The Brendan Voyage (33 page)

Trondur pumped up the little rubber dinghy and paddled across to
Svanur.
After ten minutes he came back. “The captain says there is very heavy ice all ahead of
Brendan. Svanur
has been steaming six hours and could not find a way through the ice. Also he has heard on the radio from another ship which cannot get through. He says the ice is very thick.” I saw that
Svanur
’s steel bows had ice dents in it. If
Svanur,
a well-built fishing boat designed for those waters, was backing off the ice, then it was wise for
Brendan
to do the same. It seemed that the ice had moved since the last reports and was a good deal farther south. Trondur continued:
“Svanur
’s captain said if you want, he will pull
Brendan
around the corner of the ice where we can pick up the wind again.
Svanur
is going this way.”

“Please tell him that I accept his offer.”

Trondur paddled back with a tow line and soon
Svanur
was plucking
us out of danger. More Brendan Luck, I reflected, that the first boat in three weeks should show up just when
Brendan
was blundering into an ice trap. Doubtless we would have been able to work ourselves clear of the ice once the wind had changed, but in future I would be more wary of the ice reports. The pack could move and change its boundaries faster than the Ice Patrol could keep track of it, and next time, I promised myself, I would keep
Brendan
to seaward of it. I did not know what a broken promise that would soon turn out to be.

It took only three hours for
Svanur
to pull
Brendan
out of her predicament, and then she cast us off. Trondur, who had stayed aboard
Svanur
for the tow, came back with a bag of frozen bread, a sack of potatoes, the supply of milk which Arthur had wanted, and a great box of frozen shrimp.

“That’s a splendid haul,” I grunted, taking the box from Trondur’s hands. “Yes,” he replied,
“Svanur
’s captain lives not so far from us, on the island of Hestor.” Only the wandering Faroese fisherman, I thought, could make so light of a chance meeting off the pack ice.

We were still busily stowing this welcome supplement to our rations when George exclaimed, “Good Lord—it’s another ship.” Sure enough, rolling down from the north was a grey-painted vessel. She had a strange profile, with a cut-back icebreaker bow and a crow’s nest fixed to her foremast. “This place is like Piccadilly Circus,” I said. “Two ships in a day. Everyone has to come round this corner en route to or from the Arctic.”

“Let’s hope that ship has seen us,” muttered George. “She’s bearing straight at us.”

The look-out aboard the newcomer had spotted
Brendan.
The vessel slowed down and then stopped about two hundred yards from
Brendan.
She was the U.S. Navy ship
Mirfak,
and we could see her deck officers leaning over the wingbridge to gaze curiously down at us.

“What ship are you?”
Mirfak
asked by radio.

“Brendan
out of Reykjavik and bound for North America,” I replied.

There was a long pause.

“Can I have that again?” came a puzzled voice.

“Brendan,
out of Reykjavik and bound for North America. Our boat is an archeological experiment. She’s made of leather and testing whether Irish monks could have reached America before the Vikings.”

Long pause.

“Say that again.”

I repeated the information. Another pause, as the khaki-clad officers peered at us.

“I had better take this down in writing,” said
Mirfak
’s radio operator. “Where did you sail from?”

“Reykjavik, this season.”

Another incredulous pause. “Where?”

“Reykjavik in Iceland. We’ve had pretty good weather this side of Greenland, but we took a battering between Iceland and Greenland.”

“I should say so. Things can be pretty bad in this steel tub. I can’t imagine what it’s like in your little boat.”

Mirfak,
as it turned out, was a U.S. Navy supply vessel returning from Sondrestrom Fjord in Greenland and a regular visitor to Arctic waters. Meeting
Brendan
was a complete surprise.

“Can we give you any help?”

“Some fresh vegetables and meat would be very welcome if you can spare any. We ran out of fresh food a little while back.”

“That’s easy. But how will we transfer the stuff to you?”

I smiled to myself at the thought of a leather boat advising a navy ship. “That’s easy. We’ll send you a boat.” I turned to George. “Your turn in the dinghy.”

So
Brendan
’s little rubber dinghy paddled off again, a tiny dot against
Mirfak’s
tall flank. We saw crewmen lowering sacks on the end of the line to George, who was heaving up and down on the swell. Then George gesticulated upward.

Ten minutes later he pulled back to
Brendan,
the dinghy low in the water. “I had to stop them,” he puffed. “They gave me so much food it would have swamped the dinghy.” Piled around his legs were sacks of oranges, apples, yet more milk, tins of coffee, slabs of meat. It was an incredibly generous haul.

