The Brendan Voyage (30 page)

For the third time, I began emptying out the contents of the cabin, peeled back the floor sheet with a sticky ripping sound, and prized up the leather sheets where they had lain on the deck boards. “Get a fistful of thongs,” I told George. “I want to lace the hides together.” He crawled forward.

I shoved the leather sheets out of the cabin door. They were stiff and unwieldy in the cold. So much the better, I thought, they will be like armor plate.

Quickly I pointed out to Trondur what needed to be done. Immediately he grasped the principle, nodded his understanding, and gave a quick grin of approval.

Then he was off, knife in hand, scrambling up onto
Brendan
’s unprotected stern where the waves washed over the camber of the stern deck. It was a very treacherous spot, but it was the only place where the job could be done properly. With one hand Trondur held onto his perch, and with the other he worked on the leather sheets we passed up to him. Every now and then, the roar of an oncoming breaker warned him to drop his work, and hold on with both hands while
Brendan
bucked and shuddered and the wave crest swirled over the stern. Meanwhile, Arthur at the helm kept
Brendan
as steady as he could, and George, balancing on the port gunwale, pinned down each sheet of leather to prevent it being swept away by the gale. Trondur’s job was to cut a line of holes along the edge of the oxhide in the right place for the leather thongs to lash down and join together the tortoise. With the full power of his trained sculptor’s hand, Trondur drove his knife point again and again through the quarter-inch-thick leather, twisted and sawed, and carved out neat hole after neat hole like a machine. It was an impressive display of strength. Then George fed the leather thongs through the holes, tied down the corner of the main hide, and laced on the overlapping plates.

In less than fifteen minutes the job was done. A leather apron covered the larger part of
Brendan
’s open stern, leaving just enough room for the helmsman to stand upright, his torso projecting up through the tortoise. Leather cheek plates guarded the flanks.

Boom! Another breaker crashed over the stern, but this time caromed safely off the tortoise and poured harmlessly back into the Atlantic; only in one spot did it penetrate in quantity, where I had plugged a gap beneath the leather apron with my spare oilskin trousers. So great was the force of the water that the trousers shot out from the gap, flying across the cockpit on the head of a spout of water.

The tortoise won the battle for us that night. Several more potentially destructive waves curled over
Brendan,
broke, and shattered themselves harmlessly against our leather defenses. Only a fraction of that water entered the bilges, and was easily pumped back into the sea. Poking up through his hole in the leather plating, the helmsman had a hard and bitter time of it. Facing aft and steering to ride the waves, he
was battered achingly in the ribs by the sharp edge of the tortoise while the wind scoured his face. From time to time a breaker would flail his chest, and it was so uncomfortable that each man stayed only fifteen minutes at the helm before he had to be replaced, his hands and face numb in the biting cold.

But it was worth it. Even if we were losing the distance we had made and were being blown back in our tracks, we had survived the encounter with our first major Greenland gale. We had made
Brendan
seaworthy to face the unusual conditions of those hostile seas, and we had done so with our own ingenuity and skills. Above all, we had succeeded by using the same basic materials which had been available to Saint Brendan and the Irish seagoing monks. It was cause for genuine satisfaction.

By eight o’clock next morning the gale had eased enough for us to begin sorting out the jumbled mess in the cockpit created by the waves that had washed aboard. Shelves were knocked askew; canisters of food had leaked. The lids had sprung off plastic boxes, and their contents now swam in murky puddles. When the salt container was tipped, its contents ran out as a liquid. All the matches we had been using, and the lighters, were ruined; to light the stove we had to resort again to special lifeboat matches which ignited even when damp. Sea water had burst into the kerosene lamps so that even the mantle had been broken behind the glass of the pressure lamp. Gloves, socks, scarves, hats, all were soaked, and there was no way to dry them except by body heat. The pages of my daily journal, which were written on waterproof paper, had been so badly soaked that most of the allegedly indelible ink had run. Each page had to be mopped off with a rag. Nor could I raise contact on the main radio with any shore station until that evening our signal was picked up by one of the Icelandic Airlines regular flights between Reykjavik and Chicago, and the pilot promptly relayed our position report to his air traffic control center, who in turn passed on the message to the Coast Guard that we were safe. That at least was one worry out of the way: the last thing I wanted was for our friends in the Icelandic Coast Guard to start searching for us on a false alarm. They had been magnificently generous in offering to keep track
of
Brendan,
and I had the reciprocal responsibility not to put them to unnecessary trouble.

