The Brendan Voyage (34 page)

Our torch beams showed us that
Brendan
had blundered into a type of sea ice known as Very Open Pack, and that most of the ice was rotten. Very Open Pack would have presented no problems to a large ship, which would have been able to shoulder forward, driven by powerful engines. But it was a totally different matter for
Brendan.
How much of a battering would her leather hull withstand, I wondered, and what would happen if a couple of ice floes bumped together, and
Brendan
was caught in the middle? Would she burst open like an overripe banana? And just how much sailing water was there among the ice floes which lay ahead? The devil of our situation was that there was no way to plan a strategy. We might only be in a small zone of ice, a temporary obstacle which we would soon clear. Common sense said that it was far more likely that we were in a major area of ice and that sooner or later we would find massive rafts of consolidated ice still frozen together. We had already seen the grinding action of the giant ice floes on a relatively calm day. I shuddered to think of what would happen to
Brendan
if she was blown into that sort of obstacle in the dark. She would be fed in like mincemeat. For about an hour George and I tried to keep the boat out of trouble. Without her sails,
Brendan
was still moving through the pack ice at one or two knots, driven by the pressure of the wind on the masts and hull. But sail-less,
Brendan
was at her worst—slow to maneuver and only able to turn through a very small arc. If too much helm was applied, she merely drifted sideways, out of control.

Everywhere the torch beams probed, white lumps of ice winked back out of the dark. Painfully, we wallowed past them, heaving on the tiller, and silently hoping that
Brendan
would respond in time. Smaller floes bumped and muttered on her leather skin; and out of the darkness we heard the continuous swishing sound of the waves breaking on ice beyond our vision.

George hoisted himself on the steering frame to get a clearer view. “There’s a big floe dead ahead,” he warned. “Try to get round to port.”
I pulled over the tiller as far as it would go. But it was not enough. I could see that we were not going to make it. “Get the foresail up,” I shouted. “We’ve got to have more steerage way.” George clipped on his lifeline and crawled forward along the gunwale. Reaching the foremast, he heaved on the halliard to raise the sail. It jammed. A loose thong had caught in the collar that slid up and down the mast. “Trondur!” shouted George. “Quick, pass me up a knife.” Trondur’s berth was right beside the foremast, and he began to emerge like a bear from hibernation. But it was too late. With a shudder from the top of her mast to the skid under her,
Brendan
ran her bow into the great lump of sea ice. It was like hitting a lump of concrete. The shock of the impact made me stagger. “That will test medieval leather—and our stitching,” I thought. Thump! We struck again. Thump! Once more the swell casually tossed
Brendan
onto the ice. Then ungracefully and slowly,
Brendan
began to pivot on her bow, wheeling away from the ice floe like a car crash filmed in slow motion. Thump! The boat shivered again. We had a feeling of total helplessness. There was nothing we could do to assist
Brendan.
Only the wind would blow her clear. Thump! This time the shock was not so fierce.
Brendan
was shifting. Scrape. She was clear. “Is she taking water?” George called back anxiously. I glanced down at the floorboards. “No, not as far as I can see back here,” I replied. “Try to clear the jammed headsail. I’ll get Boots up as well. This is getting dodgy.”

Scarcely had I spoken than a truly awesome sight loomed up out of the dark just downwind of us—the white and serrated edge of a massive floe, perhaps the dying shard of an iceberg, twice the size of
Brendan,
and glinting with malice. This apparition was rolling and wallowing like some enormous log. Its powerful, squat shape had one great bluff end which was pointing like a battering ram straight at
Brendan,
and it was rocking backward and forward with ponderous certainty to deliver a blow of perhaps a hundred tons or so at the fragile leather.