“Look at that lot,” said Arthur. “Marvelous! We ought to set up a corner shop at the ice here and trade with passing vessels. We’d never starve.”

“And I left behind three more sacks of food they had ready on deck for us,” George added.

As
Mirfak
picked up speed to continue on her way to Bayonne in New Jersey, I made one more request. “Could you give us a position check, please?”

“Yes,” came the reply. “We’re getting a read-out from the satellite now.”

That was a nice touch, I thought to myself—a medieval leather boat receiving her position from a twentieth-century navigation satellite. Then
Mirfak
was gone, and
Brendan
was left rocking on the swell. The wind had died completely, and the sun went down in a spectacular mauve-and-orange sunset, the sky streaked with radiating patterns of high clouds that complemented the brilliant white of the ice field stretching away on our starboard side. We ate a delicious supper of Greenland shrimp and turned in that night, listening to the ceaseless mutter and grumble of the ice floes rubbing against one another on the Atlantic swell.

That evening George finally gave up the unequal contest of trying to compete with Arthur’s flailing knees and elbows inside the confines of the main shelter, and he moved his berth forward to a spot under the bow canvas. We slept with the tent flaps open because the weather was so still, and it was a surprise to find a rind of ice covering
Brendan
in the morning. We were now some 1,600 miles along our route from Iceland, and across the icefield lay Labrador, only 200 miles away. Moreover our encounter with
Mirfak
and
Svanur
had put
Brendan
back on the map for the outside world. The Canadian Coast Guard radio stations now arranged a special listening watch for us; and on the afternoon of June 15 a small plane flew over the boat for five minutes and took pictures. By radio the plane warned that large areas of pack ice lay to the south and west of
Brendan.
But there was little to be done.
Brendan
was still becalmed.

At quarter past three the next morning, however, I was awakened by the sound of water sliding past the leather hull. That’s odd, I thought to myself,
Brendan
is not heeling to the wind. Nor can I hear the sound of waves. On my last watch the weather had been very settled, and there had been a flat calm and no sign of wind.

Then I heard Trondur and George speaking softly, and some sort of commotion, punctuated by light thuds and the flapping of a sail, and several splashes. What on earth were they doing? Was George helping
Trondur restow some of the stores? But that was ridiculous; it was dark, and George was off-watch, and should be asleep. Finally, I could contain my curiosity no longer, and called, “What’s going on? Do you need any help?”

No answer. Then abruptly, the thuds and splashes stopped. I heard the others moving back down the boat.

“What’s up?” I asked again.

“Oh, Trondur just lost a pilot whale he had harpooned,” came back George’s casual reply. I pulled on a sweater, and listened to their story.

Trondur had been on watch by himself when a large school of pilot whales surfaced around
Brendan,
splashing and puffing. Although it was dark, this was the opportunity Trondur the Hunter had been waiting for. Without bothering to wake up anyone, he clambered forward to his cabin, unshipped his harpoon, and scrambled up onto the very bows of the boat where he could get a clear throw. George was awakened by the sound of Trondur clambering across the thin tarpaulins just over his head. George got up, and emerged just as Trondur saw his chance—a pilot whale of the right size swimming near the boat.

Chunk! From a kneeling position on the bow Trondur tossed his harpoon three or four yards to starboard, and made a clean hit. It was a classic shot.

Immediately the harpooned animal dived. There was a tremendous flurry among its closely packed companion whales. The water churned as the animals thrashed in panic. The shaft of the harpoon snapped under the press of bodies, and then all the whales were gone, leaving the stricken animal to its fate.

Fascinated, George watched as Trondur began to play the whale like a fisherman with a salmon on the end of a line. At first the thirty-foot harpoon line was pulled out taut to its fullest extent. Trondur had tied the free end of the line to the foremast as a strong point, and the harpooned whale began towing
Brendan
briskly along. If the whale had been any larger, this could have been dangerous, but Trondur knew what he was doing. He had selected a whale of the right size, about fifteen feet long, small enough to handle from
Brendan.
As the whale grew tired, Trondur began to haul in on the line. The animal darted back and forth underneath the bows, trying to rid itself of the clinging harpoon. Flashes of foam and phosphorescence rolled up off its body
and fins as it fought to escape. Inexorably Trondur continued to haul in. As the line shortened, the pilot whale began to weave up and down; its tail scooped dollops of water aboard
Brendan
as it fought to resist. Trondur’s strategy was to pull the animal high enough to the surface so that it could get less grip on the water. At the crucial moment, however, when the whale was right alongside the boat, the harpoon head pulled free. A second later, the animal was gone.