The wind dropped, but the weather did not really relent. It produced rain, fog, a brief calm, then more rain, and more fog. For half a day the wind obliged us by going into the northeast, and we bowled along sometimes at six or seven knots, rapidly picking up valuable mileage in the right direction. But then it turned again into the south and we were forced to slant even closer to the ice edge. All this time we kept up our efforts to dry out—mopping up again and again, sponging and bilge pumping, trying to beat back the water.

Whether the medieval Irish seafarers had to endure such bleak conditions is doubtful. Most historians who have studied climate agree that the climate of the North Atlantic between the fifth and eight centuries was often warmer than it is today. But they are cautious about the precise details. Quite simply, too little is known about the reasons for climatic change, and the experts are still gathering evidence of exactly what happened. The leading English historian of climate, Professor H. H. Lamb, had studied the early chronicles for references to floods, harvests, and other records of climatic change. “Briefly, there is good reason to believe,” he had written to me, “that there were periods, particularly between A.D. 300 and 500 or perhaps as late as 550, and again between 900 and 1200, as well as a briefer period coinciding approximately with the eighth century A.D. in which there was an anomalously high frequency of anticyclones about the 50 latitudes and sometimes higher latitudes which must have reduced the frequency of storms and made the possibility of safe voyages to Iceland and Greenland higher in those times than in most others. However, it is quite clear that the variation of climate was not sufficient to rule out the possibility of a disastrous storm at any time.”

Professor Lamb’s conclusions were supported in part, though not in every instance, by the recent analysis of ice-core samples drilled out of the Greenland ice cap by Danish and American scientists. The horizontal layers in these ice cores represent annual snowfalls in Greenland extending back for more than a thousand years. A technique has been devised to calculate the temperatures in those years by measuring the amount of the heavy oxygen isotope trapped in each layer. Again, the evidence shows various warmer periods in Greenland’s history, including one between A.D. 650 and A.D. 850.

Several scholars had already pointed out that the weather was much more suitable for trans-Atlantic voyages when the Norsemen were reaching Iceland and then went on to colonize Greenland. But there were at least two other favorable intervals, sometimes overlooked by the historians: a period in the eighth century just before the time Dicuil had been writing of the Irish voyages to Iceland; and an earlier opportunity in the sixth century closer to the time of Saint Brendan himself. Dicuil’s information also throws a revealing sidelight on the more general climatic picture provided by the scientists. Dicuil declared that in about A.D. 800 the Irish monks had been setting out on regular voyages to Iceland
in February,
a time of year which modern sailors would certainly not recommend as the best season for the passage. But wind and weather in February, in Dicuil’s day, were suitable for the voyage, more evidence that the early medieval climate was not the same as it is in the mid-twentieth century.

Of course the air temperature over the North Atlantic in early medieval times was only one factor in the problem of climatic history and the Irish voyages. Nothing is known of such vital matters as the prevailing wind direction, or the frequency and seasonal distribution of storms in those earlier centuries. However, it does seem likely that there was less sea ice on the Greenland coast for most of this time. The Norse sailors who voyaged from Iceland to the Greenland settlements in the early years were not unduly hindered by the Greenland ice. And it is reasonable to suppose that with higher temperatures at the time of the Irish Christian voyages, the sea ice would not have presented the problem it does today. Appropriately enough Páll Bergthorsson, a meteorologist at Iceland’s Weather Center, had checked back through the Icelandic records and shown how the variations in winter temperatures could be directly related to the amount of sea ice appearing off Iceland. Now Páll and his colleagues were watching the Greenland weather maps on behalf of
Brendan
and, whenever possible, sending us weather forecasts by radio.

