzled. “Spaekhugger,” he repeated. “In Faroes, we not like this whale. It is not so big, but has big—” and here he was at a loss for the right word, and so opened his mouth and pointed at his teeth. To leave no doubt he drew an outline of the whale with charcoal strokes on his sketch book.

One glance was enough. He had drawn the characteristic shape and piebald blotches of the grampus or killer whale. I was not altogether surprised. From the start of the project I had heard more jokes and quips about sharks and killer whales than I cared to remember. The shark fishermen of Courtmacsherry, my own village in County Cork, had jovially pointed out that
Brendan
’s leather would make a tasty snack for a shark, drawn to the boat by the smell of her—to a shark—succulent wool grease. “Just like laying a rubby dubby trail across the ocean,” they had joked. Personally I discounted the shark danger, particularly so far north, but I was not so confident about killer whales. In the last few years there had been a handful of well-authenticated reports of yachts sunk by killer whales who had battered holes in their hulls. Only the previous summer a big racing yacht off Brazil had been attacked in this way. There was no explanation for these attacks, as the metal or fiberglass hulls certainly were not edible. But it was a different matter with
Brendan.
The killer whale is carnivorous and, quite simply, there was a risk that
Brendan
’s leather skin would be mistaken for a potential meal. A killer whale combines a huge appetite with massive teeth, ten to thirteen of them and up to two inches thick on each side of the upper and lower jaws. These teeth are designed to bite and rend, and were more than capable of ripping
Brendan
to shreds. “As its name implies,” said our little handbook about whales from the Natural History Museum, “[the killer whale] is distinguished by its great ferocity, being the only cetacean which habitually preys on other warm-blooded animals.” The stomach of one killer whale, I had read, yielded up no less than thirteen seals; and it was often recorded that packs of hungry killer whales attacked and demolished larger whales. Would they now mistake
Brendan
for a dead or wounded whale lying on the surface?

Trondur pointed. There in the distance I could just see the thin line
of a black fin lift briefly above the water. A moment later the sound of its hissing breath reached us across the still water. Then another hiss. Trondur’s arm swung. A couple of hundred yards to the right of the first spot, another fin lifted from the sea. Then a double hiss. By now my eyes could pick up a pattern, and I looked farther to the right and saw two more fins. “Four—no, five,” said George, close by my right ear, as he too stood up to watch. “There’s a sixth,” called Arthur.

The pack of killer whales was strung out in the classic hunting pattern, line abreast with perhaps one or two hundred yards between each animal so that they covered a front of about three-quarters of a mile. No wonder, I remembered, the Spanish fishermen called them
lobo del mar,
the wolf of the sea. They hunted with the same deadly efficient organization.

The pack swept south, sinking down, then reappearing almost in unison with heavy wheezing breaths. The third time they surfaced, they were close enough for us to pick out that there were five smaller animals and a sixth, much bigger one. This was the bull, the leader of the group. He was swimming two places in from the end of the line nearest us. According to sea lore, the bull controls the movements of the hunting group among these remarkably intelligent animals. The rest of the pack takes its direction from the leader, who is more experienced and acts as a director of the hunt. This pack, I saw, were going to pass well astern of
Brendan
on their present course.

Then the bull sensed us. His fin turned majestically toward us as he left the pack to investigate. We gazed, fascinated by this display of unhurried power. Hiss, ripple, his great bulk surfaced again on a direct course for
Brendan,
and sank down. Puff, a mist of spray and steam leapt a few feet into the air as he emptied his lungs before the water had cleared from his nostrils on his next surfacing. He came up for breath again, and this time he was no more than fifty yards away, and we could see just how massive he was. He was a fully grown killer whale, as large as he would probably ever be, perhaps five or six feet shorter than
Brendan
and three or four times the displacement. Alone, of all whales, he looked totally sinister; he was not like the cuddly, performing creature of the dolphinariums but had the brutal black-and-white ferocity reminiscent of the tiger’s stripe. Most sinister of all was the thin, cruel fin which came slicing up every time he surfaced. It looked more like a shark’s fin than a whale’s fin, for it curved back to a
point, and it was so big, a good six feet tall, that it could not support its own weight out of the water, but sagged over to one side. It reminded me irresistibly of the razor-sharp wing of an attack aircraft drooping as it squats on the runway.