“Harpoon too far back in whale,” said Trondur, sadly shaking his head. “More forward and it would have been good.”

I wondered to myself what on earth we would have done with a fifteen-foot pilot whale on
Brendan.
We didn’t have that much extra space. But Trondur the Hunter had done remarkably well to harpoon the animal in the dark. “Never mind,” I said, “you picked a good whale. It was towing us in the right direction at a good two to three knots.”

Our adventures and misadventures all seemed to be happening in the dark, or at best, in the last hour of daylight. On June 18 the barometer began to fall rapidly. So did the temperature. Then the wind backed into the northwest and blew strongly, bringing driving rain. In short, it was a thoroughly villainous evening, and it was lucky, in view of what was to follow, that Trondur and Arthur unlashed and stowed the bonnet from the mainsail before they ended their watch at dusk. George and I took over on a foul, black night, rigged an awning over the cooker, lit the kerosene lamp, and huddled over it for warmth, taking an hour each at the helm. Our only consolation was that
Brendan
was thrusting briskly through the murk, sailing at a good pace. At 3:00 A.M. it was my turn to seek the shelter of the cabin, and I crawled in thankfully. I had just pulled off my wet sea-boot socks when suddenly there was a high-pitched crackling sound, rather like stiff calico tearing. “What on earth was that?” I exclaimed, poking my head out of the cabin. George was already standing up, flashing a torch on the sails. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Everything looks okay. The sails seem all right.” “Perhaps a bird was flung into the sail by the high wind, and was thrashing to get out,” I suggested. “No,” said George, “I thought the sound came from the hull—still, there’s nothing we can do about it in the dark,” and he settled back down on the thwart.

Crack … crack … crack. There it came again, something weird was happening, a strange snapping noise, this time much louder. George
was right. The noise was coming from the hull. George was back on his feet, peering into the darkness, trying to see a few yards in the pitch black. Hastily I began to put on my outer clothes again, knowing by instinct that we had a crisis on our hands.

“It’s ice!” George suddenly shouted. “We’re running into ice! I can see lumps of it all around.” Crack … crack … crack, we heard the sound again and realized without looking what it was.
Brendan
was hitting lumps of ice at speed, and they were swirling and bumping along her flanks so hard that they rattled and crackled along the oxhide skin.

“Drop the sails,” I yelled. “If we collide with heavy ice at this speed, we’ll knock her to pieces. Our only chance is to stop and wait for daylight.”

George moved into action. By the time I had struggled into my oilskins, he had lowered the mainsail and scampered forward over the icy tarpaulins, and already had the headsail halfway down. I went forward to help him secure the sodden canvas. It was perishingly cold. In an instant our bare fingers were numb as we secured the lashings on the sails. Neither George nor I said a word as we worked frantically. We could glimpse indistinct shapes in the water, and felt under our feet that
Brendan
’s hull juddered softly against unseen obstacles. We hurried back to the helm and took out the two most powerful hand torches. They were the only spotlights we had. We switched them on, one each side of
Brendan,
and shone them over the water. Their beams penetrated only fifty yards through the spray and sleet which hissed down in white streaks through the shafts of light. But fifty yards was far enough to reveal a sight which brought the adrenalin racing. All around us floated chunks and lumps and jagged monsters of ice. This was not the same ice we had seen a few days ago. In place of the well-defined ice edge, there was now a nightmare jumble of ice floes of every size and description, with channels of clear water opening and closing between them as the floes moved with the wind. But this ice should not be here, I told myself. I knew the ice chart by heart. That same day I had painstakingly marked in the ice boundaries according to the latest information radioed by the ice information service.
Brendan
should be at least sixty miles clear of the nearest ice. Yet here it was; and with a morbid feeling of satisfaction I knew exactly what had happened. The same northwest gale which had been spinning
Brendan
so happily on her way had swept over the main ice sheet and burst it open. The compact ice raft we had seen two days ago was now sprayed like shrapnel right into
Brendan
’s path. Later I learned that the entire pack-ice front had advanced across a broad front so that the Straits of Belle Isle, well to the south of
Brendan,
were nearly closed to merchant shipping.