An improvement in the climate of the North Atlantic in the Middle Ages may explain why the
Navigatio
had so little to say about bad weather during Saint Brendan’s epic voyage. In general, his curragh seems to have been troubled as much by calms as by gale-force winds. But this was due in part to the Saint’s good sense in restricting the main stages of his voyage to the summer, though there was one occasion
when he was taken by surprise by the weather: After their narrow escape from the hostile sea monster who attacked them, only to be defeated and killed by another sea creature, the travelers beached their curragh on an island. Here they found the carcass of the dead monster where it had been washed ashore, and Saint Brendan told his men to cut it up for food. This gave them extra supplies for three months. But the travelers had to spend all three months stranded on the island because foul weather at sea, with heavy rain and hail storms, kept them from putting out in the curragh. Some commentators had suggested that this unseasonal bad weather indicates that the monks had landed in South Greenland, where the weather can be notoriously foul even in summer. A bad Greenland summer, it is claimed, would have caught the Irish monks unawares because they were accustomed to better summer sailing at home.

A more intriguing clue to the possibility that the Irish navigators landed in Greenland is to be found, once more, in the writings of the Norsemen themselves. When the Norse first discovered Greenland they reported coming across “human habitations, both in the eastern and western parts of the country, and fragments of skin boats and stone implements.” The eminent American geographer, Carl Sauer, argued that these skin boats and stone dwellings were much more likely to have been left behind by Irishmen than by the Eskimo, because at that time—as far as all research can show—there were no Eskimos living in South Greenland. The Norse settlers in South Greenland did not encounter any living Eskimo, nor have archaeologists found Eskimo relics of that time in that area. What the archaeologists have found is evidence that the only Eskimos in Greenland when the Norse arrived belonged to the Dorset culture whose early traces are confined to the north of the country. Just as important, the only habitations, other than tents, known to have been used by the Dorset people were very characteristic subterranean burrows, sometimes roofed with skins. These burrows would certainly not be described as “habitations of stone.”

This being so, Carl Sauer asked, then whose skin boats and stone habitations did the Norsemen find in South Greenland? Surely the Irish, because cells are typical structures built by Irish monks all over the west coast of Ireland and in the Hebrides.

Had the Norsemen stumbled across the traces of the Irish monks
who fled there as refugees from Iceland when the Norsemen drove them on? Or were these relics left by Irish hermits who had voyaged direct to Greenland from the Faroes or from the Hebrides? The Norse sagas do not give any more information about the size or shape of these “habitations of stone,” but with
Brendan’s
experience to help, another point now arose: the “skin boats” the Norsemen found were not likely to have been Eskimo kayaks, because the skin cover of a kayak will perish if it is not regreased and looked after very carefully. The skin has not been tanned in the true sense, as
Brendan
was, and will disintegrate when abandoned any length of time on the shore. By contrast, the oak-bark-tanned leather of the Irish curraghs was extremely stable and durable, and could last for a very long time indeed. Perhaps, then, the skin boats of pre-Norse Greenland were Irish ocean-going curraghs.

As we now struggled toward Greenland’s coast,
Brendan
’s modern weather-luck was causing me real anxiety. The gales had not only forced her around in a futile circle in the Greenland Sea, but the boat was being pushed much farther north than I had anticipated or wanted. To clear Cape Farewell and its eighty-mile-wide shelf of pack ice striking out from South Greenland,
Brendan
needed to head southwest. But she was being frustrated by the constant foul winds. So I decided to take a gamble: We would steer close to the ice. There the local wind often blows parallel to the ice edge, and
Brendan
might find the wind she wanted so desperately. But the danger was obvious; if we were caught by an easterly gale,
Brendan
would be driven headlong into the pack ice with very little chance of anyone reaching us in time if we got into trouble. Petur Sigurdsson of the Coast Guard had told me not to be worried by the ice. “We call it the Friendly Ice,” he had said with a twinkle in his eye. “Coast Guard patrol ships have found shelter many times from the storms by entering the ice. The sea is always calm there.” But he was speaking of steel-built ships, and I was not so sure that
Brendan
’s leather hull would withstand an ice collision.