George took one look at this monster and leapt up the foremast to try to clear the jammed sail and give us steerage way. It was a slim hope. “Hang on tight!” I bellowed at him as the swell gathered up
Brendan
and pushed her at the great ice lump which heaved up ponderously to greet her. Crack! Thump! The whole boat shook as if she had struck a reef, which indeed she had, but a reef of ice. The impact flung
George backward from the mast. “Christ, he’s going to fall between
Brendan
and the ice floe, he’ll be crushed,” I thought, horrified. But George still had the jammed halliard in his hand, and clutched at it desperately. The rope brought him up short, and for a heart-stopping moment he dangled backward over the gap like a puppet on a string. Now the wind was pinning
Brendan
against the great block of ice so that she was nuzzling up to it in a deadly embrace. The next impact was different. This time the ice floe rocked away from
Brendan
as the swell passed beneath us.
Brendan
swung over a broad spur of a wave-cut ledge projecting from the floe. The spur rose under us, caught
Brendan
with a grating sound, and began to lift and tip the boat. “We’re going to be flipped over like a fried egg,” I thought, as
Brendan
heeled and heeled. Then, with another grating sound of leather on ice,
Brendan
slid sideways off the ice spur and dropped back into the water.

Crash. The next collision was broadside, halfway down the boat’s length. The leeboard took the impact with the sound of tortured wood.

This can’t go on much longer, I wondered. Either
Brendan
will be blown clear of the floe, or she will be smashed to smithereens. As I watched,
Brendan
jostled forward another six feet on the next wave, and there was a chance to gauge the rhythm of destruction. It was obvious that the next blow would strike the steering paddle and snap its shaft. That would be the final problem: to be adrift in the pack ice with our steering gear smashed. Now the great floe was level with me where I stood at the tiller bar. The face of the floe stood taller than I did and in the light cast by my torch, the ice gleamed and glowed deep within itself with an unearthly mixture of frost white, crystal, and emerald. From the water-line a fierce blue-white reflected up through the sea from the underwater ice ledge. And all the time, like some devouring beast, the floe never ceased its constant roar and grumble as the ocean swell boomed within its submarine hollows and beat against its sides.

Here comes the last blow, I thought, the final shock in
Brendan’s
ordeal. I felt a wave lift the leather hull, saw the bleak edge of glistening ice swing heavily toward me and—feeling slightly foolish—could think of nothing else to do but lean out with one arm, brace against the steering frame, and putting my hand on the ice floe I pushed with all my strength. To my astonishment,
Brendan
responded. The stern wagged away and forward from the ice wall, and instead of a full-blooded sideswipe,
we received a glancing ice blow that sent a shiver down the hull, but left the steering paddle intact. One wave later, the great floe was rolling and grumbling in our wake. It had been a very close call.

Trondur and Arthur were soon up and dressed in sweaters and oilskins ready to help. I should have called them earlier, but their off-watch rest had seemed too precious. Now their assistance was needed, because I planned to try to get
Brendan
through the ice by increasing speed, which in turn meant that we might be blundering into the main consolidated pack ice and wreck the boat. But it was a risk we had to take. It was better than gyrating into loose floes and being broken up. “Boots! Trondur! Go forward by the foremast and stand by. We’ll raise and lower the foresail as we need it, and trim the sail to port or starboard, depending on the position of the bigger ice floes. We’re going to run through this ice. George, could you act as look-out, and sing out the bearings on the larger floes?”

George climbed up on to the shelter roof, wrapped an arm round the mainmast for support, and from his vantage point spotted the approaching dangers.

“Big one dead ahead! Two floes on the port bow, and another on the starboard side! I think there’s a gap between them.”

As he called the position of each floe, he aimed the beam of his torch at it to identify the hazard for me at the helm. In turn I called out instructions to Boots and Trondur to raise and trim, or lower, the headsail to catch the wind and pick a route through the ice. “Up foresail …down!” We slipped past a white shape of ice, ghostly in the dark. “Up foresail … sheet to starboard,” and I hauled over the tiller bar so that
Brendan
slid past the next floe. It was a crazy scene, an icy toboggan run in the dark, with a minimum of control, no way of stopping, no knowing what lay fifty yards ahead. From where I stood, I could see the shape of George’s body clinging to the mast, the gale plastering his oilskin to his back; then the line of the midships tarpaulin running forward to where Arthur and Trondur stood, one by each gunwale. They had opened a gap in the tarpaulin, and the upper halves of their bodies poked out like the crew in an open airplane of First World War vintage. Only the hoods of their oilskin jackets now made them look more like monks in cowls, and the impression was heightened by the red-ringed cross on the foresail, which raised and lowered and bellied out
with a thundering clap above their heads. Beyond them, still farther, was the blackness of the night out of which loomed the eerie white shapes of the ice floes, occasionally illuminated by George’s torch beam through which still flicked the streaks of rain and spray.

After three hours of this surrealist scene, the gloom began to lift. George switched off his torch, and found he could detect the white flashes of the ice floes without help. Dawn lightened the horizon, and we started to identify ice patterns beyond our immediate orbit. We were surrounded by pack ice. Off to one side was floating a huge, picture-postcard iceberg, a sleek monster of ice sloping spectacularly to the ocean with virgin white flanks. But the berg was no danger, for it was at least a mile away. Our real troubles lay ahead and around us in the contorted shapes of the floes which had ambushed us in the night. Now we could identify them by type. There were “bergy bits” broken from the dead icebergs, ice pans of assorted sizes, and “growlers,” the unstable chunks of hard ice which twisted and turned in the water and threatened to do the most damage to
Brendan
’s quarter-inch-thick leather hull. Now with enough light we could see to avoid these obstacles. Surely the way ahead must be clear, I thought to myself.
Brendan
had shown her worth yet again. Her leather skin and hand-lashed frame had survived a battering. No more could be expected of her. “Is there any water in her yet?” George asked again.

“No,” I replied. “She came through like a warrior.”

But my hopes were soon dashed. Ahead we began to discover mile upon mile of ice, floe after floe, oscillating and edging southward under the combined effects of gale and the current.
Brendan
could neither hold her position nor retreat. Her only course was forward and sideways, hoping to move faster than the pack ice until we eventually outran it and emerged somewhere from its leading edge.

All that day we labored on, trying to work our way diagonally across the pack ice and find its limits. It was a nerve-wracking business, trying to pick our way from one gap to the next. Planning ahead was impossible, because the ice floes changed their position, and our horizon was very limited. From time to time fog banks gathered over the ice and visibility was often less than a mile. Our only advantage was that the water was very calm within the pack ice. As we penetrated deeper, the wave action died away even though half a gale was still
blowing. The great carpet of ice muffled the waves like an enormous floating breakwater, leaving only a powerful swell which rocked and spun the floes. Sometimes we came across patches of open water, dotted with only a few lumps of rotting ice. Here we sailed without hindrance for a few minutes. Sometimes ice barriers and ice ridges rose ahead of
Brendan
where the floes stretched right across her path, forming an impenetrable wall which had to be avoided at all costs. Once or twice there loomed out of the mists the magnificent shape of the great icebergs, one hundred feet high and more; and as we drew closer to them we could discern ominous cracks riven through the ice blocks where the bergs would split and calve. Such bergs had to be avoided because downwind of each one lay its attendant cluster of broken ice. Even more awkward were the patches of consolidated pack ice, the larger relics of the old ice sheet. This consolidated ice floated in broad jumbled rafts, heaped and contorted where one floe had piled upon another, and then frozen into one mass, like a breaker’s yard where every block weighed a score of tons or more.

Brendan
’s ability to maneuver past these dangers was so limited that virtually every floe had to be skirted on its leeward side. This meant sailing directly at the floe, putting over the helm at the last moment, and skidding around the lee of the ice where the scud and foam sucked and spread as the floe rocked in an endless see-saw motion to the swell. Our advance was a cross between bumper cars at a fairground and a country square dance, except that our dancing partners were leviathans of ice as they dipped, circled, and curtsied. Again and again we slithered past floes, listening to the bump and crunch as ice brushed the leather hull, the sharper tremor and rattle as we ran over scraps of small ice, the shudder as ice fragments the size of table tops and weighing a couple of hundred pounds ricocheted off the blade of the steering paddle.

“Well, you wanted to see ice on this trip, George,” I said. “You can’t say you’ve been disappointed.”